faithful; he bears reproach for God. He has not abused his high
calling for the sake of worldly advantage; he has not prostituted
the name of prophet to the vile ends of pleasing the people,
and satisfying personal covetousness. He has not feigned smooth
prophecies, misleading his hearers with flattering falsehood; but he
has considered the privilege of being called a prophet of Iahvah as in
itself an all-sufficient reward; and when the Divine Word came to him,
he has eagerly received, and fed his inmost soul upon that spiritual
aliment, which was at once his sustenance and his deepest joy. Other
joys, for the Lord's sake, he has abjured. He has withdrawn himself
even from harmless mirth, that in silence and solitude he might listen
intently to the inward Voice, and reflect with indignant sorrow
upon the revelation of his people's corruption. _Because of Thine
Hand_--under Thy influence; conscious of the impulse and operation of
Thy informing Spirit;--_I sate solitary; for with indignation Thou
didst fill me_. The man whose eye has caught a glimpse of eternal
Truth, is apt to be dissatisfied with the shows of things; and the
lighthearted merriment of the world rings hollow upon the ear that
listens for the Voice of God. And the revelation of sin--the discovery
of all that ghastly evil which lurks beneath the surface of smooth
society--the appalling vision of the grim skeleton hiding its noisome
decay behind the mask of smiles and gaiety; the perception of the
hideous incongruity of revelling over a grave; has driven others,
besides Jeremiah, to retire into themselves, and to avoid a world from
whose evil they revolted, and whose foreseen destruction they deplored.
The whole passage is an assertion of the prophet's integrity and
consistency, with which, it is suggested, that the failure which has
attended his efforts, and the serious peril in which he stands, are
morally inconsistent, and paradoxical in view of the Divine disposal
of events. Here, in fact, as elsewhere, Jeremiah has freely opened
his heart, and allowed us to see the whole process of his spiritual
conflict in the agony of his moments of doubt and despair. It is an
argument of his own perfect sincerity; and, at the same time, it
enables us to assimilate the lesson of his experience, and to profit
by the heavenly guidance he received, far more effectually, than if
he had left us ignorant of the painful struggles at the cost of which
that guidance was won.
The seeming injustice or indifference of Providence is a problem which
recurs to thoughtful minds in all generations of men.
"O, goddes cruel, that govérne
This world with byndyng of youre word eterne ...
What governance is in youre prescience
That gilteles tormenteth innocence?...
Alas! I see a serpent or a theif,
That many a trewé man hath doon mescheit,
Gon at his large, and wher him luste may turne;
But I moste be in prisoun."
That such apparent anomalies are but a passing trial, from which
persistent faith will emerge victorious in the present life, is the
general answer of the Old Testament to the doubts which they suggest.
The only sufficient explanation was reserved, to be revealed by Him,
who, in the fulness of time, "brought life and immortality to light."
The thought which restored the failing confidence and courage of
Jeremiah was the reflexion that such complaints were unworthy of one
called to be a spokesman for the Highest; that the supposition of the
possibility of the Fountain of Living Waters failing like a winter
torrent, that runs dry in the summer heats, was an act of unfaithfulness
that merited reproof; and that the true God could not fail to protect
His messenger, and to secure the triumph of truth in the end.
"_To this Iahvah said thus_:
If thou come again,
I will make thee again to stand before Me;
And if thou utter that is precious rather than that is vile,
As My mouth shalt thou become:
They shall return unto thee,
But Thou shalt not return unto them.
"And I will make thee to this people an embattled wall of brass;
And they shall fight against thee, but not overcome thee,
For I will be with thee to help thee and to save thee;
It is Iahvah's word.
And I will save thee out of the grasp of the wicked,
And will ransom thee out of the hand of the terrible."
In the former strophe, the inspired poet set forth the claims of the
psychic man, and poured out his heart before God. Now he recognises a
Word of God in the protest of his better feeling. He sees that where
he remains true to himself, he will also stand near to his God. Hence
springs the hope, which he cannot renounce, that God will protect His
accepted servant in the execution of the Divine commands. Thus the
discords are resolved; and the prophet's spirit attains to peace,
after struggling through the storm.
