ich has begun with the singular _Thou_ changes gradually to _You_, and
not _Israel_ but _ye men of Israel_ are called to turn to their God.(799)
As the Prophet's indictments proceed his burden ceases to be the national
harlotry. He arraigns separate classes or groups,(800) and then, in
increasing numbers, individuals: brother deceiving brother and friend
friend; adulterers each after the wife of his neighbour; the official
bully Pashhur, Jehoiakim the atrocious and petty in contrast to his sire
the simple and just Josiah, the helpless and ridiculous Sedekiah, the
bustling and self-confident Hananiah(801)--with the fit word and in sharp
irony Jeremiah etches them separately, in the same vividness as the
typical figures of the harlot watching for her prey like the Arab robber
in the desert, the fowler crouching to fling his net, the shepherds
failing to keep their scattered flocks, the prophets who _fling about
their tongues and rede a rede of the Lord_.(802) Jeremiah has answered the
call to him to search for the _man_, the men beneath the nation.(803)

Then there are his readings of the heart of man into which he more deeply
thought than any other prophet of Israel: his revelation of the working of
God in the soul of man, its Searcher, its only Guide and Strength; his
stress upon individual responsibility and guilt, and on the one glory of
man being his knowledge of God and the duty of every man to know God for
himself and not through others; and his song of the beauty of the personal
life rooted in faith, evergreen and yielding its fruit even in seasons of
drought. Such passages increase in the Oracles of Jeremiah. Not ceasing to
be the patriot, the civic conscience of his people, he busies himself more
with the hearts, the habits, the sins and the duties towards God of its
individuals. Like Christ he takes the deaf apart from the multitude and
talks to him of himself.

O Lord, Who triest the righteous,
Who seest the reins and the heart.(804)

False above all is the heart,
Sick to despair,
Who is to know it?
I, the Lord, searching the heart
And trying the reins,
To give to each man as his ways,
As the fruit of his doings.(805)

Can any man hide him in secret
And I not see him?(806)

In those days they shall say no more: The fathers have eaten sour
grapes and the teeth of the children are set on edge. But every
one shall die for his own iniqui