tery and the promise of peace
to his contemporaries, to blind him to the clear and just reading of his
times, to which God's Word and his faith in the Divine character had
opened his vision. On the contrary the other prophets, to take them at
their best, were blinded by their patriotism, blinded by it even after
Carchemish and when the grasp of Babylon was sensibly closing upon
Judah--even after the first captivity and when the siege of Jerusalem could
only end in her downfall and destruction. Nothing proved sufficient to
open such eyes to the signs of the times.

Making allowance, then, for the fact that we depend for our knowledge of
the controversy upon the record of only one of the parties to it, and
imputing to the other prophets the best possible, we are left with these
results: that as proved by events the truth was with Jeremiah's word and
not with that of his opponents, and that the causes of this were his
profoundly deeper ethical conceptions of God working in concert with his
unwarped understanding of the political and military movements of his
time.

To this were allied other differences between Jeremiah and the prophets
who were against him.

Along with the priests they clung to tradition, to dogma, to things that
had been true and vital for past generations but were no longer so for
this one, which turned exhausted truths into fetishes. To all these he
opposed _the Word of the Living God_, Who spoke to the times and freely
acted according to the character and the needs of the present generation.

Again, the other prophets do not appear to have attached any conditions to
their predictions; these they delivered as absolute and final. In
contrast, not merely were Jeremiah's prophecies conditional but the
conditions were in harmony with their fundamentally moral spirit. His
doctrine of Predestination was (as we have seen) subject to faith in the
Freedom of the Divine Sovereignty, and therefore up to the hopeless last
he repeated his calls to repentance, so that God might relent of the doom
He had decreed, and save His people and His land to each other.

Further, despite his natural outbursts of rage Jeremiah showed patience
with his opponents, the patience which is proof of the soundness of a
man's own convictions. He believed in "the liberty of prophesying,"

The prophet with whom is a dream
Let him tell his dream,
And he with whom is My Word,
My Word let him speak in truth!