It was an outcome of earnest prayer, of an unreserved exposure of
his inmost heart before God. What a marvel it is--that instinct of
prayer! To think that a being whose visible life has its beginning
and its end, a being who manifestly shares possession of this earth
with the brute creation, and breathes the same air, and partakes of
the same elements with them for the sustenance of his body; who is
organized upon the same general plan as they, has the same principal
members discharging the same essential functions in the economy of
his bodily system; a being who is born and eats and drinks and sleeps
and dies like all other animals;--that this being and this being only
of all the multitudinous kinds of animated creatures, should have and
exercise a faculty of looking off and above the visible which appears
to be the sole realm of actual existence, and of holding communion
with the Unseen! That, following what seems to be an original impulse
of his nature, he should stand in greater awe of this Invisible
than of any power that is palpable to sense; should seek to win its
favour, crave its help in times of pain and conflict and peril; should
professedly live, not according to the bent of common nature and
the appetites inseparable from his bodily structure, but according
to the will and guidance of that Unseen Power! Surely there is here
a consummate marvel. And the wonder of it does not diminish, when
it is remembered that this instinct of turning to an unseen Guide
and Arbiter of events, is not peculiar to any particular section
of the human race. Wide and manifold as are the differences which
characterize and divide the families of man, all races possess in
common the apprehension of the Unseen and the instinct of prayer. The
oldest records of humanity bear witness to its primitive activity, and
whatever is known of human history combines with what is known of the
character and workings of the human mind to teach us that as prayer
has never been unknown, so it is never likely to become obsolete.
May we not recognise in this great fact of human nature a sure index
of a great corresponding truth? Can we avoid taking it as a clear
token of the reality of revelation; as a kind of immediate and
spontaneous evidence on the part of nature that there is and always
has been in this lower world some positive knowledge of that which far
transcends it, some real apprehension of the mystery that enfolds the
universe? a knowledge and an apprehension which, however imperfect
and fragmentary, however fitful and fluctuating, however blurred in
outline and lost in infinite shadow, is yet incomparably more and
better than none at all. Are we not, in short, morally driven upon the
conviction that this powerful instinct of our nature is neither blind
nor aimless; that its Object is a true, substantive Being; and that
this Being has discovered, and yet discovers, some precious glimpses
of Himself and His essential character to the spirit of mortal man?
It must be so, unless we admit that the soul's dearest desires are a
mocking illusion, that her aspirations towards a truth and a goodness
of superhuman perfection are moonshine and madness. It cannot be
nothingness that avails to evoke the deepest and purest emotions of
our nature; not mere vacuity and chaos, wearing the semblance of an
azure heaven. It is not into a measureless waste of outer darkness
that we reach forth trembling hands.
Surely the spirit of denial is the spirit that fell from heaven, and the
best and highest of man's thoughts aim at and affirm something positive,
something that is, and the soul thirsts after God, the Living God.
We hear much in these days of our physical nature. The microscopic
investigations of science leave nothing unexamined, nothing
unexplored, so far as the visible organism is concerned. Rays from
many distinct sources converge to throw an ever-increasing light
upon the mysteries of our bodily constitution. In all this, science
presents to the devout mind a valuable subsidiary revelation of
the power and goodness of the Creator. But science cannot advance
alone one step beyond the things of time and sense; her facts belong
exclusively to the material order of existence; her cognition is
limited to the various modes and conditions of force that constitute
the realm of sight and touch; she cannot climb above these to a higher
plane of being. And small blame it is to science, that she thus lacks
the power of overstepping her natural boundaries. The evil begins
when the men of science venture, in her much-abused name, to ignore
and deny realities not amenable to scientific tests, and immeasurably
transcending all merely physical standards and methods.
