Part 22 (2/2)

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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sions 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 G.o.d Himself he is hasty.(734) There are signs throughout, navely 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 rus.h.i.+ng in pa.s.sion before the power he hated but could not withstand.

So probable an opinion becomes a certainty when we turn to G.o.d'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. G.o.d 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 a.s.syria. The nation crumbling from within was suffering from without harder blows than even a.s.syria 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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d 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 circ.u.mstance.

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 G.o.d'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.

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