alike in the impulse which led him thither, and in the familiar
actions of the potter. Perhaps as he sat meditating at home, or
praying in the court of the temple, the thought had crossed his mind
that Iahvah was the Potter, and mankind the clay in His hands; a
thought which recurs so often in the eloquent pages of the second
Isaiah, who was doubtless indebted to the present oracle for the
suggestion of it. Musing upon this thought, Jeremiah wandered
half-unconsciously down to the workshop of the potter; and there,
under the influence of the Divine Spirit, his thought developed itself
into a lesson for his people and for us.
_Cannot I do unto you like this potter, O house of_ _Israel? saith
Iahvah; Behold, as the clay in the potter's hand, so are ye in My
hand, O house of Israel._ Iahvah has an absolute control over His
people and over all peoples, to shape their condition and to alter
their destiny; a control as absolute as that of the potter over the
clay between his hands, which he moulds and remoulds at will. Men
are wholly malleable in the hands of their Maker; incapable, by the
nature of things, of any real resistance to His purpose. If the
first intention of the potter fail in the execution, he does not
fail to realize his plan on a second trial. And if man's nature and
circumstances appear for a time to thwart the Maker's design; if the
unyielding pride and intractable temper of a nation mar its beauty and
worth in the eyes of its Creator, and render it unfit for its destined
uses and functions; He can take away the form He has given, and reduce
His work to shapelessness, and remodel the ruined mass into accordance
with His sovereign design. Iahvah, the supreme Author of all
existence, can do this. It is evident that the Creator can do as He
will with His creature. But all His dealings with man are conditioned
by moral considerations. He meddles with no nation capriciously,
and irrespective of its attitude towards His laws. _At one moment I
threaten a nation and a kingdom that I will uproot and pull down and
destroy. And that nation which I threatened returneth from its evil,
and I repent of the evil that I purposed to do it. And at another
moment, I promise a nation and a kingdom that I will build and plant.
And it doeth the Evil in Mine eyes, in not hearkening unto My voice;
and I repent of the good that I said I would do it_ (vv. 7-10).
This is a bold affirmation, impressive in its naked simplicity and
directness of statement, of a truth which in all ages has taken
possession of minds at all capable of a comprehensive survey of national
experience; the truth that there is a power revealing itself in the
changes and chances of human history, shaping its course, and giving
it a certain definite direction, not without regard to the eternal
principles of morality. When in some unexpected calamity which strikes
down an individual sinner, men recognise a "judgment" or an instance of
"the visitation of God," they infringe the rule of Christian charity,
which forbids us to judge our brethren. Yet such judgment, liable as it
is to be too readily suggested by private ill-will, envy and other evil
passions, which warp the even justice that should guide our decisions,
and blind the mind to its own lack of impartiality, is in general the
perversion of a true instinct which persists in spite of all scientific
sophistries and philosophic fallacies. For it is an irrepressible
instinct rather than a reasoned opinion which makes us all believe,
however inconsistently and vaguely, that God rules; that Providence
asserts itself in the stream of circumstance, in the current of human
affairs. The native strength of this instinctive belief is shewn by its
survival in minds that have long since cast off allegiance to religious
creeds. It only needs a sudden sense of personal danger, the sharp shock
of a serious accident, the foreboding of bitter loss, the unexpected but
utter overthrow of some well-laid scheme that seemed assured of success,
to stir the faith that is latent in the depths of the most callous and
worldly heart, and to force the acknowledgment of a righteous Judge
enthroned above.
Compared with the mysterious Power which evinces itself continuously
in the apparent chaos of conflicting events, man's free will is like
the eddy whirling round upon the bosom of a majestic river as it
floats irresistibly onward to its goal, bearing the tiny vortex along
with it. Man's power of self-determination no more interferes with the
counsels of Providence than the diurnal revolution of the earth on its
axis interferes with its annual revolution round the sun. The greater
comprises the less; and God includes the world.
