Part 5 (2/2)

For these northern omens conspired with others, ethical and therefore more articulate, within Judah herself. It was two generations since Isaiah and Hezekiah had died, and with them the human possibilities of reform. For nearly fifty years Mana.s.seh had opposed the pure religion of the prophets of the eighth century, by persecution, by the introduction of foreign and sensual cults, and especially by reviving in the name of Israel's G.o.d(110) the ancient sacrifice of children, in order to propitiate His anger. Thus it appears that the happier interests of religion-family feasts, pieties of seed-time and harvest, grat.i.tude for light, fountains and rain, and for good fortune-were scattered among a host both of local and of foreign deities; while for the G.o.d of Israel, the G.o.d of Abraham, Moses and Isaiah, the most horrible of superst.i.tious rites were reserved, as if all that His people could expect of Him was the abatement of a jealous and hungry wrath.

A few voices crying through the night had indeed reminded Judah of what He was and what He required. _He hath showed thee, O man, __ what is good; and what doth the Lord require but to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with thy G.o.d._(111) At last with the overthrow of Mana.s.seh's successor, Amon, signs of a dawn appeared. The child of eight years who was heir to the throne was secured, perhaps through his mother's influence, by a party in Court and Temple that had kept loyal to the higher faith; and the people, probably weary of the fanatic extravagance of Mana.s.seh, were content to have it so.

The young King Josiah, who to the end was to prove himself worthy of his training, and the boy in the priest's home at Anathoth were of an age: a fact not to be omitted from any estimate of the influences which moulded Jeremiah in his youth. But no trace of this appears in what he has left us; as a boy he may never have seen the King, and to the close of Josiah's reign he seems to have remained too obscure to be noticed by his monarch; yet at the last he has only good to say of Josiah:-

Did he not eat and drink, And do judgment and justice?

The cause of the poor and the needy he judged- Then was it well.(112)

Attempts at reform were made soon after Josiah's accession,(113) but little was achieved, and that little only in the capital and its Temple.

In the latter for four hundred years no deity of the land had been wors.h.i.+pped save Yahweh, and He in no material form. It would be easy to remove from the streets of Jerusalem any recently introduced Baals and possibly, as a.s.syria's sovereignty relaxed, the wors.h.i.+p of the Host of Heaven. But beyond Jerusalem the task was more difficult. Every village had the shrine of a deity before the G.o.d of Israel came to the land. The names of these local Baalim, or Lords, had mostly vanished,(114) and Israel claimed the rural sanctuaries for Yahweh. But the old rites, with the old conceptions of deity attached to them, seem to have been transferred to Him by the ignorant wors.h.i.+ppers, till instead of one Yahweh-one Lord-unique in character and in power, there were as many as there had been Baalim, and they bore the same inferior and sometimes repulsive characters. We cannot exaggerate this division of the G.o.dhead into countless local forms:-

As many as thy cities in number So many O Judah thy G.o.ds!(115)

Their high places lay all round the Prophet and each had its bad influence, not religious only but ethical, not only idolatrous but immoral, with impure rites and orgies.

Lift to the bare heights thine eyes, Where not wast thou tumbled?

The land thou hast fouled with thy wh.o.r.edoms,(116)

-spiritual and physical both; the one led to the other.

This dissipation of the national mind upon many deities was reflected in the nation's politics. With no faith in One Supreme G.o.d the statesmen of Judah, just as in Isaiah's earlier days, fluttered between the great powers which were bidding for the empire of the world. Egypt under Psamtik's vigorous direction pressed north, flying high promises for the restless va.s.sals of a.s.syria. But a.s.syria, though weakened, had not become negligible. Between the two the anchorless policy of Judah helplessly drifted. To use Jeremiah's figure, suitable alike to her politics and her religion, she was a faithless wife, off from her husband to one paramour after another.

All this was chaos worse than the desert that crumbled before Anathoth, a tragedy more bitter than the past which moaned through the land behind.

What had G.o.d to say? It was a singular mark of Israel, that the hope of a great prophet never died from her heart. Where earnest souls were left they prayed for his coming and looked for the Word of the Lord by him more than they who wait for the morning. The same conditions prevailed out of which a century before had come an Amos, a Hosea, a Micah and an Isaiah.

Israel needed judgment and the North again stirred with its possibilities.

Who would rise and spell into a clear Word of G.o.d the thunder which to all ears was rumbling there?

The call came to Jeremiah and, as he tells the story, came sudden and abrupt yet charged with the full range and weight of its ultimate meaning, so far as he himself was concerned:-

Before in the body I built thee, I knew thee, Before thou wast forth of the womb, I had hallowed thee, And a prophet to the nations had set thee.(117)

A thought of G.o.d, ere time had anything to do with him, or the things of time, even father or mother, could make or could mar him; G.o.d's alone, and sent to the world; out of the eternities with the Divine will for these days of confusion and panic and for the peoples, small and great, that were struggling through them. It was a stupendous consciousness-this that then broke in the village of Anathoth and in the breast of the young son of one its priests; the spring of it deeper and the range of it wider than even that similar a.s.surance which centuries later filled another priest's home in the same hill country:-

And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest, For thou shalt go before the face of the Lord, To prepare His ways.(118)

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