The Song of Solomon : and the Lamentations of Jeremiah

i. 12-22.] ZION'S APPEAL 123
but ignores the present wounds of society— the wounds
of the world for which He bled and died, or the wounds
of the Church which is His body now, must be wrong
in His sight. He would rather we gave a cup of cold
water to one of His brethren than an ocean of tears to
the memory of Calvary. If then we would make use of
the ruined city's appeal for sympathy by applying it to
some later object it would be more in agreement with
the mind of Christ to think of the miseries of mankind
in our own day, and to consider how a sympathetic
regard for them may point to some ministry of
alleviati on.
In order to impress the magnitude of her miseries on
the minds of the strangers whose attention she would
arrest, the city, now personified as a suppliant, describes
her dreadful condition in a series of brief, pointed
metaphors. Thus the imagination is excited ; and the
imagination is one of the roads to the heart. It is not
enough that people know the bald facts of a calamity
as these may be scheduled in an inspector's report.
Although this preliminary information is most important,
if we go no further the report will be replaced in its
pigeon-hole, and lie there till it is forgotten. If it is to
do something better than gather the dust of years it
must be used as a foundation for the imagination to
work upon. This does not imply any departure from
truth, any false colouring or exaggeration ; on the
contrary, the process only brings out the truth which
is not really seen until it is imagined. Let us look
at the various images under which the distress of
Jerusalem is here presented.
It is like a fire in the bones.^ It burns, consumes,