Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922. George Adam Smith

the Lord, searching the heart,

      And trying the reins,

      To give to each man as his ways,

      As the fruit of his doings.201

      In this answer there is awfulness but not final doom. The affirmation of a man's dread responsibility for his fate implies, too, the liberty to change his ways. In the dim mystery of the heart freedom is clear. Similarly, and even more plainly, is this expressed in the earlier call to break up the fallow-ground. This implies that beneath those surfaces of the national life, whether of callous indifference on the one hand or of shallow feeling on the other, there is soil which, if thoroughly ploughed, will be hospitable to the good seed and fit to bring forth fruits meet for repentance. Human nature even at its worst has tracts other than those on which there has been careless sowing among thorns, moral possibilities below those of its abused or neglected surfaces. Let us mark this depth, which the Prophet's insight has already reached. Much will come out of it; this is the matrix of all developments by himself and others of the doctrine of man and his possibilities under God. And for all time the truth is valid that many spoiled or wasted lives are spoiled or wasted [pg 110] only on the surface; and that it is worth while ploughing deeper for their possibilities.202

      In what form the deep ploughing required was at first imagined by the Prophet we see from the immediately following Oracles.