oing His Will.(744) To its
last dregs he drank the cup of the Lord's wrath upon His false and wilful
nation; he suffered with them every pang of the slow death their sins had
brought upon them. And yet he was most conscious of his own innocence when
most certain of his fate. The more he loyally gave himself to his mission
the more he suffered and the nearer was he brought to death. The tragedy
perplexed him,

Why is my pain perpetual,
My wound past healing?(745)

The only reply he heard from heaven was the order to stand fast, for God
was with him to deliver--but that more troubles awaited him. And beyond
this what is there to answer the staggering Prophet save that if a man
have the Divine gifts of a keener conscience and a more loving heart than
his fellows, there inevitably comes with such gifts the obligation of
suffering for them. Every degree in which love stands above her brethren
means pain and shame to love though as yet she bear no thorn or nail in
her flesh. This spiritual distress Jeremiah felt for the people long
before he shared with them the physical penalties of their sins. Just
there--in his keener conscience, in his hot shame for sins not his as if
they were his, in his agony for his people's estrangement from God and in
his own constantly wounded love--lay his real substitution, his vicarious
offering for his people.

Did Jeremiah ever conceive the far-off fulness of the travail thus laid
upon his soul, the truth that this vicarious agony of a righteous man for
the sins of others is borne by God Himself? To that question we have only
fragments of an answer. In his discourses, both earlier and later, when he
talks directly in the Name of the Deity--when the Deity speaks in the first
person--the words breathe as much effort and passion as when Jeremiah
speaks in his own person. The Prophet is very sure that his God is Love,
and he hears that love utter itself in tones of yearning for the love of
men, and even of agony for their sin and misery. There is, too, a singular
prayer of his which is tense with the instinct, that God would surely be
to Israel what Jeremiah had resolved and striven to be--not a far-off God
who occasionally visited or passed through His people, but One in their
midst sharing their pain; not indifferent, as he fears in another
place,(746) to the shame that is upon them, but bearing even this. The
prayer which I mean is the one in XIV. 8, 9, which recalls not only th