The Creator has implanted in the creature a power of choice between
good and evil, which is a pale reflexion of His own tremendous Being.
But how can we even imagine the dependent, the limited, the finite,
acting independently of the will of the Absolute and Infinite? The
fish may swim against the ocean current; but can it swim at all out
of the ocean? Its entire activity depends upon the medium in which it
lives and moves and has its being.
But Jeremiah exposes the secret of Providence to the eyes of his
fellow-countrymen for a particular purpose. His aim is to eradicate
certain prevalent misconceptions, so as to enable them to rightly
apprehend the meaning of God's present dealings with themselves.
The popular belief was that Zion was an inviolable sanctuary; that
whatever disasters might have befallen the nation in the past, or
might be imminent in the future, Iahvah could not, for His own sake,
permit the extinction of Judah as a nation. For then His worship,
the worship of the temple, the sacrifices of the one altar, would be
abolished; and His honour and His Name would be forgotten among men.
These were the thoughts which comforted them in the trying time when
a thousand rumours of the coming of the Chaldeans to punish their
revolt were flying about the land; and from day to day men lived in
trembling expectation of impending siege and slaughter. These were
the beliefs which the popular prophets, themselves probably in most
cases fanatical believers in their own doctrine, vehemently maintained
in opposition to Jeremiah. Above all, there was the covenant between
Iahvah and His people, admitted as a fact both by Jeremiah and his
opponents. Was it conceivable that the God of the Fathers, who had
chosen them and their posterity to be His people for ever, would turn
from His purpose, and reject His chosen utterly?
Jeremiah meets these popular illusions by applying his analogy of the
potter. The potter fashions a mass of clay into a vessel; and Iahvah had
fashioned Israel into a nation. But as though the mass of inert matter
had proven unwieldy or stubborn to the touches of his plastic hands;
as the wheel revolved, a misshapen product resulted, which the artist
broke up again, and moulded afresh on his wheel, till it emerged a fair
copy of his ideal. And so, in the revolutions of time, Israel had failed
of realizing the design of his Maker, and had become a vessel of wrath
fitted to destruction. But as the rebellious lump was fashioned again by
the deft hand of the master, so might this refractory people be broken
and built up anew by the Divine master hand.
In the light of this analogy, the prophet interprets the existing
complications of the political world. The serious dangers impending
over the nation are a sure symptom that the Divine Potter is at work,
"moulding" an evil fate for Judah and Jerusalem. "And now prithee say
unto the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem:
"Thus hath Iahvah said,
Behold I am moulding evil against you,
And devising a device against you!"
But Iahvah's menaces are not the mere vent of a tyrant's caprice or
causeless anger: they are a deliberate effort to break the hard heart,
to reduce it to contrition, to prepare it for a new creation in a more
glorious likeness. Therefore the threat closes with an entreaty:
"Return ye, I pray you, each from his evil way,
And make good your ways and your doings!"
If the prophetic warning fulfil its purpose, and the nation repent,
then as in the case of Nineveh, which repented at the preaching of
Jonah, the sentence of destruction is revoked, and the doomed nation
is granted a new lease of life. The same truth holds good reversely.
God's promises are as conditional as His threats. If a nation lapse
from original righteousness, the sure consequence is the withdrawal
of Divine favour, and all of blessing and permanence that it confers.
It is evident that the prophet directly contradicts the popular
persuasion, which was also the current teaching of his professional
opponents, that Iahvah's promises to Israel are absolute, that is,
irrespective of moral considerations. Jeremiah is revealing, in terms
suited to the intelligence of his time, the true law of the Divine
dealings with Israel and with man. And what he has here written, it
is important to bear in mind, when we are studying other passages of
his writings and those of his predecessors, which foreshow judgments
and mercies to individual peoples. However absolute the language
of prediction, the qualification here supplied must usually be
understood; so that it is not too much to say that this remarkable
utterance is one of the keys to the comprehension of Hebrew prophecy.