Neither the natural history nor the physiology of man, nor both
together, are competent to give a complete account of his marvellous
and many-sided being. Yet some thinkers appear to imagine that
when a place has been assigned him in the animal kingdom, and his
close relationship to forms below him in the scale of life has been
demonstrated; when every tissue and structure has been analysed,
and every organ described and its function ascertained; then the
last word has been spoken, and the subject exhausted. Those unique
and distinguishing faculties by which all this amazing work of
observation, comparison, reasoning, has been accomplished, appear
either to be left out of the account altogether, or to be handled
with a meagre inadequacy of treatment that contrasts in the strongest
manner with the fulness and the elaboration which mark the other
discussion. And the more this physical aspect of our composite nature
is emphasized; the more urgently it is insisted that, somehow or
other, all that is in man and all that comes of man may be explained
on the assumption that he is the natural climax of the animal
creation, a kind of educated and glorified brute--that and nothing
more;--the harder it becomes to give any rational account of those
facts of his nature which are commonly recognised as spiritual, and
among them of this instinct of prayer and its Object.
Under these discouraging circumstances, men are fatally prone to
seek escape from their self-involved dilemma, by a hardy denial
of what their methods have failed to discover and their favourite
theories to explain. The soul and God are treated as mere metaphysical
expressions, or as popular designations of the unknown causes of
phenomena; and prayer is declared to be an act of foolish superstition
which persons of culture have long since outgrown. Sad and strange
this result is; but it is also the natural outcome of an initial
error, which is none the less real because unperceived. Men "seek the
living among the dead"; they expect to find the soul by _post mortem_
examination, or to see God by help of an improved telescope. They fail
and are disappointed, though they have little right to be so, for
"spiritual things are discerned spiritually," and not otherwise.
In speculating on the reasons of this lamentable issue, we must not
forget that there is such a thing as an unpurified intellect as
well as a corrupt and unregenerate heart. Sin is not restricted to
the affections of the lower nature; it has also invaded the realm
of thought and reason. The very pursuit of knowledge, noble and
elevating as it is commonly esteemed, is not without its dangers
of self-delusion and sin. Wherever the love of self is paramount,
wherever the object really sought is the delight, the satisfaction,
the indulgence of self, no matter in which of the many departments
of human life and action, there is sin. It is certain that the
intellectual consciousness has its own peculiar pleasures, and those
of the keenest and most transporting character; certain that the
incessant pursuit of such pleasures may come to absorb the entire
energies of a man, so that no room is left for the culture of humility
or love or worship. Everything is sacrificed to what is called the
pursuit of truth, but is in sober fact a passionate prosecution
of private pleasure. It is not truth that is so highly valued; it
is the keen excitement of the race, and not seldom the plaudits
of the spectators when the goal is won. Such a career may be as
thoroughly selfish and sinful and alienated from God as a career of
common wickedness. And thus employed or enthralled, no intellectual
gifts, however splendid, can bring a man to the discernment of
spiritual truth. Not self-pleasing and foolish vanity and arrogant
self-assertion, but a self-renouncing humility, an inward purity from
idols of every kind, a reverence of truth as divine, are indispensable
conditions of the perception of things spiritual.
The representation which is often given is a mere travesty. Believers
in God do _not_ want to alter His laws by their prayers--neither His
laws physical, nor His laws moral and spiritual. It is their chief
desire to be brought into submission or perfect obedience to the sum
of His laws. They ask their Father in heaven to lead and teach them,
to supply their wants in His own way, because He _is_ their Father;
because "It is He that made us, and His we are." Surely, a reasonable
request, and grounded in reason.
To a plain man, seeking for arguments to justify prayer may well seem
like seeking a justification of breathing, or eating and drinking and
sleeping, or any other natural function. Our Lord never does anything
of the kind, because His teaching takes for granted the ultimate
prevalence of common sense, in spite of all the subtleties and airspun
perplexities, in which a speculative mind delights to lose itself. So
long as man has other wants than those which he can himself supply,
prayer will be their natural expression.
If there be a spiritual as distinct from a material world, the
difficulty to the ordinary mind is not to conceive of their contact
but of their absolute isolation from each other. This is surely the
inevitable result of our own individual experience, of the intimate
though not indissoluble union of body and spirit in every living person.
