e gives
proof that he can descry the dross still among them, despite the furnace
through which they have passed.(493) But the banished were without doubt
the best of the nation, and now they had "dreed their weird," gone through
the fire, been lifted out of the habits and passions of the past, and
chastened by banishment--pensive and wistful as exile alone can bring men
to be.

We also have come out of the Great War with the best of us gone, and feel
the contrast between their distant purity, _out of great tribulation_, and
the unworthiness of those who are left. But neither to Jeremiah nor to any
of his time was such inspiration possible as we draw from our brave,
self-sacrificing dead. No confidence then existed in a life beyond the
grave. Jeremiah himself can only _weep for the slain of his people_. His
last vision of them is of _corpses strewn on the field like sheaves left
after the reaper which nobody gathers_, barren of future harvests; and the
last word he has for them is, _they went forth and are not_.(494) But that
separated and distant Israel has for the Prophet something at least of
what the cloud of witnesses by which we are encompassed means for us.
There was quality in them, quality purified by suffering and sacrifice,
more than enough to rally the conscience of the nation from which they had
been torn. For the Prophet himself they released hope, they awoke the
sense of a future, they revived the faith that God had still a will for
His people, and that by His patient Grace a pure Israel might be re-born.

If the vision of the Figs reveals the ethical grounds of Jeremiah's new
hope for Israel, his Letter to the Exiles, XXIX. 1-23, discloses still
another ground on which that hope was based--his clear and sane
appreciation of the politics of his time. And it adds a pronouncement of
profound significance for the future of Israel's religion, that the sense
of the presence of God, faith in His Providence and Grace, and prayer to
Him were independent of Land and Temple.

From the subsequent fortunes of the exiles we know what liberal treatment
they must have received from Nebuchadrezzar. They were settled by
themselves; they were not, as in Egypt of old, hindered from multiplying;
they were granted freedom to cultivate and to trade, by which many of them
gradually rose to considerable influence among their captors. All this was
given to Jeremiah to foresee and to impress upon the first exiles. But it
meant th