The call to the prophetic ministry came to Jeremiah early in life, and it is expressly dated as five years before the discovery of the book of the law and the Reformation of Josiah, which constituted the last flicker of spiritual life in the history of Judah. If we may argue from the order of compositions, the years following this call are represented by the elaborate poetic work which I have called the Prophet's Manifesto. Immediately following this (II. i) we have the first distinct appearance of Jeremiah in public: his commission is to stand in the Temple precincts, and proclaim how these buildings of Jehovah's Temple in which men trust may nevertheless be overthrown, like Shiloh, for the nation's sins. More of this bold denunciation occupies Book II, along with lamentation for Judah, and rhapsodic picturing of Zion heard from a far land, wailing that the harvest is past, the summer is ended, and she is not saved. The third book starts with the high hopes generated by the Reformation of Josiah : the prophet receives a commission to enter upon a missionary journey, preaching 'the Covenant' throughout the cities of Judah, and accepts the task with a hearty 'Amen.' The record of this commission is immediately followed by a record of utter failure; the prophet encounters persecution in his own native city of Anathoth, and in personal experience is confronted with the bitter problem of the prosperity of the wicked. Throughout this and the following book despair of his country is seen to have taken

complete possession of Jeremiah; though a later book is. devoted to prophecies of future restoration, yet it has become abundantly evident at this point that all hopes for Judah lie on the other side of ruin. The Lord is to be known no longer as the God who brought Israel out of Egypt, but as the God who has brought them from the land of the North, and from all the countries whither he had driven them (IV. ii).

The turning-point in the public career of Jeremiah is made by a single discourse and a single symbol. He receives an inspiration from the work of the potter:

And when the vessel that he made of the clay was marred in the hand of the potter, he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it. Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying, O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the LORD.

The image of 'clay in the hand of the potter' has passed into our ordinary speech. But it is easy to imagine how this idea, on its first presentation, would penetrate to the very quick of the national conscience. The people are sitting careless to righteousness in sublime consciousness of Jehovah's selection of the chosen nation: they are confronted with the idea that the Divine potter may remould his clay into a vessel of dishonour. The sensation thus produced can be traced in the succession of discourses. Jeremiah appears at once as the head of a party: 'elders of the people' and 'elders of the priests' support him in

a public demonstration (V. ii). The solemn procession passes out through the Gate of Potsherds' into the Topheth valley; Jeremiah holding a potter's bottle in his hands proclaims the hopeless doom of the country, and seals the word by breaking the bottle on the spot henceforth to be known as 'The valley of Slaughter.' Then the procession returns, or at least Jeremiah returns, to the court of the Temple to repeat his denunciation there: the chief officer of the Temple seizes him and places him in the stocks. War has been declared, and from this point the life of Jeremiah is part of the history of Jerusalem; he is the centre and rallying-point of all who are on the side of Jehovah. A royal deputation begs of him in vain a comforting prophecy. Priests and false prophets indict him of a capital offence, princes and people interpose to secure his acquittal; again princes procure his imprisonment, and a weak king secretly works for his release. From his place of custody he formally negotiates (not without secret misgivings) a purchase of land in the midst of the Babylonian conquest as token of the hopes for the future; it is, as Mr. Streane justly remarks, like the Roman buying the land on which Hannibal was encamped. The Babylonian commander treats him with deference, offering him the choice of remaining in his own land or removing to Babylon; the officers of the besieged arrest him as a deserter; finally, a body of refugees carries him off by main force into Egypt.

Jeremiah may well have been 'the weeping prophet' of Israel.

Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth! I have not lent on usury, neither have men lent to me on usury; yet every one of them doth curse me.

He stands between this outer life of universal unpopularity and an inner life of irresistible inspiration.

And if I say, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name, then there is in mine heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with forbearing, and I cannot contain.

Compelled in the exercise of his ministry to quench the hopes of patriotic pride, the fulfilment of his prophecies makes him an exile from a ruined country; fighting all his life against Egypt, he is forced to end his days a captive in that idolatrous land. Attempting even in the midst of ruin to prosecute his ministry among his fellow-exiles, he finds that they attribute all their woes to the doctrines he has preached: "Since we left off to burn incense to the queen of heaven . . . we have wanted all things." Like a smouldering taper, his life goes out in obscurity and oblivion. If the judgment of posterity could atone for contemporary neglect, Jeremiah might well have wherein to glory. Modern thought has recognised him as the cen

tral point in the religious history of his people, where the overthrow of a national religion becomes the startingpoint for the religion of the individual life and the 'new covenant' written on the heart. Yet this seems a reflection unworthy of the prophet who has left us as the most sublime of his many sublime sayings this:

Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches: but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth, and knoweth me, that I am the LORD which exercise lovingkindness, judgement, and righteousness, in the earth.

The text in this, as in other volumes, is that of the Revised Version, the marginal alternatives being often adopted. For the use of it I express my obligations to the University Presses of Oxford and Cambridge. A Reference Table at the end connects the numbering of this volume with the chapters and verses of the Bible.

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