age and theirs were
diametrically opposite. But both he and they spoke in the name of the same
God, the God of their nation. Both were convinced that they had His Mind.
Both were sure that their respective predictions would be fulfilled. Each
repudiated the other's claim to speak in the name of their nation's God.
With each it was an affair of strong, personal convictions, which we may
grant, in the case of some at least of Jeremiah's opponents, to have been
as honest as his. At first sight it may seem hopeless to analyse such
equal assurances, based apparently on identical grounds, with the view of
discovering psychological differences between them; and as if we must
leave the issue to the course of events to which both parties confidently
appealed. Even here the decision is not wholly in favour of the one as
against the others. For Jeremiah's predictions in the Name of the Lord
were not always fulfilled as he had shaped them. The northern executioners
of the Divine Judgment upon Judah were not the Scythians as he at first
expected; and--a smaller matter--Jehoiakim was not _buried with the burial
of an ass, dragged and flung out from the gates of Jerusalem_, but _slept
with his fathers_.(555) Yet these are only exceptions. Jeremiah's
prophesying was in substance vindicated by history, while the predictions
of the other prophets were utterly belied. This is part of Jeremiah's
meaning when he says, _Of no profit whatsoever are they to this
people_.(556)

What were the grounds of the undoubted difference? On penetrating the
similar surfaces of Jeremiah's and the prophets' assurances we find two
deep distinctions between them--one moral and one intellectual.

We take the moral first for it is the deeper. Both Jeremiah and the
prophets based their predictions on convictions of the character of their
God. But while the prophets thought of Him and of His relations to Israel
from the level of that tribal system of religion which prevailed
throughout their world, and upon that low level concluded that Yahweh of
Israel could not for any reason forsake His own people but must avert from
them every disaster however imminent; Jeremiah was compelled by his faith
in the holiness and absolute justice of God to proclaim that, however
close and dear His age-long relations to Israel had been and however high
His designs for them, He was by His Nature bound to break from a
generation which had spurned His Love and His Law and proved unwor