A PO TTER Y MO UNO. 2 7 T 



often decline from the perpendicular, and bulge out in 

 different parts. " And he shall break it as the breaking 

 of the potter's vessel that is broken in pieces ; he shall 

 not spare ; so that there shall not be found in the burst- 

 ing of it a sherd to take fire from the hearth, or to take 

 water withal out of the pot." There is a still more 

 striking allusion in the prophecies of Jeremiah, in the 

 description of one of those remarkable acted parables 

 which abound in the prophetic writings, and of which 

 our Lord Himself made frequent use. The prophet is 

 Divinely commanded to go down to a potter's house, 

 and watch the process of fashioning a vessel of clay 

 upon the wheel ; and he is told that as the clay is 

 plastic in the hands of the potter, so are the children of 

 Israel in the hands of God; an image which the Apostle 

 Paul afterwards employed in his Epistle to the Romans, 

 and which has been so often grievously misinterpreted. 

 Both passages, it may be remarked, refer exclusively 

 to the temporal destiny of a nation, and have nothing 

 to do with the question of the ultimate fate of 

 individuals, which they have been supposed to involve. 

 It is of the outward providential sphere of God's action 

 that both the prophet and the apostle are speaking, not 

 of the inward spiritual relation of God to the personal 

 soul, according to which its destiny is fixed for time and 

 eternity. And this distinction should be carefully 

 observed when the passages in question are explained. 

 The nation in the hands of God is undoubtedly as clay 

 in the hands of the potter, governed by fixed laws in its 

 temporal political relations ; but this cannot be said in 



