for sin was the first, the necessary preliminary to His other gifts. Nor is the fact that the New Covenant is to be a national one alien to his teaching: Jeremiah never lost hope of his nation’s survival and restoration. Thus the passage on the New Covenant brings together all the strands of Jeremiah’s experience and doctrine and hopes, shaken free from the political debris of the times, into one fair web under a pattern familiar and dear to the people. The weaving, it is true, is none of the deftest, but whether this is due to the aged Jeremiah’s failing fingers or to the awkwardness of a disciple, the stuff and its dyes are all his own. Lo, days are coming—Rede of the Lord—when I will make with the House of Israel and with the House of Judah a New Covenant, not like the Covenant which I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by their hand to bring them forth from the land of Egypt, which My Covenant they brake and I rejected them(820)—Rede of the Lord. But this is My(821) Covenant which I will make with the sons(822) of Israel after those days—Rede of the Lord—I will set My Law in their inward part and on their heart will I write it, and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to Me a people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour and every man his brother saying, Know thou(823) the Lord! For they shall all know Me from the least even to the greatest;(824) for I will forgive their guilt and their sin will I remember no more. This is, as has been said, a prophecy of Christianity which has hardly its equal in the Old Testament.(825) It is the Covenant which Jesus Christ the Son of God accepted for Himself and all men and sealed with His own blood. And yet not even in this prophecy of Jeremiah, in which the individual soul is made to feel that God created it not for its family nor its state nor its church but only for Himself, is there any breath of a promise for it after death. The Prophet’s eyes are still sealed to that future. The soul must be content that her strength and peace and hope are with God. Appendix I. MEDES AND SCYTHIANS (PP. 73, 110).