_She is the city doomed to be punished! she is all oppression within. As a spring poureth forth its waters, so she poureth forth her wickedness; violence and oppression resound in her; before Me continually is_ _sickness and wounds_ (vi. 6, 7). There would seem to be no hope for such a people and such a city. The prophet, indeed, cannot forget the claims of kindred, the thousand ties of blood and feeling that bind him to this perverse and sinful nation. Thrice, even in this dark forecast of destruction, he mitigates severity with the promise, _yet will I not make a full end_. The door is still left open, on the chance that some at least may be won to penitence. But the chance was small. The difficulty was, and the prophet's yearning tenderness towards his people could not blind him to the fact, that all the lessons of God's providence were lost upon this reprobate race: _They have belied the Lord, and said, it is not He; neither shall evil come upon us; neither shall we see sword and famine._ The prophets, they insisted, were wrong both in the significance which they attributed to occasional calamities, and in the disasters, which they announced as imminent: _The prophets will become wind, and the Word of God is not in them; so will it turn out with them_. It was, therefore, wholly futile to appeal to their better judgment against themselves: _Thus said Iahvah, Stop on the ways, and consider, and ask after the eternal paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and find rest for your soul: and they said, We will not walk therein. And I will set over you watchmen_ (the prophets); _hearken ye to the call of the trumpet!_ (the warning note of prophecy) _and they said We will not hearken._ From such wilful hardness and impenitence, disdaining correction and despising reproof, God appeals to the heathen themselves, and to the dumb earth, to attest the justice of His sentence of destruction against this people: _Therefore, hear, O ye nations, and know, and testify what is among_ _them! Hear, O earth! Lo, I am about to bring evil upon this people, the fruit of their own devisings; for unto My words they have not hearkened, and as for Mine instruction, they have rejected it._ Their doom was inevitable, for it was the natural and necessary consequence of their own doings: _Thine own way and thine Own deeds have brought about these evils for thee; this is thine own evil; verily, it is bitter, verily, it reacheth unto thine heart_. The discourse ends with a despairing glance at the moral reprobation of Israel. _An assayer did I make thee among My people, a refiner_ (reading _mec̰ārēf_, Mal. iii. 2, 3), _that thou mightest know and assay their kind_ (lit. _way_). Jeremiah's call had been to "sit as a refiner and purifier of silver" in the name of his God: in other words, to separate the good elements from the bad in Israel, and to gather around himself the nucleus of a people "prepared for Iahvah." But his work had been vain.