Chapter VIII: Part 8

Mother! Ah me! XV. 10
As whom(700) hast thou borne me?
A man of strife and of quarrel
To the whole of the land.
I have not lent upon usury, nor any to me,
Yet all of them curse me.
Amen,(701) O Lord! If I be to blame(?), 11
If I never besought Thee,
In the time of their trouble and straits,
For the good of my foes.
Is the arm on my shoulder iron 12
Or brass my brow?(702)
Thou hast known it,(703) O Lord. 15
Think on and visit me!
Avenge me on them that pursue me,
Halt not Thy wrath.
Know that for Thee I have borne reproach
From them who despise(704) Thy words. 16
[End them!(705) Thy word’s my delight
And the joy of my heart
For Thy Name has been calléd upon me,
Lord of Hosts!]
I have not sat in their company 17
Jesting and merry.(706)
Because of Thy hand alone I sit,
For with rage Thou hast filled me.
Why is my pain perpetual, 18
My wound past healing?
Art Thou to be a false stream to me,
As waters that fail?

This to Him on Whom he had called as The Fountain of Living Water!

Therefore thus saith the Lord: 19
If thou wilt turn, then shall I turn thee,
That before Me thou stand;
And if thou bring forth the dear from the vile,
As My Mouth thou shalt be.
[Then may those turn to thee,
But not thou to them.]
For to this people I set thee 20
An impassable wall.(707)
When they fight thee they shall not prevail,
With thee am I to deliver,(708)
And deliver thee I shall from the power of the wicked, 21
From the hand of the cruel redeem thee.

Thou(709) shalt not take a wife— XVI. 2
Rede of the Lord—
Nor shall sons nor daughters be thine
Within this place.
For thus hath the Lord said: 3
As for the sons and the daughters
Born in this place,
[As for their mothers who bore them
And their fathers who gat them
Throughout this land.]
Painfullest deaths shall they die 4
Unmourned, unburied,
[Be for dung on the face of the ground,
Consumed by famine and sword.]
And their corpses shall be for food
To the birds of the heaven and beasts of the earth.(710)
Thus saith the Lord: 5
Come not to the house of mourning,
Nor go about to lament,(711)
Because My Peace I have swept
Away from this people.(712)
For them shall none lament, 6_b_
Nor gash nor make themselves bald;
Neither break bread(713) to the mourner,(714) 7
For the dead to console him,
Nor pour him(715) the cup of condolement
For his father or mother.
Come thou not to the house of feasting, 8
To sit with them eating and drinking.
For thus saith the Lord of Hosts,(716) 9
The God of Israel:
Lo, I shall stay from this place,
In your days, to your eyes,
The voices of joy and of gladness,
The voices of bridegroom and bride.

Follows, in 10-13, the moral reason of all this—the people’s leaving of their God—and the doom of exile.

Heal me O Lord, and I shall be healed, XVII. 14
Save me and saved shall I be.(717)
Lo, there be those, who keep saying to me. 15
“Where is the Word of the Lord?
Pray let it come!”
But I have not pressed ... (?) 16
Nor for evil(718) kept at Thee,
Nor longed for the woeful day,
Thyself dost know.
Whatever came forth from my lips
To Thy face it was.
Be not a (cause of) dismay to me, 17
My Refuge in evil days.
Shamed be my hunters, but shamed not I, 18
Dismayed, but dismayed not I.
Bring Thou upon them the day of disaster
And break them twice over!

XVIII. 18. And they said, Come and let us devise against Jeremiah
devices, for the Law(719) shall not perish from the priest, nor
Counsel from the wise, nor the Word from the prophet. Come let us
smite him with the tongue and pay no heed to any of his words.

O Lord, unto me give Thou heed, 19
And hark to the voice of my plea!(720)
Shall evil be rendered for good, 20
That they dig a pit for my life?(721)
O remember my standing before Thee,
To bespeak their good—
To turn Thy fury from off them.
Give therefore their sons to famine, 21
And spill them out to the sword.
Let their wives be widows and childless
And their men be slain of death—
And smitten their youths by the sword in battle.
May crying be heard from their homes, 22
As a troop comes sudden upon them!
For a pit have they dug to catch me,
And hidden snares for my feet.
But Thou, O Lord, hast known 23
Their counsels for death against me.
Pardon Thou not their iniquities,(722)
Nor blot from Thy Presence their sins;(723)
But let them be tumbled before Thee
Deal with them in time of Thy wrath.

