The people of Judah were misled, but they were willingly misled. When Jeremiah declares to them, _Lo, ye are trusting, for your part, upon the words of delusion, so that ye gain no good!_ (vii. 8) it is perhaps not so much the smooth prophecies of the false prophets as the fatal attitude of the popular mind, out of which those misleading oracles grew, and which in turn they aggravated, that the speaker deprecates. He warns them that an absolute trust in the _præsentia Numinis_ is delusive; a trust, cherished like theirs independently of the condition of its justification, viz., a walk pleasing to God. _What! will ye break all My laws, and then come and stand with polluted hands before Me in this house_ (Isa. i. 15), _which is named after Me 'Iahvah's House'_, (Isa. iv. 1), _and reassure yourselves with the thought, We are absolved from the consequences of all these abominations?_ (vv. 9-10. Lit. _We are saved, rescued, secured, with regard to having done all these abominations_: cf. ii. 35. But perhaps, with Ewald, we should point the Hebrew term differently, and read, "Save us!" _to do all these abominations_, as if that were the express object of their petition, which would really ensue, if their prayer were granted: a fine irony. For the form of the verb, cf. Ezek. xiv. 14.) They thought their formal devotions were more than enough to counterbalance any breaches of the decalogue; they laid that flattering unction to their souls. They could make it up with God for setting His moral law at nought. It was merely a question of compensation. They did not see that the moral law is as immutable as laws physical; and that the consequences of violating or keeping it are as inseparable from it as pain from a blow, or death from poison. They did not see that the moral law is simply the law of man's health and wealth, and that the transgression of it is sorrow and suffering and death.