Part 21 (1/2)

Ye women(676) have said with your mouths And fulfilled with your hands, ”We must indeed perform our vows, Which we have vowed, ”To burn to the Queen of Heaven, And to pour her libations!”

Indeed then establish your words(677) And perform your vows!

Jeremiah ”adds this by way of irony.”(678) Having thus finished with the women, he adds an Oracle to the Jews in general.

26. Therefore hear the Word of the Lord all Judah, who are settled in the land of Egypt:

By My great Name I swear, Sayeth the Lord, That My Name shall no more be called By the mouth of a man of Judah- Saying, ”As liveth the Lord!”- In all the land of Egypt.

Lo, I am wakeful upon you 27 For evil and not for good.(679) And the remnant of Judah shall know, 28_b_ Whose is the word that shall stand.(680)

These are the last words we have from him, and up to these last he is still himself-broken-hearted indeed and disappointed in the ultimate remnant of his people-but still himself in his honesty, his steadfastness to the truth and his courage; still himself in his irony, his deliberateness and his confident appeal to the future for the vindication of his word.

So he disappears from our sight. How pathetic that even after his death he is not spared from spoiling but that the last clear streams of his prophesying must run out, as we have seen, in the sands of those expanders!

Lecture VII.

THE STORY OF HIS SOUL.

In this Lecture I propose to gather up the story of the soul of the man, whose service, and the fortunes it met with, we have followed over the more than forty years of their range. The interest of many great lives lies in their natural and fair development: the growth of gift towards occasion, the beckoning of occasion when gift is ripe, the sympathy between a man and his times, the coincidence of public need with personal powers or ambition-the zest of the race and the thrill of the goal. With Jeremiah it was altogether otherwise.

1. Protest and Agony. (I, IV. 10, 19, VI. 11, XI. 18-XII. 6, XV. 10-XVI.

9, XVII. 14-18, XVIII. 18-23, XX. 7-18.)

If, as is possible, the name Jeremiah means _Yahweh hurls_ or _shoots forth_, it fitly describes the Prophet's temper, struggles and fate. For he was a projectile, fired upon a hostile world with a force not his own, and on a mission from which, from the first, his gifts and affections recoiled and against which he continued to protest. On his pa.s.sage through the turbulence of his time he reminds us of one of those fatal sh.e.l.ls which rend the air as they shoot, distinct even through the roar of battle by their swift, shrill anguish and effecting their end by their explosion.

Jeremiah has been called The Weeping Prophet, but that is mainly because of the attribution to him of The Book of Lamentations, which does not profess to be his and is certainly later than his day. Not weeping, though he had to weep, so much as groaning or even screaming is the particular pitch of the tone of this Prophet. As he says himself,

For as oft as I speak I must shriek, And cry ”Violence and Spoil!”(681)

His first word is one of shrinking, _I cannot speak, I am too young_.(682) The voice of pain and protest is in most of his Oracles. He curses the day of his birth and cries woe to his mother that she bare him. He makes us feel that he has been charged against his will and he hurtles on his career like one slung at a target who knows that in fulfilling his commission he shall be broken-as indeed he was.

Lord, Thou beguiled'st me, and beguiled I let myself be, Thou wast too strong for me, Thou hast prevailed.(683)

Power was pain to him; he carried G.o.d's Word as _a burning fire in his heart_.(684) If the strength and the joy in which others rise on their gifts ever came to him they quickly fled. Isaiah, the only other prophet comparable, accepts his mission and springs to it with freedom. But Jeremiah, always coerced, shrinks, protests, craves leave to retire. So that while Isaiah's answer to the call of G.o.d is _Here am I, send me_, Jeremiah's might have been ”I would be anywhere else than here, let me go.” He spent much of himself in complaint and in debate both with G.o.d and with his fellow-men:

Mother! Ah me!

As whom hast thou borne me?

A man of quarrel and of strife To the whole of the land- All of them curse me.(685)

Nor did he live to see any solid results from his work. His call was

To root up, pull down and destroy, To build and to plant.(686)