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could domesticate itself in the West. But the law of Truth is nowhere from home; the thirst for God is part of the heritage of the race ; and it is to these that the gospel makes its appeal. As a revelation of God to the soul of man, Christianity is the absolute Truth, the universal Faith.
The clearest mark of the new order of things, says Jeremiah, is that religion shall henceforth be taken at first hand. Jesus said, " Have salt in yourselves " ; do not be dependent for what keeps life strong and wholesome on influences outside of you. The religion that is worth anything is not what is told you but what you know of yourself. This does not mean that there is no room for teaching. Paul's understanding of what is contained in Jesus Christ is rich and subtle, for Paul had a sure insight and a burning love. But if we know only what Paul says, and have no answer- ing knowledge in ourselves, even Paul will help us little. A man may be a heretic in the truth, as Milton says; and "if he believes only because his pastor says so, or because the assembly so determines, without knowing other reasons, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy." It was proclaimed by Joel that God would one day pour out of His Spirit upon all flesh, even upon the servants and the handmaids ; for it is God's intention in the covenant that nothing in station or in lack of education or opportunity should hinder any man from knowing God for himself. The motto of all our faith is, " With open face."
T{ It must be possible for men to know more of God, because the knowledge of God by man involves two elements, the known and the knower, God and man ; and however perfectly God may have revealed Himself, man is but half developed and has only half possession of his knowing powers. The faith has been "once delivered to the saints," as Canaan was given to the Israelites. To " go in and possess the land " is still the duty of the Christian Israel. Who shall say how far it has been occupied in all these Christian centuries ? We may be yet only at Jericho and Ai. Some most adventurous and earnest tribes may have pushed on to Bethel. Some very determined and aspiring souls may have climbed to the mountain-tops and even caught sight of the flashing sea which bounds the Promised Land upon the western side. However we may estimate the progress of the past, there still remains " very much land to be possessed." Surely the
142 THE NEW COVENANT
strongest way to contend for the faith once delivered to the saints is to go forward reverently till the saints shall perfectly possess the land and know all that it is possible for them to know of God and of His Book and of His ways.1
3. The New Covenant will be permanent and final. — " For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will I remember no more." Under the Old Covenant, the provisions for the cancelling of sin were very unsatisfactory, and utterly unfit to perfect the worshipper as to conscience, by dealing thoroughly with the problem of guilt — of which no better evidence could be desired than the institution of the great day of atonement, in which a remembrance of sin was made once a year, and by which nothing more than an annual and putative forgiveness was procured ; under the New, on the contrary, God would grant to His people a real, absolute, and perennial forgiveness, so that the abiding relation between Him and them should be as if sin had never existed.
The trouble in every religious system that fails is that it does not bring men close enough to what God really is, and there is no regenerating virtue in bowing before a formless mystery. There must be revelation, and the revelation of a heart. Jeremiah, feeling after things to come, says, It must be God who is to bridge this gulf, and He will do so by showing what He is. The new order is to be inaugurated by a great act of forgiveness, in which all the heart of God will appear. In some public way He will treat as His friends the men who have refused Him, putting them all in His debt. Nothing short of that, as the prophet believed, will get at the obdurate hearts of men ; but at the touch of an unmerited forgiveness, gratitude will spring up within them, and love — the power by which men know God and the constraint under which they are drawn willingly to obey Him. Forgiveness brings to erring men new conceptions of what their God is like — a God who does not deal with His creatures on terms of strict, legal precision, but who pardons at His own cost, and gives them what they have not worked for. And the very sight of such a God is a real new birth, clearing and deepening all the faculties, and making obedience easy.
Jeremiah hails here the coming of the religion of redemption. He dwells on what is the crowning glory of our faith. For what