thy of
His designs, and to deliver them for the punishment of their sins into the
hands of their enemies.(557) _What else can I do?_ Jeremiah hears God say.
The opposing prophets reply, _Not He!_ This is the ground of his charge
against them, that they plan to make the _people forget the Name_, the
revealed Nature and Character, of God, just as _their fathers forgat Him
through Baal_,(558) confusing His Nature with that of the lower, local
god.(559) This ethical difference between Jeremiah and the prophets is
clear beyond doubt; it was profound and fundamental. There went with it of
course the difference between their respective attitudes to the society of
their time--on the one side his acute conscience of the vices that
corrupted the people, on the other their careless temper towards those
vices. They would _heal the hurt of the daughter of my people lightly_,
saying _it is well, it is well when well it is not_, and in their
prophesying there was no call to repentance.(560) Moreover, though this
may not have been true of all of them, some both in Jerusalem and among
the exiles were _partakers of other men's sins_; for Jeremiah charges them
with the prevailing immoralities of the day--adultery and untruth. Instead
of turning Judah from her sins, they were the promoters of the godlessness
that spread through the land.(561) Though we have only Jeremiah's--or
Baruch's--word for this, we know how natural it has ever been for the
adherents, and for even some of the leaders, of a school devoid of the
fundamental pieties to slide into open vice. Jeremiah's charges are
therefore not incredible.

But the grounds of the difference between Jeremiah and the other prophets
were also intellectual. Jeremiah had the right eye for events and
throughout he was true to it. Just as he tells us how the will of God was
sometimes suggested to him by the sight of certain physical objects--the
almond-blossom that broke the winter of Anathoth, the boiling caldron, or
the potter at his wheel--so the sight of that in which the physical and
spiritual mingled, the disposition and progress of the political forces of
his world, made clear to him the particular lines upon which the ethically
certain doom of Judah would arrive. He had the open eye for events and
allowed neither that horror of his people's ruin, of which he tells us his
heart was full, nor any other motive of patriotism, nor temptations to the
easier life that had surely been his by flat