source in the unhappy domestic experience of the prophet himself. His own wife had proved an adulteress, and his children were born in adultery. The anguish which he had felt opened to him a new and profounder knowledge of the true gravity of the national sin. He discovered the intrinsic force and grandeur of his love for his faithless wife when he learned her falseness, and inevitably he carried into his theology the noblest version he could frame of human character. He could ask with the poet:
"Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift,
That I doubt His own love can compete with it? Here the parts shift?
Here, the creature surpass the Creator,—the end, what began?"
and his answer could not be the same. His own love for the shameless Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim, was in its generosity and persistence but a faint picture of the long-suffering and munificent love of Jehovah for His unthankful people. So the prophet wakes