Verses 21-23 are rejected by Duhm and Cornill, along with XI. 22_b_, 23, XII. 3_b_, XVII. 18 for no textual or metrical reasons, but only because these scholars shrink from attributing to Jeremiah such outbursts of passion: just as we have seen them for similarly sheer reasons of sentiment refuse to consider as his the advice to desert to the enemy.(724) Yet they admit inconsistently the genuineness of VI. 11, XI. 20, XV. 15.(725)

Lord, Thou beguiledst me, and beguiled I let myself be, XX. 7
Too strong for me, Thou hast conquered,
A jest I have been all the day,
Every one mocks me.
As oft as I speak I must shriek, 8
Crying “Violence and spoil.”
Yea, the Word of the Lord is become my reproach
All day a derision.
If I said, I’ll not mind Him(726) 9
Nor speak in His name,(727)
Then in my heart ’tis a burning fire,
Shut up in my bones.
I am worn away with refraining,
I cannot hold on.(728)
For I hear the whispering of many, 10
Terror all round!
“Denounce, and let us denounce him,”
—And these my familiars!—
Keep ye watch for him tripping,
Perchance he’ll be fooled,
“And we be more than enough for him,
And get our revenge.”
Yet the Lord He is with me, 11
Mighty and Terrible!
So they that hunt me shall stumble
And shall not prevail.
Put to dire shame shall they be
When they fail to succeed.
Be their confusion eternal,
Nor ever forgotten!
O Lord,(729) Who triest the righteous, 12
Who lookest to the reins and the heart,
Let me see Thy vengeance upon them,
For to Thee I have opened my cause.(730)

Cursed be the day, XX. 14
Whereon I was born!
The day that my mother did bare me,
Be it unblessed!
Cursed be the man who carried the news, 15
Telling my father,
“A man child is born to thee!”
Making him glad.
Be that man as the cities the Lord overthrew, 16
And did not relent,
Let him hear a shriek in the morning,
And at noon-tide alarms;
That he slew me not in(731) the womb, 17
So my mother had been my grave,
And great for ever her womb!
For what came I forth from the womb? 18
Labour and sorrow to see,
That my days in shame should consume.

Considering the passion of these lines, it is not surprising that they are so irregular.(732)

Some have attributed the aggravations, at least, of this rage to some fault in the man himself. They are probably right. The prophets were neither vegetables nor machines but men of like passions with ourselves. Jeremiah may have been by temper raw and hasty, with a natural capacity for provoking his fellows. That he felt this himself we may suspect from his cry to his mother, that he had been born to quarrel. His impatience, honest though it be, needs stern rebuke from the Lord.(733) Even with God Himself he is hasty.(734) There are signs throughout, naïvely betrayed by his own words, of a fluid and quick temper, both for love and for hate. For so original a poet he was at first remarkably dependent on his predecessors. The cast of his verse is lyric and subjective; and for all its wistfulness and plaint is sometimes shrill with the shrillness of a soul raw and too sensitive about herself. His strength as a poet may have been his weakness as a man—may have made him, from a human point of view, an unlikely instrument for the work he had to do and the force with which he must drive—painfully swerving at times from his task, and at others rushing in passion before the power he hated but could not withstand.

So probable an opinion becomes a certainty when we turn to God’s words to him. _Be not dismayed lest I make thee dismayed_ and _I set thee this day a fenced city and wall of bronze_.(735) For these last imply that in himself Jeremiah was something different. God does not speak thus to a man unless He sees that he needs it. It was to his most impetuous and unstable disciple that Christ said, _Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I build_.

Yet while his own temper thus aggravated his solitude and his pain we must also keep in mind that neither among the priests, the prophets and the princes of his time, nor in the kings after Josiah, did Jeremiah find any of that firm material which under the hands of Isaiah rose into bulwarks against Assyria. The nation crumbling from within was suffering from without harder blows than even Assyria dealt it. These did not weld but broke a people already decadent and with nothing to resist them save the formalities of religion and a fanatic gallantry. The people lost heart and care. He makes them use more than once a phrase about themselves in answer to his call to repent: _No’ash, No use! All is up!_ Probably this reflects his own feelings about them. He was a man perpetually baffled by what he had to work with.

Poet as he was he had the poet’s heart for the beauties of nature and of domestic life: for birds and trees and streams, for the home-candle and the sound of the house-mill, for children and the happiness of the bride, and the love of husband and wife; and he was forbidden to marry or have children of his own or to take part in any social merriment—in this last respect so different from our Lord. Was it unnatural that his heart broke out now and then in wild gusts of passion against it all?

There is another thing which we must not forget in judging Jeremiah’s excessive rage. We cannot find that he had any hope of another life. Absolutely no breath of this breaks either from his own Oracles or from those attributed to him. Here and now was his only chance of service, here and now must the visions given him by God be fulfilled or not at all. In the whole book of Jeremiah we see no hope of the resurrection, no glory to come, no gleam even of the martyr’s crown. I have often thought that what seem to us the excess of impatience, the rashness to argue with Providence, the unholy wrath and indignation of prophets and psalmists under the Old Covenant, are largely to be explained by this, that as yet there had come to them no sense of another life or of judgment beyond this earth. When we are tempted to wonder at Jeremiah’s passion and cursing, let us try to realise how we would have felt had we, like him, found our _one_ service baffled, and the _single_ possible fulfilment of our ideals rendered vain. All of which shows the difference that Christ has made.

2. Predestination. (I, XVIII, etc.)

Yet though such a man in such an age Jeremiah is sped through it with a force, which in spite of him never fails and which indeed carries his influence to the end of his nation’s history.

What was the powder which launched this grim projectile through his times? Part at least was his faith in his predestination, the bare sense that God Almighty meant him from before his beginning for the work, and was gripping him to it till the close. This alone prevailed over his reluctant nature, his protesting affections, and his adverse circumstance.

