Part 24 (1/2)

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 a.s.surance 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d or to visions of vast s.p.a.ces 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 wors.h.i.+p upon ?ion.(753)

Like those of all the prophets Jeremiah's most immediate convictions of G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d_ 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 G.o.ds, the G.o.ds of the nations, who were ineffective, or as Jeremiah puts it _unprofitable-no-G.o.ds, 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 G.o.ds.(766) With Jeremiah every vestige of this superst.i.tion is gone, and other G.o.ds 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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. G.o.d'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 pa.s.sing 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.s and he predicted them accurately, from close observation of the political conditions of his world and the character of his people.

Granted these and G.o.d'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 ill.u.s.trated, 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 ma.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 una.s.soilable.(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 G.o.d.(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 G.o.d upon sin, he reveals at the same time that His people's sin costs G.o.d 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 p.r.o.nounce upon them. So also, he was given to feel, was the heart of their G.o.d. 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)