But now, allowing for antique phraseology, and for the immense
difference between ancient and modern modes of thought and expression;
allowing also for the new light shed upon the problems of life and
history by the teaching of Him who has supplemented all that was
incomplete in the doctrine of the prophets and the revelation granted
to the men of the elder dispensation; must we pronounce this oracle
of Jeremiah's substantially true or the contrary? Is the view thus
formulated an obsolete opinion, excusable in days when scientific
thinking was unknown; useful indeed for the furtherance of the immediate
aims of its authors, but now to be rejected wholly as a profound
mistake, which modern enlightenment has at once exposed and rendered
superfluous to an intelligent faith in the God of the prophets?
Here and everywhere else, Jeremiah's language is in form highly
anthropomorphic. If it was to arrest the attention of the multitude,
it could not well have been otherwise. He seems to say that God
changes His intentions, according as a nation changes its behaviour.
Something must be allowed for style, in a writer whose very prose is
more than half poetry, and whose utterances are so often lyrical in
form as well as matter. The Israelite thinkers, however, were also
well aware that the Eternal is superior to change; as is clear from
that striking word of Samuel: "The Glory of Israel lieth not nor
repenteth; for He is not man, that He should repent" (1 Sam. xv. 29).
And prophetic passages like that in Kings, which so nobly declares
that the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain God (cf. Jer.
xxiii. 24), or that of the second Isaiah which affirms that the Divine
ways and purposes are as much higher than those of His people, as the
heavens are higher than the earth (Isa. lv. 9), prove that the vivid
anthropomorphic expressions of the popular teaching of the prophets
ought in mere justice to be limited by these wider conceptions of the
Divine Nature and attributes. These passages are quite enough to clear
the prophets of the accusation of entertaining such gross and crude
ideas of Deity as those which Xenophanes ridiculed, and which find
their embodiment in most mythologies.
There is indeed a sense in which all thinking, not only thought about
God, but about the natural world, must be anthropomorphic. Man is
unquestionably "the measure of all things," and he measures by a
human standard. He interprets the world without in terms of his own
consciousness; he imposes the forms and moulds of his own mind upon
the universal mass of things. Time, space, matter, motion, number,
weight, organ, function,--what are all these but inward conceptions
by which the mind reduces a chaos of conflicting impressions to order
and harmony? What the external world may be, apart from our ideas of
it, no philosopher pretends to be able to say; and an equal difficulty
embarrasses those who would define what the Deity is, apart from His
relations to man. But then it is only those relations that really
concern us; everything else is idle speculation, little becoming to
creatures so frail and ephemeral as we.
From this point of view, we may fairly ask, what difference it makes
whether the prophet affirm that Iahvah repents of retributive designs,
when a nation repents of its sins, or that a nation's repentance will
be followed by the restoration of temporal prosperity. It is a mere
matter of statement; and the former way of putting the truth was the
more intelligible way to his contemporaries, and has, besides, the
advantage of implying the further truth that the fortunes of nations
do not depend upon a blind and inexorable fate, but upon the Will
and Law of a holy God. It affirms a Lawmaker as well as a Law, a
Providence as well as an uniform sequence of events.
The prophet asserts, then, that nations reap what they have sown;
that their history is, in general, a record of God's judgments upon
their ways and doings. This is, of course, a matter of faith, as are
all beliefs about the Unseen; but it is a faith which has its root
in an apparently ineradicable instinct of humanity. Δράσαντι παθεῖν,
"The doer must suffer," is not a conviction of Hebrew religion only;
it belongs to the universal religious consciousness. Some critics are
fond of pronouncing the "policy" of the prophets a mistaken one. They
commend the high tone of their moral teachings, but consider their
forecasts of the future and interpretations of passing events, as
erroneous deductions from their general views of the Divine nature.
We are not well acquainted with the times and circumstances under
which the prophets wrote and spoke. This is true even in the case of
Jeremiah; the history of the time exists only in the barest outline.
