Part 25 (1/2)

One has travelled by night through a wooded country, by night and on into the dawn. How solid and indivisible the dark ma.s.ses appear and how difficult to realise as composed of innumerable single growths, each with its own roots, each by itself soaring towards heaven. But as the dawn comes up one begins to see all this. The ma.s.s breaks; first the larger, more lonely trees stand out and soon every one of the common crowd is apparent in its separate strength and beauty.

It seems to me as I travel through the Book of Jeremiah that here also is a breaking of dawn-but they are men whom it reveals. There is a stir of this even in the earliest Oracles; for the form of address to the nation which has begun with the singular _Thou_ changes gradually to _You_, and not _Israel_ but _ye men of Israel_ are called to turn to their G.o.d.(799) As the Prophet's indictments proceed his burden ceases to be the national harlotry. He arraigns separate cla.s.ses or groups,(800) and then, in increasing numbers, individuals: brother deceiving brother and friend friend; adulterers each after the wife of his neighbour; the official bully Pashhur, Jehoiakim the atrocious and petty in contrast to his sire the simple and just Josiah, the helpless and ridiculous ?edekiah, the bustling and self-confident Hananiah(801)-with the fit word and in sharp irony Jeremiah etches them separately, in the same vividness as the typical figures of the harlot watching for her prey like the Arab robber in the desert, the fowler crouching to fling his net, the shepherds failing to keep their scattered flocks, the prophets who _fling about their tongues and rede a rede of the Lord_.(802) Jeremiah has answered the call to him to search for the _man_, the men beneath the nation.(803)

Then there are his readings of the heart of man into which he more deeply thought than any other prophet of Israel: his revelation of the working of G.o.d in the soul of man, its Searcher, its only Guide and Strength; his stress upon individual responsibility and guilt, and on the one glory of man being his knowledge of G.o.d and the duty of every man to know G.o.d for himself and not through others; and his song of the beauty of the personal life rooted in faith, evergreen and yielding its fruit even in seasons of drought. Such pa.s.sages increase in the Oracles of Jeremiah. Not ceasing to be the patriot, the civic conscience of his people, he busies himself more with the hearts, the habits, the sins and the duties towards G.o.d of its individuals. Like Christ he takes the deaf apart from the mult.i.tude and talks to him of himself.

O Lord, Who triest the righteous, Who seest the reins and the heart.(804)

False above all is the heart, Sick to despair, Who is to know it?

I, the Lord, searching the heart And trying the reins, To give to each man as his ways, As the fruit of his doings.(805)

Can any man hide him in secret And I not see him?(806)

In those days they shall say no more: The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the teeth of the children are set on edge. But every one shall die for his own iniquity, every man that eateth sour grapes his teeth shall be set on edge.(807)

Speak to all Judah all the words I have charged thee....

Peradventure they will hearken and turn _every man from his evil way_.(808)

He that would boast in this let him boast, Insight and knowledge of Me.(809)

Lord, I know-not to man is his way, Not man's to walk or settle his steps.(810)

Blessed the man that trusts in the Lord And the Lord is his trust!

He like a tree shall be planted by water, That stretches its roots to the stream; Unafraid at the coming of heat, His leaf shall be green; _Sans_ care in the season of drought He fails not in yielding his fruit.(811)

The individual soul rooted in faith and drawing life from the Fountain of Living Water, independent of all disaster to the nation and famine on earth-could not be more beautifully drawn.

Now all this advance by Jeremiah from the idea of the nation as the human unit in religion-Deuteronomy's ideal and at first his own-to the individual as the direct object of the Divine Grace and Discipline was promoted, we have seen, by the dire happenings of the time, the unworthy conduct of the people, their abandonment by G.o.d, the ruin of the State and of the national wors.h.i.+p-which cut off individuals from all political and religious a.s.sociations, leaving to each (in Jeremiah's repeated phrase) only _his life_, or _his soul, for a prey_.(812) But all these could have furthered the advance but little unless Jeremiah had felt by bitter experience his own soul searched and re-searched by G.o.d-

But Thou, Lord, hast known me, Thou seest and triest my heart towards Thee-(813)

unless through doubt and struggle he himself had won into the confidence of an immediate and intimate knowledge of G.o.d. At his call he had learned how a man could be G.o.d's before he was his mother's or his nation's-G.o.d's own and to the end answerable only to Him. He had proved his solitary conscience under persecution. He had known how personal convictions can overbear the traditions of the past and the habits of one's own generation-how G.o.d can hold a single man alone to His Will against his nation and all its powers, and vindicate him at last to their faces. In all this lay much of the vicarious service which Jeremiah achieved for his own generation; what he had won for himself was possible for each of them.

And sure it is that the personal piety which henceforth flourished in Israel as it had never flourished before, weaving its delicate tendrils about the ruins of the state, the city and the altar, and (as the Psalms show) blooming behind the shelter of the Law like a garden of lilies within a fence of thorns, sprang from seeds in Jeremiah's heart, and was watered by his tears and the sweat of his spiritual agonies.

We are now come to a confluence of the streams we have been tracing-the prophecy of the New Covenant. This occupies no incongruous place, following hard as it does upon that of the eating of sour grapes-individual inspiration upon individual responsibility. But we cannot off-hand accept it as Jeremiah's own; the critical questions which have been with us from the beginning embarra.s.s us still.

The collection of Oracles to which that of the New Covenant belongs, Chs.

x.x.x, x.x.xI, was not made till long after Jeremiah's time; it includes, as we have seen, several of exilic or post-exilic origin.(814) But so do other chapters of the Book, in which nevertheless genuine prophecies of Jeremiah are recognised by virtually all modern critics. The context therefore offers no prejudice against the authenticity of the prophecy of the New Covenant, x.x.xI. 31-34. But the form and the substance of this have raised doubts, so honest and reluctant as to deserve our consideration.