At the thought of this crowning outrage, the prophet cannot restrain his indignation. "Generation that ye are!" he exclaims, "behold the word of the Lord. Is it a wilderness that I have been to Israel, or a land of deepest gloom?" Have I been a thankless, barren soil, returning nothing for your culture? The question is more pointed in Hebrew than in English; for the same term (עבד `abad) means both to till the ground, and to serve and worship God. We have thus an emphatic repetition of the remonstrance with which the address opens: Iahweh has not been unmindful of Israel's service; Israel has been persistently ungrateful for Iahvah's gracious love. The cry "We are free!" (רדנו) implies that they had broken away from a painful yoke and a burdensome service (cf. ver. 20); the yoke being that of the Moral Law, and the service that perfect freedom which consists in subjection to Divine Reason. Thus sin always triumphs in casting away man's noblest prerogative; in trampling under foot that loyalty to the higher ideal which is the bridal adornment and the peculiar glory of the soul. _Why hurriest thou to seek thy love?_ (Lit. _why dost thou make good thy way?_ somewhat as we say, "to make good way with a thing") (ver. 33). The key to the meaning here is supplied by ver. 36: _Why art thou in such haste to change thy way? In_ (Of) _Egypt also thou shalt be disappointed, as thou wert in Assyria._ The "way" is that which leads to Egypt; and the "love" is that apostasy from Iahvah which invariably accompanies an alliance with foreign peoples (ver. 18). If you go to Assyria, you "drink the waters of the Euphrates," _i.e._, you are exposed to all the malign influences of the heathen land. Elsewhere, also (iv. 30), Jeremiah speaks of the foreign peoples, whose connexion Israel so anxiously courted, as her "lovers"; and the metaphor is a common one in the prophets. The words which follow are obscure. _Therefore the evil things also hast thou taught thy ways._ What "evil things"? Elsewhere the term denotes _misfortunes_, _calamities_ (Lam. iii. 38); and so probably here (cf. iii. 5). The sense seems to be: Thou hast done evil, and in so doing hast taught Evil to dog thy steps! The term _evil_ obviously suggests the two meanings of sin and the punishment of sin; as we say, "Be sure your _sin_ will find you out!" Ver. 34 explains what was the special sin that followed and clung to Israel: _Also, in thy skirts_--the borders of thy garments--_are they_ (the evil things) _found_, viz., _the life-blood of innocent helpless ones; not that thou didst find them house-breaking_, and so hadst excuse for slaying them (Exod. xxii. 2); _but for all these_ warnings or, because of all these apostasies and dallyings with the heathen, which they denounced (cf. iii. 7), _thou slewest them_. The murder of the prophets (ver. 30) was the unatoned guilt which clung to the skirts of Israel.