God is omnipotent, yet He can do nothing for Israel till Israel put away their sins. Those sins, and not the people's captivity, are the Deity's chief concern. Sin has been at the bottom of their whole adversity. This is brought out with all the versatility of conscience itself. Israel and their God have been at variance; their sin has been, what conscience feels the most, a sin against love. _Yet not upon Me hast thou called, O Jacob; how hast thou been wearied with Me, O Israel.... I have not made thee to slave with offerings, nor wearied thee with incense ... but thou hast made Me to slave with thy sins, thou hast wearied Me with thine iniquities_ (xliii. 22-24). So God sets their sins, where men most see the blackness of their guilt, in the face of His love. And now He challenges conscience. _Put Me in remembrance; let us come to judgement together; indict, that thou mayest be justified_ (ver. 26). But it had been agelong and original sin. _Thy father, the first had sinned; yea, thy representative men_--literally _interpreters, mediators--had transgressed against Me. Therefore did I profane consecrated princes, and gave Jacob to the ban, and Israel to reviling_ (vv. 27, 28). The Exile itself was but an episode in a tragedy, which began far back with Israel's history. And so ch. xlviii. repeats: _I knew that thou dost deal very treacherously, and Transgressor-from-the-womb do they call thee_ (ver. 8). And then there comes the sad note of what might have been. _O that thou hadst hearkened to My commandments! then had thy peace been as the river, and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea_ (ver. 18). As broad Euphrates thou shouldst have lavishly rolled, and flashed to the sun like a summer sea. But now, hear what is left. _There is no peace, saith Jehovah, to the wicked_ (ver. 22). Ah, it is no dusty stretch of ancient history, no long-extinct volcano upon the far waste of Asian politics, to which we are led by the writings of the Exile. But they treat of man's perennial trouble; and conscience, that never dies, speaks through their old-fashioned letters and figures with words we feel like swords. And therefore, still, whether they be psalms or prophecies, they stand like some ancient minster in the modern world,--where, on each new soiled day, till time ends, the heavy heart of man may be helped to read itself, and lift up its guilt for mercy.