Israel, and it is associated with the permanence of the seed of Israel
as a separate people and with the Divine rebuilding of Jerusalem. The
Jew had no thought of analysing these verses into the words of the true
Jeremiah and those of his editors. The point is that over and above,
in complementary explanation of, the Abrahamic and Mosaic Covenants with
their external signs, over and above the Call of the Patriarch and the
Theophany of Sinai, was the Jeremian Covenant written in Israel's heart.

The Covenant conferred a distinction and imposed a duty. It was a bond
between a gracious God and a grateful Israel. It dignified history,
for it interpreted history in terms of providence and purpose; it
transfigured virtue by making virtue service; it was the salt of life,
for how could present degradation demoralise, seeing that God was
in it, to fulfil His part of the bond, to hold Israel as His jewel,
though Rome might despise? The Covenant made the Jew self-confident and
arrogant, but these very faults were needed to save him. It was his only
defence against the world's scorn. He forgot that the correlative of the
Covenant was Isaiah's 'Covenant-People'--missionary to the Gentiles and
the World. He relegated his world-mission (which Christianity and Islam
in part gloriously fulfilled) to a dim Messianic future, and was content
if in his own present he remained faithful to his mission to himself.

Above all, the legacy from the past came to Judaism hallowed and
humanised by all the experience of redemption and suffering which had
marked Israel's course in ages past, and was to mark his course in
ages to come. The Exodus, the Exile, the Maccabean heroism, the Roman
catastrophe; Prophet, Wise Man, Priest and Scribe,--all had left their
trace. Judaism was a religion based on a book and on a tradition; but
it was also a religion based on a unique experience. The book might
be misread, the tradition encumbered, but the experience was eternally