But the writings of an Isaiah or an Amos make it difficult to suppose
that their authors would not have occupied a leading position in any
age and nation; their thought is the highest product of the Hebrew
mind; and the policy of Isaiah at least, during the Assyrian crisis,
was gloriously justified by the event.
We need not, however, stop here in attempting to vindicate the
attitude and aims of the prophets. Without claiming infallibility for
every individual utterance of theirs--without displaying the bad taste
and entire lack of literary tact which would be implied by insisting
upon the minute accuracy and close correspondence to fact, of all
that the prophets foreboded, all that they suggested as possible or
probable, and by turning all their poetical figures and similes into
bald assertions of literal fact; we may, I think, steadfastly affirm
that the great principles of revealed religion, which it was their
mission to enunciate and impress by all the resources of a fervid
oratory and a high-wrought poetical imagination, are absolutely and
eternally true. Man does reap as he sows; all history records it. The
present welfare and future permanence of a nation do depend, and have
always depended, upon the strength of its adhesion to religious and
moral convictions. What was it that enabled Israel to gain a footing
in Canaan, and to reduce, one after another, nations and communities
far more advanced in the arts of civilization than they? What but the
physical and moral force generated by the hardy and simple life of
the desert, and disciplined by wise obedience to the laws of their
Invisible King? What but a burning faith in the Lord of Hosts, Iahvah
Sabaoth, the true Leader of the armies of Israel? Had they only
remained uncontaminated by the luxuries and vices of the conquered
races; had they not yielded to the soft seduction of sensuous forms of
worship; had they continued faithful to the God who had brought them
out of Egypt, and lived, on the whole, by the teaching of the true
prophets; who can say that they might not have successfully withstood
the brunt of Assyrian or Chaldean invasion?
The disruption of the kingdom, the internecine conflicts, the
dynastic revolutions, the entanglements with foreign powers which
mark the progressive decline of the empire of David and Solomon,
would hardly have found place in a nation that steadily lived by the
rule of the prophets, clinging to Iahvah and Iahvah only, and "doing
justice and loving mercy" in all the relations of life. The gradual
differentiation of the idea of Iahvah into a multitude of Baals at
the local sanctuaries must have powerfully tended to disintegrate the
national unity. Solomon's temple and the recognition of the one God
of all the tribes of Israel as supreme, which that religious centre
implied, was, on the other hand, a real bond of union for the nation.
We cannot forget that, at the outset of the whole history, Moses
created or resuscitated the sense of national unity in the hearts of
the Egyptian serfs, by proclaiming to them Iahvah, the God of their
fathers. It is a one-sided representation which treats the policy
of the prophets as purely negative; as confined to the prohibition
of leagues with the foreigner, and the condemnation of walls and
battlements, chariots and horses, and all the elements of social
strength and display. The prophets condemn these things, regarded
as substitutes for trust in the One God, and faithful obedience to
His laws. They condemn the man who puts his confidence in man, and
makes flesh his arm, and forgets the only true source of strength and
protection. To those who allege that the policy of the prophets was a
failure, we may reply that it never had a full and fair trial.
And they will say, Hopeless! for we will follow after our own
devices, and will each practise the stubbornness of his own evil
heart. Therefore thus hath Iahvah said:
1. "Ask ye now among the heathen,
Who hath heard the like?
The virgin (daughter) of Israel
Hath done a very horrible thing.
2. "Doth the snow of Lebanon cease
From overflowing the field?
Do the running waters dry up,
The icy streams?[80]
3. "For My people have forgotten me,
To vain things they burn incense;
And they have made them stumble in their ways, the ancient
paths,
To walk in bypaths, a way not cast up:
4. "To make their land a desolation,
Perpetual hissings;
Every one that passeth her by shall be amazed,
And shall shake his head.
5. "Like an east wind will I scatter them
In the face of the foe;
The back and not the face will I shew them,
In the day of their overthrow."
