Nature, of That with which it struggles, all the answer it
may get is another question, _Wherefore askest thou after My Name?_
Morning may break, as it broke on Jacob by Jabbok with the assurance of
blessing or as on Jeremiah with a firmer impression of the Will not his
own; but no strength is left to glory in the Nature behind the Will. There
is a horrified breathlessness about his lines--

Thou wast stronger than I and hast conquered,
The Lord is with me as a Mighty and Terrible.(751)

From his struggles he indeed issues more sure of God and finally more
trustful in Him, as is testified by his fair song on the beauty and
fruitfulness of faith, beginning

Blessed the wight that trusts in the Lord,
And the Lord is his trust.(752)

But even here is none of the awe and high wonder which fall upon Israel
through other prophets. Lyrist as he is and subjective, Jeremiah dwells
not so much upon the attributes of God on which faith rests as upon the
effects of faith in man.

Again by the desperate character of the times he was starved of hope, the
hope by which the Apostle says _we are saved_, which not only braces the
will but clears the inner eyes of men and liberates the imagination. As
the years went on he was ever more closely bound to the prediction of his
people's ruin, and, when this came, to the sober counsel to accept their
fate and settle down to a long exile in patience for the Lord's time of
deliverance. As we have seen, his intervals of release from so grim a
ministry were brief, and his Oracles of a bright future but few. Even in
these he does not rise, like the Evangelist of the Exile whom he inspired,
to exultation in the Almighty Power of God or to visions of vast spaces of
the Divine Providence, or of Israel's service wide as the world. His happy
peasant-heart is content to foresee his restored people tending their
vineyards again, enjoying their village dances and festivals, and sharing
with their long divided tribes the common national worship upon Sion.(753)

Like those of all the prophets Jeremiah's most immediate convictions of
God are that He has done, and is always doing or about to do, things.(754)
From the first Yahweh of Israel had been to the faith of his people a God
of Deeds. He delivered them from Egypt, led them through the desert, ever
ready to avenge them on any who molested them, and He had brought them to
a land of delight.(755) By his creative and guiding Wor