Before in the body I built thee, I knew thee,
Before thou wast forth from the womb, I had put thee apart,
I have set thee a prophet to the nations.

From the first and all through it was God’s choice of him, the knowledge of himself as a thought of the Deity and a consecrated instrument of the Divine Will, which grasped this unbraced and sensitive creature, this alternately discouraged and impulsive man, and turned him, as we have seen, into the opposite of himself.

The writers of the Old Testament give full expression to the idea of predestination, but what they understand by it is not what much of Jewish and Christian theology has understood. In the Old Testament predestination is not to character or fate, to salvation or its opposite, to eternal life or eternal punishment, but to service, or some particular form of service, for God and man. The Great Evangelist of the Exile so defines it for Israel as a whole: Israel an eternal purpose of God for the enlightenment and blessing of mankind. And this faith is enforced on the nation, not for their pride nor to foster the confidence that God will never break from them, but to rouse their conscience, and give them courage when they are feeble or indolent or hopeless of their service. So with Jeremiah in regard both to his own predestination and that of his people. In his Parable of the Potter (as we have seen) it is for service as vessels that the clay is moulded; God is revealed not as predestining character or quality, but as shaping characters for ends for which under His hand they yield suitable qualities. The parable illustrates not arbitrariness of election nor irresistible sovereignty but a double freedom—freedom in God to change His decrees for moral reasons, freedom on man’s part to thwart God’s designs for him. In further illustration of this remember again the wonderful words, _Be thou not dismayed before them, lest I make thee dismayed; if thou wilt turn, then shall I turn thee_. To work upon man God needs man’s own will.

From imagining the Deity as sheer absolute will, to which the experience of the resistless force behind his own soul must sometimes have tempted him, Jeremiah was further guarded by his visions of the Divine working in Nature. He is never more clear or musical than when singing of the regularity, faithfulness and reasonableness of this. With such a Creator, such a Providence, there could be neither arbitrariness nor caprice.

Having this experience of God’s ways with man it was not possible for Jeremiah to succumb to those influences of a strong unqualified faith in predestination which have often overwhelmed the personalities of its devotees. Someone has talked of “the wine of predestination,” and history both in the East and in the West furnishes cases of men so drugged by it as to lose their powers of will, reason and heart, and become either apathetic unquestioning slaves of fate, or violent and equally unquestioning dogmatists and tyrants—the soul-less instruments of a pitiless force. God overpowers them: He is all and they are nothing. It was far otherwise with Jeremiah, who realised and preserved his individuality not only as against the rest of his people but as against God Himself. His earlier career appears from the glimpses we get of it to have been, if not a constant, yet a frequent struggle with the Deity. He argues against the Divine calls to him. And even when he yields he expresses his submission in terms which almost proudly define his own will as over against that of God:

Lord thou beguiledst me, and I let myself be beguiled,
Thou wast stronger than I and hast conquered.

The man would not be mastered, but if mastered is not crushed. He questions each moment of his own sufferings, each moment of his people’s oncoming doom. He debates with God on matters of justice. He wrestles things out with God and emerges from each wrestle not halt and limping like Jacob of old, but firm and calm, more clear in his mind and more sure of himself—as we see him at last when the full will of God breaks upon his soul with the Battle of Carchemish and he calmly surrenders to his own and his people’s fate. That is how this prophet, by nature so fluid, and so shrinking stands out henceforth _a fenced city and a wall of bronze over against the whole people of the land_: the one unbreakable figure in the breaking-up of the state and the nation. We perceive the method in God’s discipline of such a soul. He sees his servant’s weakness and grants him the needful athletic for it, by wrestling with him Himself.

We may here take in full the remarkable passage, part of which we have already studied.(736)

Too Righteous art Thou, O Lord, XII. 1
That with Thee I should argue.
Yet cases there are I must speak with Thee of:—
The way of the wicked—why doth it prosper,
And the treacherous all be at ease?
Thou did’st plant them, yea they take root, 2
They get on, yea they make fruit;
Near in their mouths art Thou,
But far from their reins.
But me, O Lord, Thou hast known,(737) 3
And tested my heart with Thee;
Drag them out like sheep for the shambles,
To the day of slaughter devote them.

Thou hast run with the foot and they wore thee— 5
How wilt thou vie with the horse?
If in peaceful country thou can’st not trust,
How wilt thou do in the rankness of Jordan?
For even thy brothers, the house of thy father, 6
Even they have betrayed thee.
Even they have called after thee loudly,
Trust them not, though they speak thee fair.(738)

_The rankness_ or _luxuriance of Jordan_ is the jungle on both sides of the river, in which the lions lie. This then is all the answer that the wearied and perplexed servant gets from his Lord. The troubles of which he complains are but the training for still sorer. The only meaning of the checks and sorrows of life is to brace us for worse. It is the strain that ever brings the strength. Life is explained as a graded and progressively strenuous discipline, the result of it a stronger and more finely tempered soul. But this surely suggests the questions: Is that the whole result? Is the soul thus to be trained, braced and refined, only at last to be broken and vanish? These are natural questions to the Lord’s answer, but Jeremiah does not put them. Unlike Job he makes no start, even with this stimulus, to break through to another life.

