, Jeremiah accomplished only half of the work he did for Israel and
mankind. It is proof of how great a prophet we have in him that he who was
the first in Israel to realise the independence of the single self in
religion should also become the supreme example under the Old Covenant of
the sacrifice of that self for others, that he should break from one type
of religious solidarity only to illustrate another and a nobler, that the
prophet of individuality should be also the symbol if not the conscious
preacher of vicariousness. This further stage in Jeremiah's experience is
of equally dramatic interest, though we cannot always trace the order of
his utterances which bear witness to it.

There must often have come to him the temptation to break loose from a
people who deserved nothing of him, but cruelly entreated him, and who
themselves were so manifestly doomed. Once at least he confesses this.

O that I had in the wilderness IX. 2
A wayfarers' lodge!
Then would I leave my people,
And get away from them;
For adulterers all of them be,
A bundle of traitors.
They stretch their tongues 3
Like a falsing bow,
And never for truth
Use their power in the land.
But from evil to evil go forth
And Me they know not!(739)

Well might the Prophet wish to escape from such a people--worn out with
their falsehood, their impurity, and their senseless optimism. Yet it is
not solitude for which he prays but some inn or caravanserai where he
would have been less lonely than in his unshared house in Jerusalem,
_sitting alone because of the wrath of the Lord_. His desire is to be set
where a man may see all the interest of passing life without any
responsibility for it, where men are wayfarers only and come and go like a
river on whose bank you lie, and help you to muse and perhaps to sing but
never touch the heart or the conscience of you. It is the prayer of a poet
sick of being a prophet and a tester. Jeremiah was weary of having to look
below the surface of life, to know people long enough to judge them with a
keener conscience than their own and to love them with a hopeless and
breaking heart that never got an answer to its love or to its calls for
repentance--wearied with watching habit slowly grow from ill to ill, old
truths become lies or at the best mere formalities, prophets who only
flattered, priests to bless them, and the people loving to have it
so.(74