ves of the trials which he endured
because of his faithfulness to the Word of the Lord, and his sane views of
the facts of the time. As we read these prophecies and narratives several
changes become clear in the position and circumstances of the Prophet, and
in his temper and outlook. Signally vindicated as his words have been, we
are not surprised that to his contemporaries he has grown to be a
personage of greater impressiveness and authority than before. He has
still his enemies but these are not found in exactly the same quarters as
under Jehoiakim. Instead of an implacable king, and princes more or less
respectful and friendly, in the king he has now a friend, though a timid
and ineffective one, while the new and inferior princes appear almost
wholly against him. Formerly both priests and prophets had been his foes,
but now only the prophets are mentioned as such, and at least one priest
is loyal to him.(482) Inwardly again, he has no more of those debates with
God and his own soul, which had rent him during the previous years; only
once does doubt escape from his lips in prayer.(483) Clearest of all, his
hope has been released, and in contrast with his prophesying up to the
surrender of Jerusalem in 597, but in full agreement with his enduring
faith in God's Freedom and Patience,(484) he utters not a few predictions
of a future upon their own land for both Israel and Judah. This greatest
of the changes which appear is due partly to the fact that while the man's
reluctant duty has been to pronounce the doom of exile upon his people,
that doom has been fulfilled, and his spirit, which never desired it,(485)
is free to range beyond its shadows. To the clearness into which he rises
he is helped, under belief in the Divine Grace, by the truth obvious to
all but fanatics that peace and order were possible for that shaken world
only through submission to Nebuchadrezzar's firm government, including as
this did a policy comparatively lenient to the Jewish exiles. But there
was another and stronger reason why Jeremiah should at last turn himself
to a ministry of hope, however sternly he must continue to denounce the
Jews left in Jerusalem and Judah. The catastrophe of 597 largely separated
the better elements of the nation, which were swept into exile, from the
worse which remained in the land.

It is this drastic sifting, ethically one of the most momentous events in
the history of Israel, with which Jeremiah's earliest Orac