'He shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good
cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, a salt
land and not inhabited...He shall be as a tree planted by the waters,
and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when
heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in
the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.'--JER.
xvii. 6, 8.
The prophet here puts before us two highly finished pictures. In the
one, the hot desert stretches on all sides. The fierce 'sunbeams like
swords' slay every green thing. The salt particles in the soil glitter
in the light. No living creature breaks the melancholy solitude. It is
a 'waste land where no one came, or hath come since the making of the
world.' Here and there a stunted, grey, prickly shrub struggles to
live, and just manages not to die. But it has no grace of leaf, nor
profitableness of fruit; and it only serves to make the desolation more
desolate.
The other carries us to some brimming river, where everything lives
because water has come. The pictures are coloured by Eastern
experience. For in those lands more than beneath our humid skies and
weaker sunshine, the presence or absence of running water makes the
difference between barrenness and fertility. Dipping their boughs in
the sparkling current, and driving their roots through the moist soil,
the bordering trees lift aloft their pride of foliage and bear fruits
in their season.
So, says Jeremiah, the two pictures represent two sets of men; the one,
he who diverts from their true object his heart-capacities of love and
trust, and clings to creatures and to men, 'making flesh his arm and
departing from the living God'; the other, he who leans the whole
weight of his needs and cares and sins and sorrows upon God. We can
make choice of which shall be the object of our trust, and according as
we choose the one or the other, the experience of these vivid pictures
will be ours.
Let me briefly, then, draw out the points of contrast in these two
companion sketches.