therefore to be used to confuse the believer's thought about other sides of truth. But it is there, as a truth among truths; to be received with abasement by the creature before the Creator, and with humble hope by the simple believer. He goes on with his argument, taking up the thread broken by the "foot-note" upon grace and works: [Sidenote: Ver. 7.] =What therefore? What Israel,= the nation, the character, =seeks after,= righteousness in the court of God, =this it lighted not upon (οὐκ ἐπέτυχεν),[187]= as one who seeks a buried treasure in the wrong field "lights not upon" it; =but the election,= the chosen ones, the "seven thousand" of the Gospel era, =did light upon it. But the rest were hardened,= (not as if God had created their hardness, or injected it; but He gave it to be its own penalty;) [Sidenote: Ver. 8.] =as it stands written= (Isai. xxix. 10, and Deut. xxix. 4[188]), ="God gave them a spirit of slumber, eyes not to see, and ears not to hear, even to this day."= A persistent ("_unto this day_") unbelief was the sin of Israel in the Prophets' times, and it was the same in those of the Apostles. And the condition was the same; God "gave" sin to be its own way of retribution. [Sidenote: Ver. 9.] =And David says= (Psal. lxix. 22), in a Psalm full of Messiah, and of the awful retribution justly ordained to come on His impenitent enemies, ="Let their table turn into a trap, and into toils (θήρα), and into a stumbling-block, and into a requital to them;= [Sidenote: Ver. 10.] =darkened be their eyes, not to see, and their back ever bow Thou together."= The words are awful, in their connexion here, and in themselves, and as a specimen of a class. Their purpose here is to enforce the thought that there is such a thing as positive divine action in the self-ruin of the impenitent; a _fiat_ from the throne which "gives" a coma to the soul, and beclouds its eyes, and turns its blessings into a curse. Not one word implies the thought that He who so acts meets a soul tending upwards and turns it downward; that He ignores or rejects even the faintest enquiry after Himself; that He is Author of one particle of the sin of man. But we do learn that the adversaries of God and Christ may be, and, where the Eternal so sees it good, are, _sentenced_ to go their own way, even to its issues in destruction. The context of every citation here, as it stands in the Old Testament, shews abundantly that those so sentenced are no helpless victims of an adverse fate, but sinners of their own will, in a sense most definite and personal. Only, a sentence of judgment is concerned also in the case; "_Fill ye up then the measure_" (Matt. xxiii. 32).