alise how we would have felt had we, like him, found our
_one_ service baffled, and the _single_ possible fulfilment of our ideals
rendered vain. All of which shows the difference that Christ has made.

2. Predestination. (I, XVIII, etc.)

Yet though such a man in such an age Jeremiah is sped through it with a
force, which in spite of him never fails and which indeed carries his
influence to the end of his nation's history.

What was the powder which launched this grim projectile through his times?
Part at least was his faith in his predestination, the bare sense that God
Almighty meant him from before his beginning for the work, and was
gripping him to it till the close. This alone prevailed over his reluctant
nature, his protesting affections, and his adverse circumstance.

Before in the body I built thee, I knew thee,
Before thou wast forth from the womb, I had put thee apart,
I have set thee a prophet to the nations.

From the first and all through it was God's choice of him, the knowledge
of himself as a thought of the Deity and a consecrated instrument of the
Divine Will, which grasped this unbraced and sensitive creature, this
alternately discouraged and impulsive man, and turned him, as we have
seen, into the opposite of himself.

The writers of the Old Testament give full expression to the idea of
predestination, but what they understand by it is not what much of Jewish
and Christian theology has understood. In the Old Testament predestination
is not to character or fate, to salvation or its opposite, to eternal life
or eternal punishment, but to service, or some particular form of service,
for God and man. The Great Evangelist of the Exile so defines it for
Israel as a whole: Israel an eternal purpose of God for the enlightenment
and blessing of mankind. And this faith is enforced on the nation, not for
their pride nor to foster the confidence that God will never break from
them, but to rouse their conscience, and give them courage when they are
feeble or indolent or hopeless of their service. So with Jeremiah in
regard both to his own predestination and that of his people. In his
Parable of the Potter (as we have seen) it is for service as vessels that
the clay is moulded; God is revealed not as predestining character or
quality, but as shaping characters for ends for which under His hand they
yield suitable qualities. The parable illustrates not arbitrariness of
election nor ir