man,
whose service, and the fortunes it met with, we have followed over the
more than forty years of their range. The interest of many great lives
lies in their natural and fair development: the growth of gift towards
occasion, the beckoning of occasion when gift is ripe, the sympathy
between a man and his times, the coincidence of public need with personal
powers or ambition--the zest of the race and the thrill of the goal. With
Jeremiah it was altogether otherwise.

1. Protest and Agony. (I, IV. 10, 19, VI. 11, XI. 18-XII. 6, XV. 10-XVI.
9, XVII. 14-18, XVIII. 18-23, XX. 7-18.)

If, as is possible, the name Jeremiah means _Yahweh hurls_ or _shoots
forth_, it fitly describes the Prophet's temper, struggles and fate. For
he was a projectile, fired upon a hostile world with a force not his own,
and on a mission from which, from the first, his gifts and affections
recoiled and against which he continued to protest. On his passage through
the turbulence of his time he reminds us of one of those fatal shells
which rend the air as they shoot, distinct even through the roar of battle
by their swift, shrill anguish and effecting their end by their explosion.

Jeremiah has been called The Weeping Prophet, but that is mainly because
of the attribution to him of The Book of Lamentations, which does not
profess to be his and is certainly later than his day. Not weeping, though
he had to weep, so much as groaning or even screaming is the particular
pitch of the tone of this Prophet. As he says himself,

For as oft as I speak I must shriek,
And cry "Violence and Spoil!"(681)

His first word is one of shrinking, _I cannot speak, I am too young_.(682)
The voice of pain and protest is in most of his Oracles. He curses the day
of his birth and cries woe to his mother that she bare him. He makes us
feel that he has been charged against his will and he hurtles on his
career like one slung at a target who knows that in fulfilling his
commission he shall be broken--as indeed he was.

Lord, Thou beguiled'st me, and beguiled I let myself be,
Thou wast too strong for me, Thou hast prevailed.(683)

Power was pain to him; he carried God's Word as _a burning fire in his
heart_.(684) If the strength and the joy in which others rise on their
gifts ever came to him they quickly fled. Isaiah, the only other prophet
comparable, accepts his mission and springs to it with freedom. But
Jeremiah, always coerced, s