Is Ephraim My dearest son, The child of delights? That as oft as against him I speak I must think of him still!(788) That these instincts are so scattered rather increases their cumulative effect. Thus whether upon the Wrath or upon the Love of God Jeremiah speaks home to the heart of his own, and of our own and of every generation which loves lies and lets itself be lulled by them. Sin, he says, is no fiction nor a thing to be lightly taken.(789) Time for repentance is short; doom comes quickly. Habits of evil are not carelessly parted with, but have their long and necessary consequences moral and physical. No wash of words nor worship nor sacrament can cleanse the heart or redeem from guilt. It is not the flagrant sinner whom he chiefly warns, but those who harden themselves softly. And—very firmly this—forgiveness is not easily granted by God nor cheaply gained by men; God has not only set our sins before His face but carries them on His heart. And therefore, in view both of the Just Wrath of the Most High and of His suffering Love, only repentance can avail, the repentance which is not the facile mood offered by many in atonement for their sins, but arduous, rigorous and deeply sincere in its anguish. All of which carries our prophet, six centuries before Christ came, very far _into the fellowship of His sufferings_. I have already spoken sufficiently of Jeremiah’s other original contributions to theology, on the Freedom and the Patience of the Providence of God, and his hope that God would be to Israel what the prophet had bravely tried to be—no transient guest but a dweller in their midst.(790) The titles for God which we may assume to have first come from himself are few, perhaps only three: _The Fountain of Living Waters, the Hope of Israel and the Saviour thereof in time of trouble_, and _Hasidh, or Loyal-in-Love_,(791) a term elsewhere applied only to men. Sometimes, but not nearly so often as the copyists of our Hebrew text have made him do, he uses the title _Yahweh of Hosts_, doubtless in the other prophets’ sense of _the forces of history and of the Universe_ (the original meaning having been _the armies of Israel_), sometimes he borrows the deuteronomic _Yahweh thy God_, or a similar form. But most often (as the Greek faithfully shows us) it is simply the personal name _Yahweh_ (Jehovah) by which he addresses or describes the Deity: significant of the long struggle between them as individuals.