God foresees that His gracious warning will be rejected as heretofore;
the prophet's hearers will cry "It is hopeless!" thy appeal is in vain,
thine enterprise desperate; "for after our own devices" or thoughts
"will we walk," not after thine, though thou urge them as Iahvah's; "and
we will each practise the stubbornness of his own evil heart"--this last
in a tone of irony, as if to say, Very well; we accept thy description
of us; our ways are stubborn, and our hearts evil: we will abide by our
character, and stand true to your unflattering portrait. Otherwise, the
words may be regarded as giving the substance of the popular reply, in
terms which at the same time convey the Divine condemnation of it; but
the former view seems preferable.
God foresees the obstinacy of the people, and yet the prophet does not
cease his preaching. A cynical assent to his invective only provokes
him to more strenuous endeavours to convince them that they are in the
wrong; that their behaviour is against reason and nature. Once more
(ii. 10 _sqq._) he strives to shame them into remorse by contrasting
their conduct with that of other nations. These were faithful to their
own gods; among _them_ such a crime as national apostasy was unheard
of and unknown. It was reserved for Israel to give the first example
of this abnormal offence; a fact as strange and fearful in the moral
world, as some unnatural revolution in the physical sphere. That
Israel should forget his duty to Iahvah was as great and inexplicable
a portent, as if the perennial snows of the Lebanon should cease to
supply the rivers of the land; or as if the ice-cold streams of its
glens and gorges should suddenly cease to flow. And certainly, when we
look at the matter with the eye of calm reason, the prophet cannot be
said to have here exaggerated the mystery of sin. For, however strong
the temptation that lures man from the path of duty, however occasion
may suggest, and passion urge, and desire yearn, these influences
cannot of themselves silence conscience, and obliterate experience,
and overpower judgment, and defeat reason. As surely as it is possible
to know anything, man knows that his vital interests coincide with
duty; and that it is not only weak but absolutely irrational to
sacrifice duty to the importunities of appetite.
When man forsakes the true God, it is to "burn incense to vain gods"
or things of nought. He who worships what is less than God, worships
nothing. No being below God can yield any true satisfaction to that
human nature which was made for God. The man who fixes his hope upon
things that perish in the using, the man who seeks happiness in things
material, the man whose affections have sole regard to the joys of
sense, and whose devotion is given wholly to worldly objects, is the man
who will at the last cry out, in hopeless disappointment and bitterness
of spirit, Vanity of vanities! all is vanity! "For what shall it profit
a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or
what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" The soul's salvation
consists in devotion to its Lord and Maker; its eternal loss and ruin,
in alienation from Him who is its true and only life. The false gods are
nought as regards help and profit; they are powerless to bless, but they
are potent to hurt and betray. They "make men stumble out of their ways,
out of the ancient paths, to walk in bypaths, in a way not cast up."
So it was of old; so it is now. When the heart is estranged from God,
and devoted to some meaner pursuit than the advancement of His glory,
it soon deserts the straight road of virtue, the highway of honour,
and falls into the crooked and uneven paths of fraud and hypocrisy,
of oppression and vice. The end appears to sanctify the means, or at
least to make them tolerable; and, once the ancient path of the Law
is forsaken, men will follow the most tortuous, and often thorny and
painful courses, to the goal of their choice. The path which leads away
from God, leads both individuals and nations to final ruin. Degraded
ideas of the Deity, false ideas of happiness, a criminal indifference to
the welfare of others, a base devotion to private and wholly selfish
ends, must in the long run sap the vigour of a nation, and render it
incapable of any effectual resistance to its enemies. Moral declension
is a sure symptom of approaching political dissolution; so sure, that if
a nation chooses and persists in evil, in the face of all dissuasion, it
may be assumed to be bent on suicide. Like Israel, it may be said to do
thus, "in order to make its land an astonishment, perpetual hissings."
Men will be surprised at the greatness of its fall, and at the same time
will acknowledge by voice and gesture that its doom is absolutely just.