f His Glory!_ And their voices
rocked the Temple and filled it with smoke. Here are a Presence, Awful
Majesty, Infinite Holiness and Glory, blinding the seer and crushing his
heart contrite. Or take the inaugural vision of Ezekiel--the storm-wind out
of the North, the vast cloud, the fire infolding itself, the brightness
round about and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber; the rush
and whirl of life that followed, wheels and wings and rings full of eyes;
and over this the likeness of a firmament of the colour of the terrible
ice and the sound of wings like the noise of many waters, as the Voice of
the Almighty and above the firmament a Throne and on the Throne the
Appearance of a Man, the Appearance of the likeness of the Glory of the
Lord. _And I, when I saw it, fell upon my face._

In the inaugural visions of Jeremiah there is none of this Awfulness--only
_What art thou seeing Jeremiah? the branch of an almond tree ... a caldron
boiling._ That was characteristic of his encounters and intercourse with
the Deity throughout. They were constant and close, but in them all we are
aware only of a Voice and an Argument. There is no Throne, no Appearance,
no Majesty, no overwhelming sense of Holiness and Glory, no rush of wings
nor floods of colour or of song.(748) Jeremiah takes for granted what
other prophets have said of God. But the Deity whose Power and Glory they
revealed is his Familiar. The Lord talks with Jeremiah as a man with his
fellow.

For this there were several reasons, and first the particular quality of
the Prophet's imagination. His native powers of vision were not such as
soar, or at any rate easily soar, to the sublime. He was a lyric poet and
his revelations of God are subjective and given to us by glimpses in
scattered verses, which, however intimate and exquisite, have not the
adoring wonder of his prophetic peers.

Again there were the startled recoil of his nature from the terrible
office of a prophet in such times, and those born gifts of questioning and
searching which fitted him for his allotted duty as Tester of his
people,(749) but which he also turned upon the Providence and Judgments of
the Lord Himself.(750) His religious experience, as we have seen, was
largely a struggle with the Divine Will, and it left him not adoring but
amazed and perplexed. Such wrestling man's spirit has to encounter like
Jacob of old in the dark, and if like the Patriarch it craves the Name,
which is the