resistible sovereignty but a double freedom--freedom in God
to change His decrees for moral reasons, freedom on man's part to thwart
God's designs for him. In further illustration of this remember again the
wonderful words, _Be thou not dismayed before them, lest I make thee
dismayed; if thou wilt turn, then shall I turn thee_. To work upon man God
needs man's own will.

From imagining the Deity as sheer absolute will, to which the experience
of the resistless force behind his own soul must sometimes have tempted
him, Jeremiah was further guarded by his visions of the Divine working in
Nature. He is never more clear or musical than when singing of the
regularity, faithfulness and reasonableness of this. With such a Creator,
such a Providence, there could be neither arbitrariness nor caprice.

Having this experience of God's ways with man it was not possible for
Jeremiah to succumb to those influences of a strong unqualified faith in
predestination which have often overwhelmed the personalities of its
devotees. Someone has talked of "the wine of predestination," and history
both in the East and in the West furnishes cases of men so drugged by it
as to lose their powers of will, reason and heart, and become either
apathetic unquestioning slaves of fate, or violent and equally
unquestioning dogmatists and tyrants--the soul-less instruments of a
pitiless force. God overpowers them: He is all and they are nothing. It
was far otherwise with Jeremiah, who realised and preserved his
individuality not only as against the rest of his people but as against
God Himself. His earlier career appears from the glimpses we get of it to
have been, if not a constant, yet a frequent struggle with the Deity. He
argues against the Divine calls to him. And even when he yields he
expresses his submission in terms which almost proudly define his own will
as over against that of God:

Lord thou beguiledst me, and I let myself be beguiled,
Thou wast stronger than I and hast conquered.

The man would not be mastered, but if mastered is not crushed. He
questions each moment of his own sufferings, each moment of his people's
oncoming doom. He debates with God on matters of justice. He wrestles
things out with God and emerges from each wrestle not halt and limping
like Jacob of old, but firm and calm, more clear in his mind and more sure
of himself--as we see him at last when the full will of God breaks upon his
soul with the Battle of