3. Sacrifice.

But in thus achieving his individuality over against both his nation and his God, Jeremiah accomplished only half of the work he did for Israel and mankind. It is proof of how great a prophet we have in him that he who was the first in Israel to realise the independence of the single self in religion should also become the supreme example under the Old Covenant of the sacrifice of that self for others, that he should break from one type of religious solidarity only to illustrate another and a nobler, that the prophet of individuality should be also the symbol if not the conscious preacher of vicariousness. This further stage in Jeremiah’s experience is of equally dramatic interest, though we cannot always trace the order of his utterances which bear witness to it.

There must often have come to him the temptation to break loose from a people who deserved nothing of him, but cruelly entreated him, and who themselves were so manifestly doomed. Once at least he confesses this.

O that I had in the wilderness IX. 2
A wayfarers’ lodge!
Then would I leave my people,
And get away from them;
For adulterers all of them be,
A bundle of traitors.
They stretch their tongues 3
Like a falsing bow,
And never for truth
Use their power in the land.
But from evil to evil go forth
And Me they know not!(739)

Well might the Prophet wish to escape from such a people—worn out with their falsehood, their impurity, and their senseless optimism. Yet it is not solitude for which he prays but some inn or caravanserai where he would have been less lonely than in his unshared house in Jerusalem, _sitting alone because of the wrath of the Lord_. His desire is to be set where a man may see all the interest of passing life without any responsibility for it, where men are wayfarers only and come and go like a river on whose bank you lie, and help you to muse and perhaps to sing but never touch the heart or the conscience of you. It is the prayer of a poet sick of being a prophet and a tester. Jeremiah was weary of having to look below the surface of life, to know people long enough to judge them with a keener conscience than their own and to love them with a hopeless and breaking heart that never got an answer to its love or to its calls for repentance—wearied with watching habit slowly grow from ill to ill, old truths become lies or at the best mere formalities, prophets who only flattered, priests to bless them, and the people loving to have it so.(740) O to have no other task in life than to watch the street from the balcony!

But our prayers often outrun themselves in the utterance and Jeremiah’s too carried with it its denial. _My people—that I might leave my people_—this, it is clear from all that we have heard from him, his heart would never suffer him to do. And so gradually we find him turning with deeper devotion to the forlorn hope of his ministry, his fate to feel his judgment of his people grow ever more despairing, but his love for them deeper and more yearning.

From the year of Carchemish onward he appears not again to have tried or prayed to escape. Through the rest of the reign of Jehoiakim they persecuted him to the edge of death. Prophets and priests called for his execution. He was stoned, beaten and thrust into the stocks. The king scornfully cut up the roll of his prophecies; and the people following their formalist leaders rejected his word. With the first captivity under Jehoiakim all the better classes left Jerusalem, but he elected to remain with the refuse. When in the reign of Ṣedekiah the Chaldeans came down on the city and Jeremiah counselled its surrender he was again beaten and was flung into a pit to starve to death. When he was freed and the besiegers gave him the opportunity, he would not go over to them. Even when the city had fallen and her captors hearing of his counsel offered him security and a position in Babylonia, he chose instead to share the fortunes of the little remnant left in their ruined land. When they broke up it was the worst of them who took possession of his person and disregarding his appeals hurried him down to Egypt. There, on alien soil and among countrymen who had given themselves to an alien religion, the one great personality of his time, who had served the highest interests of his nation for forty years, reluctant but unfaltering, and whose scorned words, every one, had been vindicated by events, is with the dregs of his people swept from our sight. _He had given his back to the smiters and his cheeks to them who plucked out the hair; he had not hidden his face from the shame and the spitting. He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He was taken from prison and from judgment and cut off from the land of the living; and they made his grave with the wicked, though he had done no violence neither was deceit in his mouth._ It is the second greatest sacrifice that Israel has offered for mankind.

If Jeremiah thus of his own will suffered _with_ his people, and to the bitter end with the worst of them, was he also conscious of suffering _for_ them? After his death, when the full tragedy of his life came home to his people’s heart, the sense of the few suffering for the many, the righteous for the sinners, began to be articulate in Israel—remarkably enough, let us remember, in the very period when owing to the break-up of the nation the single soul came to its own and belief in the responsibility of every man for his own sins also emerged and prevailed. Of the influence of the example of Jeremiah’s spiritual loneliness, combined with his devotion to his sinful people, in developing these doctrines of individualism and self-sacrifice for others there can be no doubt. The stamp of his sufferings is on every passage in that exilic work “Isaiah” XL-LXVI, which presents the Suffering Servant of the Lord and declares the atoning virtues of His Agonies and Death.

