ty, every man that eateth sour
grapes his teeth shall be set on edge.(807)

Speak to all Judah all the words I have charged thee....
Peradventure they will hearken and turn _every man from his evil
way_.(808)

He that would boast in this let him boast,
Insight and knowledge of Me.(809)

Lord, I know--not to man is his way,
Not man's to walk or settle his steps.(810)

Blessed the man that trusts in the Lord
And the Lord is his trust!
He like a tree shall be planted by water,
That stretches its roots to the stream;
Unafraid at the coming of heat,
His leaf shall be green;
_Sans_ care in the season of drought
He fails not in yielding his fruit.(811)

The individual soul rooted in faith and drawing life from the Fountain of
Living Water, independent of all disaster to the nation and famine on
earth--could not be more beautifully drawn.

Now all this advance by Jeremiah from the idea of the nation as the human
unit in religion--Deuteronomy's ideal and at first his own--to the
individual as the direct object of the Divine Grace and Discipline was
promoted, we have seen, by the dire happenings of the time, the unworthy
conduct of the people, their abandonment by God, the ruin of the State and
of the national worship--which cut off individuals from all political and
religious associations, leaving to each (in Jeremiah's repeated phrase)
only _his life_, or _his soul, for a prey_.(812) But all these could have
furthered the advance but little unless Jeremiah had felt by bitter
experience his own soul searched and re-searched by God--

But Thou, Lord, hast known me,
Thou seest and triest my heart towards Thee--(813)

unless through doubt and struggle he himself had won into the confidence
of an immediate and intimate knowledge of God. At his call he had learned
how a man could be God's before he was his mother's or his nation's--God's
own and to the end answerable only to Him. He had proved his solitary
conscience under persecution. He had known how personal convictions can
overbear the traditions of the past and the habits of one's own
generation--how God can hold a single man alone to His Will against his
nation and all its powers, and vindicate him at last to their faces. In
all this lay much of the vicarious service which Jeremiah achieved for his
own generation; what he had won for himself was possible for each of them.
And sure it