The Song of Solomon : and the Lamentations of Jeremiah

i. 12-22.] ZION'S APPEAL 127
enlargement of its scope. She makes the most distinct
acknowledgment of the two vital elements of the case
God's righteousness and her own rebellion,^ These
carry us beneath the visible scenes of trouble so
graphically illustrated earlier, and fix our attention on
deep-seated principles. It cannot be supposed that
the faith and penitence unreservedly confessed in the
elegy were truly experienced by all the fugitive citizens
of Jerusalem, though they were found in the devout
" remnant " among whom the author of the poem must
be reckoned. But the reasonable interpretation of
these utterances is that which accepts them as the
inspired expressions of the thoughts and feelings which
Jerusalem ought to possess, as ideal expressions, suit-
able to those who rightly appreciate the whole situation.
This fact gives them a wide applicability. The ideal
approaches the universal. Although it cannot be said
that all trouble is the direct punishment of sin, and
although it is manifestly insincere to make confession
of guilt one does not inwardly admit, to be firmly
settled in the conviction that God is right in what He
does even when it all looks most wrong, that if there
is a fault it must be on man's side, is to have reached
the centre of truth. This is very different from the ad-
mission that God has the right of an absolute sovereign
to do whatever He chooses, like mad Caligula when
intoxicated with his own divinity ; it even implies a
denial of that supposed right, for it asserts that He
acts in accordance with something other than His will,
viz., righteousness.
Enlarging the area of her appeal, no longer content
to snatch at the casual pity of individual travellers on
18.
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