But it is not clear that Jeremiah ever felt anything of this about himself; if he did so he has refrained from uttering it. Yet he must have been very near so high a consciousness. His love and his pity for his sinful people were full. He can hardly have failed to descry that his own spiritual agonies which brought him into so close a personal communion with God would show to every other man the way for his approach also to the Most High and Holy and his reconciliation with his God. Again he was weighed down with his people’s sins; he bore on his heart the full burden of them. He confessed them. The shame which the people did not feel for them, he felt; and he painted the curse upon them in words which prove how deeply the iron had entered his own soul. He had a profound sense of the engrained quality of evil,(741) the deep saturation of sin, the enormity of the guilt of those who sinned against the light and love of God.(742) A fallacy of his day was that God could easily and would readily forgive sin, that the standard ritual might at once atone for it and comfortable preaching bring the assurance of its removal. He denied this, and affirmed that such things do not change character; that no wash of words can cleanse from sin, no sacraments, however ancient, can absolve from guilt.(743) That way only strict and painful repentance can work; repentance following the deep searching of the heart by the Word and the Judgments of God and the agony of learning and doing His Will.(744) To its last dregs he drank the cup of the Lord’s wrath upon His false and wilful nation; he suffered with them every pang of the slow death their sins had brought upon them. And yet he was most conscious of his own innocence when most certain of his fate. The more he loyally gave himself to his mission the more he suffered and the nearer was he brought to death. The tragedy perplexed him,

Why is my pain perpetual,
My wound past healing?(745)

The only reply he heard from heaven was the order to stand fast, for God was with him to deliver—but that more troubles awaited him. And beyond this what is there to answer the staggering Prophet save that if a man have the Divine gifts of a keener conscience and a more loving heart than his fellows, there inevitably comes with such gifts the obligation of suffering for them. Every degree in which love stands above her brethren means pain and shame to love though as yet she bear no thorn or nail in her flesh. This spiritual distress Jeremiah felt for the people long before he shared with them the physical penalties of their sins. Just there—in his keener conscience, in his hot shame for sins not his as if they were his, in his agony for his people’s estrangement from God and in his own constantly wounded love—lay his real substitution, his vicarious offering for his people.

Did Jeremiah ever conceive the far-off fulness of the travail thus laid upon his soul, the truth that this vicarious agony of a righteous man for the sins of others is borne by God Himself? To that question we have only fragments of an answer. In his discourses, both earlier and later, when he talks directly in the Name of the Deity—when the Deity speaks in the first person—the words breathe as much effort and passion as when Jeremiah speaks in his own person. The Prophet is very sure that his God is Love, and he hears that love utter itself in tones of yearning for the love of men, and even of agony for their sin and misery. There is, too, a singular prayer of his which is tense with the instinct, that God would surely be to Israel what Jeremiah had resolved and striven to be—not a far-off God who occasionally visited or passed through His people, but One in their midst sharing their pain; not indifferent, as he fears in another place,(746) to the shame that is upon them, but bearing even this. The prayer which I mean is the one in XIV. 8, 9, which recalls not only the terms but the essence of Jeremiah’s longing to escape from his people, and lodge afar with wayfaring men, aloof and irresponsible.

O Hope of Israel, His Saviour
In time of trouble.
Why be like a passenger through the land,
Or the wayfaring guest of a night?
Yet Lord Thou art in our midst,
Do not forsake us.(747)

I may be going too far in interpreting the longing and faith that lie behind these words. But they come out very fully in later prophets who explicitly assert that the Divine Nature does dwell with men, shares their ethical warfare and bears the shame of their sins. And the truth of it all was manifested past doubt in the Incarnation, the Passion and the Cross of the Son of God.

But whether Jeremiah had instinct of it, as I have ventured to think from his prayer, or had not, he foreshadowed, as far as mere man can, the sufferings of Jesus Christ for men—and this is his greatest glory as a prophet.

Lecture VIII.

GOD, MAN AND THE NEW COVENANT.

We have followed the career of Jeremiah from his call onwards to the end, and we have traced his religious experience with its doubts, struggles, crises, and settlement at last upon the things that are sure: his debates with God and strifes with men, which while they roused him to outbursts of passion also braced his will, and stilled the wilder storms of his heart. There remains the duty of gathering the results of this broken and gusty, yet growing and fruitful experience: the truths which came forth of its travail, about God and Man and their relations. And in particular we have still to study the ideal form which Jeremiah, or (as some questionably argue) one of his disciples, gave to these relations: the New Covenant, new in contrast to God’s ancient Covenant with Israel as recorded and enforced in the Book of Deuteronomy.

1. God.

Among the surprises which Jeremiah’s own Oracles have for the student is the discovery of how little they dwell upon the transcendent and infinite aspects of the Divine Nature. On these Jeremiah adds almost nothing to what his predecessors or contemporaries revealed. Return to his original visions and contrast them with those, for example, of Isaiah and Ezekiel.

Isaiah’s vision was of the Lord upon a Throne, high and lifted up, surrounded by Seraphim crying to one another, _Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts! the whole earth is full of His Glory!_ And their voices rocked the Temple and filled it with smoke. Here are a Presence, Awful Majesty, Infinite Holiness and Glory, blinding the seer and crushing his heart contrite. Or take the inaugural vision of Ezekiel—the storm-wind out of the North, the vast cloud, the fire infolding itself, the brightness round about and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber; the rush and whirl of life that followed, wheels and wings and rings full of eyes; and over this the likeness of a firmament of the colour of the terrible ice and the sound of wings like the noise of many waters, as the Voice of the Almighty and above the firmament a Throne and on the Throne the Appearance of a Man, the Appearance of the likeness of the Glory of the Lord. _And I, when I saw it, fell upon my face._

In the inaugural visions of Jeremiah there is none of this Awfulness—only _What art thou seeing Jeremiah? the branch of an almond tree ... a caldron boiling._ That was characteristic of his encounters and intercourse with the Deity throughout. They were constant and close, but in them all we are aware only of a Voice and an Argument. There is no Throne, no Appearance, no Majesty, no overwhelming sense of Holiness and Glory, no rush of wings nor floods of colour or of song.(748) Jeremiah takes for granted what other prophets have said of God. But the Deity whose Power and Glory they revealed is his Familiar. The Lord talks with Jeremiah as a man with his fellow.

