The Song of Solomon : and the Lamentations of Jeremiah

iv.2i,22.] THE DEBT OF GUILT EXTINGUISHED 307
later an end would come to the successive acts of
conquerors in driving the Jev^^s from Jerusalem, even
if they were not told that this would be because at
that far-off time there would commence one long exile
lasting for two thousand years ? But if the words of
the elegist are for immediate use as a consolation to
his contemporaries, it is unreasonable to press their
negative statement in an absolute sense, so as to make
it serve as a prediction concerning all future ages. It
is enough for these sufferers to learn that the last of the
series of successive banishments of Jews from their land
by the Babylonian government has at length taken place.
But with this information there comes a deeper
truth. The debt is paid. Yet this is only at the commencement
of the Captivity. Two generations must
live in exile before the restoration will be possible.
There is no reference to that event, which did not
take place till the Babylonian power had been utterly
destroyed by Cyrus. Still the deliverance into exile
following the terrible sufferings of the siege and the
subsequent flight is taken as the final act in the drama
of doom. The long years of the captivity, though
they constituted an invaluable period of discipline,
did not bring any fresh kind of punishment at all
comparable with the chastisements already inflicted.
Thus we are brought face to face with the question
of the satisfaction of punishment. We have no right
to look to a single line of a poem for a final settlement
of the abstract problem itself. Whether, as St,
Augustine maintained, every sin is of infinite guilt
because it is an offence against an infinite Being;
whether, therefore, it would take eternity to pay the
debts contracted during one short life on earth, and
other questions of the sam.e character, cannot be