35) For these last imply that in
himself Jeremiah was something different. God does not speak thus to a man
unless He sees that he needs it. It was to his most impetuous and unstable
disciple that Christ said, _Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I
build_.

Yet while his own temper thus aggravated his solitude and his pain we must
also keep in mind that neither among the priests, the prophets and the
princes of his time, nor in the kings after Josiah, did Jeremiah find any
of that firm material which under the hands of Isaiah rose into bulwarks
against Assyria. The nation crumbling from within was suffering from
without harder blows than even Assyria dealt it. These did not weld but
broke a people already decadent and with nothing to resist them save the
formalities of religion and a fanatic gallantry. The people lost heart and
care. He makes them use more than once a phrase about themselves in answer
to his call to repent: _No'ash, No use! All is up!_ Probably this reflects
his own feelings about them. He was a man perpetually baffled by what he
had to work with.

Poet as he was he had the poet's heart for the beauties of nature and of
domestic life: for birds and trees and streams, for the home-candle and
the sound of the house-mill, for children and the happiness of the bride,
and the love of husband and wife; and he was forbidden to marry or have
children of his own or to take part in any social merriment--in this last
respect so different from our Lord. Was it unnatural that his heart broke
out now and then in wild gusts of passion against it all?

There is another thing which we must not forget in judging Jeremiah's
excessive rage. We cannot find that he had any hope of another life.
Absolutely no breath of this breaks either from his own Oracles or from
those attributed to him. Here and now was his only chance of service, here
and now must the visions given him by God be fulfilled or not at all. In
the whole book of Jeremiah we see no hope of the resurrection, no glory to
come, no gleam even of the martyr's crown. I have often thought that what
seem to us the excess of impatience, the rashness to argue with
Providence, the unholy wrath and indignation of prophets and psalmists
under the Old Covenant, are largely to be explained by this, that as yet
there had come to them no sense of another life or of judgment beyond this
earth. When we are tempted to wonder at Jeremiah's passion and cursing,
let us try to re