For this there were several reasons, and first the particular quality of the Prophet’s imagination. His native powers of vision were not such as soar, or at any rate easily soar, to the sublime. He was a lyric poet and his revelations of God are subjective and given to us by glimpses in scattered verses, which, however intimate and exquisite, have not the adoring wonder of his prophetic peers.

Again there were the startled recoil of his nature from the terrible office of a prophet in such times, and those born gifts of questioning and searching which fitted him for his allotted duty as Tester of his people,(749) but which he also turned upon the Providence and Judgments of the Lord Himself.(750) His religious experience, as we have seen, was largely a struggle with the Divine Will, and it left him not adoring but amazed and perplexed. Such wrestling man’s spirit has to encounter like Jacob of old in the dark, and if like the Patriarch it craves the Name, which is the Nature, of That with which it struggles, all the answer it may get is another question, _Wherefore askest thou after My Name?_ Morning may break, as it broke on Jacob by Jabbok with the assurance of blessing or as on Jeremiah with a firmer impression of the Will not his own; but no strength is left to glory in the Nature behind the Will. There is a horrified breathlessness about his lines—

Thou wast stronger than I and hast conquered,
The Lord is with me as a Mighty and Terrible.(751)

From his struggles he indeed issues more sure of God and finally more trustful in Him, as is testified by his fair song on the beauty and fruitfulness of faith, beginning

Blessed the wight that trusts in the Lord,
And the Lord is his trust.(752)

But even here is none of the awe and high wonder which fall upon Israel through other prophets. Lyrist as he is and subjective, Jeremiah dwells not so much upon the attributes of God on which faith rests as upon the effects of faith in man.

Again by the desperate character of the times he was starved of hope, the hope by which the Apostle says _we are saved_, which not only braces the will but clears the inner eyes of men and liberates the imagination. As the years went on he was ever more closely bound to the prediction of his people’s ruin, and, when this came, to the sober counsel to accept their fate and settle down to a long exile in patience for the Lord’s time of deliverance. As we have seen, his intervals of release from so grim a ministry were brief, and his Oracles of a bright future but few. Even in these he does not rise, like the Evangelist of the Exile whom he inspired, to exultation in the Almighty Power of God or to visions of vast spaces of the Divine Providence, or of Israel’s service wide as the world. His happy peasant-heart is content to foresee his restored people tending their vineyards again, enjoying their village dances and festivals, and sharing with their long divided tribes the common national worship upon Ṣion.(753)

Like those of all the prophets Jeremiah’s most immediate convictions of God are that He has done, and is always doing or about to do, things.(754) From the first Yahweh of Israel had been to the faith of his people a God of Deeds. He delivered them from Egypt, led them through the desert, ever ready to avenge them on any who molested them, and He had brought them to a land of delight.(755) By his creative and guiding Word, always clear and potential,(756) He had planted them and built them up to be a nation. These were the proofs of Him—ever operative, effective and victorious both over their foes and over every natural obstacle which their life encountered. And being _the Living God_ He still works and is ready to work, would His people only seek where!(757) He is awake, watching over His Word _to perform it_ and controlling the nations.(758) It is He who has made the earth and gives it to whom He will,(759) who prepares the destroyers of His people, who calls for the kingdoms of the North, even for the far Scythians beyond the edge of the world, to execute His purposes.(760) He brings the King of Babylon against Jerusalem, and recalls the Chaldeans to their interrupted siege of the city, gives it into their hands and Himself banishes its people.(761) He moulds the nations for his own ends, and if they fail Him, decrees their destruction.(762) His Word builds and plants but also pulls up and tears down.(763) He is always near to guide or to argue with nations and individuals, and to give directions and suggestions of practical detail to His servants for the interpretation and fulfilment of His purposes.(764)

It was all this activity and effectiveness, with their sure results in history, which distinguished Him from other gods, the gods of the nations, who were ineffective, or as Jeremiah puts it _unprofitable—no-gods, nothings_ and _do-nothings, the work of men’s hands, lies_ or _frauds_, and mere _bubbles_.(765) On this line Jeremiah’s monotheism marks a notable advance; for alongside of faith in the Divine Unity and Sovereignty there had lingered even in Deuteronomy a belief in the existence of other gods.(766) With Jeremiah every vestige of this superstition is gone, and other gods consigned to limbo once and for all.