How, it may be asked, can we really think of his Maker being cut off
from man, or man from his Maker? God were not God, if He left man to
himself. But not only are His wisdom, justice and love manifested forth
in the beneficent arrangements of the world in which we find ourselves;
not only is He "kind to the unjust and the unthankful." In pain and
loss He quickens our sense of Himself (cf. xiv. 19-22). Even in the
first moments of angry surprise and revolt, that sense is quickened; we
rebel, not against an inanimate world or an impersonal law, but against
a Living and Personal Being, whom we acknowledge as the Arbiter of our
destinies, and whose wisdom and love and power we affect for the time to
question, but cannot really gainsay. The whole of our experience tends
to this end--to the continual rousing of our spiritual consciousness.
There is no interference, no isolated and capricious interposition or
interruption of order within or without us. Within and without us,
His Will is always energizing, always manifesting forth His Being,
encouraging our confidence, demanding our obedience and homage.
Thus prayer has its Divine as well as its human side; it is the Holy
Spirit drawing the soul, as well as the soul drawing nigh unto God.
The case is like the action and reaction of the magnet and the steel.
And so prayer is not a foolish act of unauthorised presumption, not
a rash effort to approach unapproachable and absolutely isolated
Majesty. Whenever man truly prays, his Divine King has already
extended the sceptre of His mercy, and bidden him speak.
xvi.-xvii. After the renewal of the promise there is a natural pause,
marked by the formula with which the present section opens. When the
prophet had recovered his firmness, through the inspired and inspiring
reflexions which took possession of his soul after he had laid bare
his inmost heart before God (xv. 20, 21), he was in a position to
receive further guidance from above. What now lies before us is the
direction, which came to him as certainly Divine, for the regulation
of his own future behaviour as the chosen minister of Iahvah at this
crisis in the history of his people. "And there fell a word of Iahvah
unto me, saying: Thou shalt not take thee a wife; that thou get
not sons and daughters in this place." Such a prohibition reveals,
with the utmost possible clearness and emphasis, the gravity of the
existing situation. It implies that the "peace and permanence," so
glibly predicted by Jeremiah's opponents, will never more be known
by that sinful generation. "This place," the holy place which Iahvah
had "chosen, to establish His name there," as the Book of the Law
so often describes it; "this place," which had been inviolable to
the fierce hosts of the Assyrian in the time of Isaiah (Isa. xxxvii.
33), was now no more a sure refuge, but doomed to utter and speedy
destruction. To beget sons and daughters there was to prepare more
victims for the tooth of famine, and the pangs of pestilence, and the
devouring sword of a merciless conqueror. It was to fatten the soil
with unburied carcases, and to spread a hideous banquet for birds and
beasts of prey. Children and parents were doomed to perish together;
and Iahvah's witness was to keep himself unencumbered by the sweet
cares of husband and father, that he might be wholly free for his
solemn duties of menace and warning, and be ready for every emergency.
"For thus hath Iahvah said:
Concerning the sons and concerning the daughters that are born in
this place,
And concerning their mothers that bear them,
And concerning their fathers that beget them, in this land:
By deaths of agony shall they die;
They shall not be mourned nor buried;
For dung on the face of the ground shall they serve;
And by the sword and by the famine shall they be fordone:
And their carcase shall serve for food
To the fowls of the air and to the beasts of the earth" (xvi. 3-4).
The "deaths of agony" seem to indicate the pestilence, which always
ensued upon the scarcity and vile quality of food, and the confinement
of multitudes within the narrow bounds of a besieged city (see
Josephus' well-known account of the last siege of Jerusalem).
The attitude of solitary watchfulness and strict separation, which the
prophet thus perceived to be required by circumstances, was calculated
to be a warning of the utmost significance, among a people who attached
the highest importance to marriage, and the permanence of the family.
It proclaimed more loudly than words could do, the prophet's absolute
conviction that offspring was no pledge of permanence; that universal
death was hanging over a condemned nation. But not only this. It marks
a point of progress in the prophet's spiritual life. The crisis,
through which we have seen him pass, has purged his mental vision. He
no longer repines at his dark lot; no longer half envies the false
prophets, who may win the popular love by pleasing oracles of peace
and well-being; no longer complains of the Divine Will, which has
laid such a burden upon him. He sees now that his part is to refuse
even natural and innocent pleasures for the Lord's sake; to foresee
calamity and ruin; to denounce unceasingly the sin he sees around
him; to sacrifice a tender and affectionate heart to a life of rigid
asceticism; and he manfully accepts his part. He knows that he stands
alone--the last fortress of truth in a world of falsehood; and that
for truth it becomes a man to surrender his all.
