0) O to have no other task in life than to watch the street from the
balcony!

But our prayers often outrun themselves in the utterance and Jeremiah's
too carried with it its denial. _My people--that I might leave my
people_--this, it is clear from all that we have heard from him, his heart
would never suffer him to do. And so gradually we find him turning with
deeper devotion to the forlorn hope of his ministry, his fate to feel his
judgment of his people grow ever more despairing, but his love for them
deeper and more yearning.

From the year of Carchemish onward he appears not again to have tried or
prayed to escape. Through the rest of the reign of Jehoiakim they
persecuted him to the edge of death. Prophets and priests called for his
execution. He was stoned, beaten and thrust into the stocks. The king
scornfully cut up the roll of his prophecies; and the people following
their formalist leaders rejected his word. With the first captivity under
Jehoiakim all the better classes left Jerusalem, but he elected to remain
with the refuse. When in the reign of Sedekiah the Chaldeans came down on
the city and Jeremiah counselled its surrender he was again beaten and was
flung into a pit to starve to death. When he was freed and the besiegers
gave him the opportunity, he would not go over to them. Even when the city
had fallen and her captors hearing of his counsel offered him security and
a position in Babylonia, he chose instead to share the fortunes of the
little remnant left in their ruined land. When they broke up it was the
worst of them who took possession of his person and disregarding his
appeals hurried him down to Egypt. There, on alien soil and among
countrymen who had given themselves to an alien religion, the one great
personality of his time, who had served the highest interests of his
nation for forty years, reluctant but unfaltering, and whose scorned
words, every one, had been vindicated by events, is with the dregs of his
people swept from our sight. _He had given his back to the smiters and his
cheeks to them who plucked out the hair; he had not hidden his face from
the shame and the spitting. He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with
grief. He was taken from prison and from judgment and cut off from the
land of the living; and they made his grave with the wicked, though he had
done no violence neither was deceit in his mouth._ It is the second
greatest sacrifice that Israel has offered for mankind.