Yet Jeremiah’s monotheism, like that of all the Hebrew prophets, is even more due to convictions of the character of the God of Israel. We have seen how he dwells on the Divine Love, faithful and yearning for love in return, pleading and patient even with its delinquent sons and daughters;(767) but equal to this is his emphasis on the righteousness of the Most High, by all His deeds _working troth, justice, and judgment on the earth_, which are His delight and the knowledge of which is man’s only glory.(768) He demands from His people not sacrifices, which He never commanded to their fathers, nor vows but a better life, justice between man and man, and care for the weak and the innocent.(769) To know Him is to do justice and right.(770) Because the present generation have fallen away from these, and practise and love falsehood, slander, impurity, treacherous and greedy violence, therefore God, being justice and truth, must judge and condemn them: _What else can I do?_(771) The ethical necessity of the doom of the people is clear to the Prophet from a very early stage of his ministry,(772) and throughout, though his heart struggles against it. But, if possible, even more abhorrent to God than these sins against domestic and civic piety in themselves, is the fact that they are committed in the very face of His Love and despite all its pleading. With Jeremiah as with Hosea the sin against love is the most hopeless and unpardonable, and this people have sinned it to the utmost.

As a woman is false to her fere,
Have ye been false to me.(773)

Hence most deeply springs the Wrath of the Lord, a Wrath on which Jeremiah broods and explodes more frequently and fiercely than any other prophet: _I am full of the rage of the Lord; the glow of His wrath; take the cup of the wine of this fury at My hand and give all nations to whom I send thee to drink of it; the fierce anger of the Lord shall not turn until He have executed it._(774) And He does execute it. God’s Wrath breaks out in His _spurning_ of His nation, in the hot names He calls it, _adulteress_ and _harlot_, and in _hating_ it.(775) He will not relent nor pardon it, nor listen to prayer for it.(776) He says, _I must myself take vengeance upon them. I shall not spare nor pity them._(777) They will reel in the day of their visitation. He will feed them with wormwood and drug them with poison; He will suddenly let fall on them anguish and terrors; He will take His fan and winnow them out in the gates of the land and as the passing chaff strew them on the wind of the desert; the garden-land withers to wilderness and its cities break down at His presence and before His fierce anger; He will make Jerusalem heaps and cast out the people before His face. He will give them to be tossed among the nations for a consternation, a reproach and a proverb, for a taunt and a curse, in all places whither He drives them: and will send after them the sword, the famine, and the pestilence till they be consumed.(778)

The modern mind deems arbitrary such immediate linking of physical and political disasters with the Wrath of God against sin. But we have to ponder the following. The Prophet was convinced of the ethical necessity of that Wrath and of its judgments on Judah—he was convinced before they came to pass and he predicted them accurately, from close observation of the political conditions of his world and the character of his people. Granted these and God’s essential and operative justice, the connection was natural: _What else can I do?_ It was clear that Judah both deserved and needed punishment and equally clear that the boiling North held the potentialities of this, which were gradually shaping and irresistibly approaching. Moreover, as Jeremiah insists, and as the history both of nations and individuals has frequently illustrated, there is a natural sequence of disaster upon wrong-doing. _Be thy scourge thine own sin! Thy ways and thy deeds have done to thee __ these things. Is it Me they provoke, saith the Lord, Is it not themselves to the confusion of their faces? Wherefore have these things come upon thee?—for the mass of thy wickedness._(779) As St. Paul says _the wages of sin_, not the judge’s penalty on sin but the thing it naturally earns, _is death_. Now one of Jeremiah’s most acute and convincing experiences as the _Tester_ of his people,(780) is his observation of how all this worked out upon his own generation. Not only were the war, the pestilence, and the captivity, which were about to fall upon Jerusalem, directly and obviously due to the perjury and stupid pride of her rulers; but, as he more subtly saw, the immorality of the whole people had been disabling them, for years before, from meeting these or any disasters except as sheer punishment without place for repentance. Their previous troubles had failed to sober or humble them or rouse them. _They would not accept correction_, he says of them more than once.(781) To the Prophet’s warnings that God will judge them, they answer carelessly or defiantly _Not He!_ Instead of yielding to the power which lies in all adversity to cleanse the heart and brace the will they became incapable of shame, indifferent to consequences, and so past praying for.(782) And in this they were fortified by the specious dreams and lies of their false prophets, continued to sin, and so fell to their doom, abashed at last but unassoilable.(783) If at any time they were startled by disaster, this found them too enfeebled even for repentance by their habitual insincerity or self-indulgence; which made them incapable of truth even under pain, and of a real conversion to God.(784) All this is discovered to us by the eyes and the mouth of Jeremiah. What in it is arbitrary? The record is awful, nothing like it in literature. Yet every step is real. We follow a master of observation.

But perhaps the chief glory of our Prophet is that while thus delivering, as no other prophet so fully or so ethically does, the just wrath of God upon sin, he reveals at the same time that His people’s sin costs God more pain than anger. This no doubt Jeremiah learned through his own heart. As we have seen, with his whole heart he loved the people whom he was called to test and expose, and that heart was wracked and torn by thoughts of the Doom which he had to pronounce upon them. So also, he was given to feel, was the heart of their God. In the following questions there is poignant surprise; an insulted, a wounded love beats through them.