That which follows tends to complete the prophet's social isolation.
He is to give no sign of sympathy in the common joys and sorrows of
his kind.
"For thus hath Iahvah said:
Enter thou not into the house of mourning,
Nor go to lament, nor comfort thou them:
For I have taken away My friendship from this people ('Tis
Iahvah's utterance!)
The lovingkindness and the compassion;
And old and young shall die in this land,
They shall not be buried, and men shall not wail for them;
Nor shall a man cut himself, nor make himself bald, for them:
Neither shall men deal out bread to them in mourning,
To comfort a man over the dead;
Nor shall they give them to drink the cup of consolation,
Over a man's father and over his mother.
"And the house of feasting thou shalt not enter,
To sit with them to eat and to drink.
For thus hath Iahvah Sabaoth, the God of Israel, said:
Lo, I am about to make to cease from this place,
Before your own eyes and in your own days,
Voice of mirth and voice of gladness,
The voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride."
Acting as prophet, that is, as one whose public actions were
symbolical of a Divine intent, Jeremiah is henceforth to stand
aloof, on occasions when natural feeling would suggest participation
in the outward life of his friends and acquaintance. He is to quell
the inward stirrings of affection and sympathy, and to abstain from
playing his part in those demonstrative lamentations over the dead,
which the immemorial custom and sentiment of his country regarded
as obligatory; and this, in order to signify unmistakably that what
thus appeared to be the state of his own feelings, was really the
aspect under which God would shortly appear to a nation perishing
in its guilt. "Enter not into the house of mourning ... _for_ I
have taken away My friendship from this people, the lovingkindness
and the compassion." An estranged and alienated God would view the
coming catastrophe with the cold indifference of exact justice.
And the consequence of the Divine aversion would be a calamity so
overwhelming, that the dead would be left without those rites of
burial, which the feeling and conscience of all races of mankind have
always been careful to perform. There should be no burial, much less
ceremonial lamentation, and those more serious modes of evincing grief
by disfigurement of the person,[66] which, like tearing the hair and
rending the garments, are natural tokens of the first distraction of
bereavement. Not for wife or child (מֵת: see Gen. xxiii. 3), nor for
father or mother should the funeral feast be held; for men's hearts
would grow hard at the daily spectacle of death, and at last there
would be no survivors.
In like manner, the prophet is forbidden to enter as guest "the
house of feasting." He is not to be seen at the marriage-feast,--that
occasion of highest rejoicing, the very type and example of innocent
and holy mirth; to testify by his abstention that the day of judgment
was swiftly approaching, which would desolate all homes, and silence
for evermore all sounds of joy and gladness in the ruined city. And it
is expressly added that the blow will fall "before your own eyes and
in your own days;" shewing that the hour of doom was very near, and
would no more be delayed.
In all this, it is noticeable that the Divine answer appears to bear
special reference to the peculiar terms of the prophet's complaint.
In despairing tones he had cried (xv. 10), "Woe's me, my mother, that
thou didst bear me!" and now he is himself warned not to take a wife,
and seek the blessing of children. The outward connexion here may be:
"Let it not be that thy children speak of thee, as thou hast spoken
of thy mother!"[67] But the inner link of thought may rather be this,
that the prophet's temporary unfaithfulness evinced in his outcry
against God and his lament that ever he was born is punished by the
denial to him of the joys of fatherhood--a penalty which would be
severe to a loving, yearning nature like his, but which was doubtless
necessary to the purification of his spirit from all worldly taint,
and to the discipline of his natural impatience and tendency to repine
under the hand of God. His punishment, like that of Moses, may appear
disproportionate to his offence; but God's dealings with man are not
regulated by any mechanical calculation of less and more, but by His
perfect knowledge of the needs of the case; and it is often in truest
mercy that His hand strikes hard. "As gold in the furnace doth He try
them"; and the purest metal comes out of the hottest fire.