_Doth balm in Gilead fail? Fails the healer there? Why is not bound up My people's deadly wound?_ _O that my head were springs, Mine eye a fount of tears! To weep both day and night Over my people's slain._ It is not impossible that these two quatrains are cited from the prophet's elegy upon the last battle of Megiddo and the death of Josiah. Similar fragments seem to occur below (ix. 17, 18, 20) in the instructions to the mourning-women, the professional singers of dirges over the dead. The beauty of the entire strophe, as an outpouring of inexpressible grief, is too obvious to require much comment. The striking question "Is there no balm in Gilead, is there no physician there?" has passed into the common dialect of religious aphorism; and the same may be said of the despairing cry, "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved!" The wounds of the state are past healing; but how, it is asked, can this be? Does nature yield a balm which is sovereign for bodily hurts, and is there nowhere a remedy for those of the social organism? Surely that were something anomalous, strange and unnatural (cf. viii. 7). _Is there no balm in Gilead?_ Yes, it is found nowhere else (cf. Plin., _Hist. Nat._, xii. 25 _ad init._ "Sed omnibus odoribus præfertur balsamum, _uni terrarum Judææ concessum_"). Then has Iahvah mocked us, by providing a remedy for the lesser evil, and leaving us a hopeless prey to the greater? The question goes deep down to the roots of faith. Not only is there an analogy between the two realms of nature and spirit; in a sense, the whole physical world is an adumbration of things unseen, a manifestation of the spiritual. Is it conceivable that order should reign everywhere in the lower sphere, and chaos be the normal state of the higher? If our baser wants are met by provisions adapted in the most wonderful way to their satisfaction, can we suppose that the nobler--those cravings by which we are distinguished from irrational creatures--have not also their satisfactions included in the scheme of the world? To suppose it is evidence either of capricious unreason, or of a criminal want of confidence in the Author of our being. _Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no healer there?_ There is a panacea for Israel's woes--the "law" or teaching of Iahvah; there is a Healer in Israel, Iahvah Himself (iii. 22, xvii. 14), who has declared of Himself, _I wound and I heal_ (Deut. xxxii. 39; chap. xxx. 17, xxxiii. 6). _Why then is no bandage applied to the daughter of my people?_ This is like the cry of the captives, _Is Iahvah not in Sion, is not her King in her?_ (ver. 19). The answer there is, Yes! it is not that Iahvah is wanting; it is that the national guilt is working out its own retribution. He leaves this to be understood here; having framed his question so as to compel people, if it might be, to the right inference and answer.