What wrong found your fathers in Me,
That so far they broke from Me?
Have I been a desert to Israel,
Or land of thick darkness?
Why say my folk, “We are off,
No more to meet Thee!”
Can a maiden forget her adorning
Or her girdle the bride?
Yet Me have My people forgotten
Days without number.(785)

So, too, when the deserved doom threatens, and in hate He has cast off His heritage, His love still wonders how that can be—

Is My heritage to Me a speckled wild-bird
With the wild-birds round and against her?
Is Israel a slave,
Or house-born serf?
Why he for a prey?(786)

All the desolation of Judah is on Him alone: _no man lays it to heart, upon Me is the waste_.(787) And what we have seen to be the most human touch of all, the surprise of an outraged father at feeling, beneath His wrath against a prodigal son, the instincts of the ancient love which no wrath can quench,

Is Ephraim My dearest son,
The child of delights?
That as oft as against him I speak
I must think of him still!(788)

That these instincts are so scattered rather increases their cumulative effect.

Thus whether upon the Wrath or upon the Love of God Jeremiah speaks home to the heart of his own, and of our own and of every generation which loves lies and lets itself be lulled by them. Sin, he says, is no fiction nor a thing to be lightly taken.(789) Time for repentance is short; doom comes quickly. Habits of evil are not carelessly parted with, but have their long and necessary consequences moral and physical. No wash of words nor worship nor sacrament can cleanse the heart or redeem from guilt. It is not the flagrant sinner whom he chiefly warns, but those who harden themselves softly. And—very firmly this—forgiveness is not easily granted by God nor cheaply gained by men; God has not only set our sins before His face but carries them on His heart. And therefore, in view both of the Just Wrath of the Most High and of His suffering Love, only repentance can avail, the repentance which is not the facile mood offered by many in atonement for their sins, but arduous, rigorous and deeply sincere in its anguish. All of which carries our prophet, six centuries before Christ came, very far _into the fellowship of His sufferings_.

I have already spoken sufficiently of Jeremiah’s other original contributions to theology, on the Freedom and the Patience of the Providence of God, and his hope that God would be to Israel what the prophet had bravely tried to be—no transient guest but a dweller in their midst.(790) The titles for God which we may assume to have first come from himself are few, perhaps only three: _The Fountain of Living Waters, the Hope of Israel and the Saviour thereof in time of trouble_, and _Hasidh, or Loyal-in-Love_,(791) a term elsewhere applied only to men. Sometimes, but not nearly so often as the copyists of our Hebrew text have made him do, he uses the title _Yahweh of Hosts_, doubtless in the other prophets’ sense of _the forces of history and of the Universe_ (the original meaning having been _the armies of Israel_), sometimes he borrows the deuteronomic _Yahweh thy God_, or a similar form. But most often (as the Greek faithfully shows us) it is simply the personal name _Yahweh_ (Jehovah) by which he addresses or describes the Deity: significant of the long struggle between them as individuals.

Passing now from the world of nations to the world of nature we observe how little the genuine Oracles of Jeremiah have to tell us of the Divine Power over this; yet the little is proclaimed with as firm assurance as of God’s control of the history of mankind. Both worlds are His: the happenings in the one are the sacraments, the signs and seals, of His purposes and tempers towards the other: the winter blossom of the almond, of His wakefulness in a world where all seems asleep; the sun by day and the moon and stars by night, of His everlasting faithfulness to His own.(792) All things in nature obey His rule though His own people do not; it is He who rules the stormy sea and can alone bring rain.

Even the stork in the heavens
Knoweth her seasons,
And dove, swift and swallow
Keep time of their coming.
But My people—they know not
The Rule of the Lord.

I have set the sand as a bound for the sea,
An eternal decree that cannot be crossed.
Are there makers of rain ’mong the bubbles of the heathen?
Art Thou not He? ... all these Thou hast made.(793)

After all neither Nature nor the courses of the Nations but the single human heart is the field which Jeremiah most originally explores for visions of the Divine Working and from which he has brought his most distinctive contributions to our knowledge of God. But that leads us up to the second part of this lecture, his teaching about man. Before beginning that, however, we must include under his teaching about God, two elements of this to which his insight into the human heart directly led him.

First this great utterance of the Divine Omnipresence:

I am a God who is near,
Not a God who is far.
Can any man hide him in secret,
And I not see him?
Do I not fill heaven and earth?—
Rede of the Lord.(794)

These verses have been claimed as the earliest expression in Israel of the Divine Omnipresence.(795) Amos, however, had given utterance to the same truth though on a different plane of life.(796)

Second, and partly in logical sequence from the preceding, but also stimulated by thoughts of the best of Judah(797) banished to a long exile, Jeremiah was the first in Israel to assure his people that the sense of God’s presence, faith in His Providence, His Grace, and Prayer to Him were now free both of Temple and Land—as possible on distant and alien soil, without Ark or Altar, as they had been with these in Jerusalem. See his Letter to the Exiles, and recall all that lay behind it in his predictions of the ruin of the Temple, and abolition of the Ark, and in his rejection of sacrifices.(798) To Deuteronomy exile was the people’s punishment; to Jeremiah it is a fresh opportunity of grace.

2. Man and the New Covenant.