Beneath the breathings of this creative inspiration the religion of legal righteousness and rigorous retributions is softened into the religion of love. The God who punishes becomes the God who pardons and restores. Beneath the tears of the poor, the vanquished, the afflicted in Israel the gospel of divine compassion germinated and sprang up. What tones of tenderness are heard in the later prophets, the prophets of consolation, properly so called. "Comfort ye, comfort ye My people. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem. Say unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned." Read the chapter through (Is. xl.), and the forty-second and the sixty-sixth, and Psalms xxiii. and ciii. Such words as these announce and prepare the way for the great religious revolution called by Jesus the New Covenant. The relations between God and the human soul are in course of being changed. From the beginning, a pact existed between Jehovah and His people; a compact expressed and guaranteed in a Law on which depended the destiny of the nation and of the individual. The Covenant has become more inward and profound. To the law of strict remunerations is now joined a bond of love. Between God and His people the relations are those of Husband and wife. The wife has proved unfaithful to Him who had loved her, who had found her poor and naked in the desert, and had been desirous to enrich her. She has followed other gods. Jehovah, by the mouth of His messengers, covers her with reproaches, in order to excite her to repentance; but He has learnt to pity, and, in the end, He pardons. The more the nation's miseries are multiplied, the more its tears flow on the soil of alien lands, the more His heart is melted in Him and the tenderer become His words. "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, she may forget, yet will not I forget thee" (Is. xlix. 15). The idea beneath these words is the Christian idea. God loves His people with a boundless love. His mercy extends infinitely beyond the sins of the children of men. In the consciousness of the great unknown prophet whom we call the second Isaiah, we see sketched, five centuries beforehand, the drama of repentance and forgiveness, which Jesus, in profounder and yet simpler words, sums up for all mankind in the Parable of the Prodigal Son.