hrinks, protests, craves leave to retire. So
that while Isaiah's answer to the call of God is _Here am I, send me_,
Jeremiah's might have been "I would be anywhere else than here, let me
go." He spent much of himself in complaint and in debate both with God and
with his fellow-men:

Mother! Ah me!
As whom hast thou borne me?
A man of quarrel and of strife
To the whole of the land--
All of them curse me.(685)

Nor did he live to see any solid results from his work. His call was

To root up, pull down and destroy,
To build and to plant.(686)

If this represents the Prophet's earliest impression of his charge, the
proportion between the destructive and constructive parts of it is
ominous; if it sums up his experience it is less than the truth. Though he
sowed the most fruitful seeds in the fields of Israel's religion, none
sprang in his lifetime. For his own generation he built nothing.
Sympathetic with the aims and the start of the greatest reform in Israel's
history, he grew sceptical of its progress and had to denounce the dogmas
into which the spirit of it hardened. A king sought his counsel and
refused to follow it; the professional prophets challenged him to speak in
the Name of the Lord and then denied His Word; the priests were ever
against him, and the overseer of the Temple put him in the stocks. Though
the people came to his side at one crisis, they rejected him at others and
fell back on their formalist teachers, and the prophets of a careless
optimism. Though he loved his people with passion, and pled with them all
his life, he failed to convince or move them to repentance--and more than
once was forbidden even to pray for them. He was charged not to marry nor
found a family nor share in either the griefs or the joys of society. His
brethren and his father's house betrayed him, and he was stoned out of
Anathoth by his fellow-villagers. Though he could count on a friend or two
at court, he had to flee into hiding. King Sedekiah, who felt a slavish
reverence for his word, was unable to save him from imprisonment in a miry
pit, and he owed his deliverance, neither to friend nor countryman, but to
a negro eunuch of the palace. Even after the fall of Jerusalem, when his
prophecies were vindicated almost to the letter, he failed to keep a
remnant of the nation in Judah; and his word had no influence with the
little band which clung to him as a fetish and hurried him t