nation’s or an individual’s life he was sure of soil which by deeper ploughing would yet yield fruits meet for repentance.(354) In either case the parable is rich in Gospel for ourselves. If we have failed our God upon His first designs for us and for our service do not let us despair. He is patient and ready to give us another trial under His hand. And this not only is the lesson of more than one of our Lord’s parables, for instance that of the fig-tree found fruitless, but nevertheless given the chance of another year,(355) and the motive of His hopes for the publicans and harlots, but is implied by all the Gospel of His life and death for sinners. In these He saw still possibilities worth His dying for. But as Christ Himself taught, there are, and ethically must be, limits to the Divine Patience with men. Of these the men of Judah and Jerusalem are warned in the verses which follow the parable. While it is true (verse 7 ff.) that if a nation, which God has said He will destroy, turn from its evil, He will relent, the converse is equally true of a nation which He has promised to plant and build, that if it do wrong and obey not He will surely repent of the good He had planned for it. For this refractory people of Judah He is already _framing_ or _moulding evil_—the verb used is that of which the Hebrew name for _potter_ is the participle. Though chosen of God and shaped by His hands for high service Israel’s destiny is not irrevocable; nay, their doom is already being shaped. Yet He makes still another appeal to them to repent and amend their ways. To this they answer: _No use! we will walk after our own devices and carry out every one the stubbornness __ of his evil heart._ At least that is how Jeremiah interprets their temper; his people had hardened since Megiddo and the accession of Jehoiakim. Some moderns have denied these verses to Jeremiah and taken them as the addition of a later hand and without relevance to the parable. With all respect to the authority of those critics,(356) I find myself unable to agree with them. They differ as to where the authentic words of the Prophet cease, some concluding these with verse 4 others with verse 6. In either case the parable is left in the air, without such practical application of his truths as Jeremiah usually makes to Judah or other nations. Nor can the relevance of the verses be denied, as Cornill, one of their rejectors, admits. Nor does the language bear traces of a later date. They seem to me to stand as Jeremiah’s own. The Prophet’s threat of evil is still so vague, that, with due acknowledgment of the uncertainty of such points, we may suppose it, along with the Parable of the Potter, to have been uttered before the Battle of Carchemish, when the Babylonian sovereignty over Western Asia became assured.(357)