eir hearers must have understood the
individual hearts composing it. But, in urging upon his generation
repentance, faith and conversion to God, Jeremiah's language is more
thorough and personal than that used by any previous prophet. The
individual, as he leaves Jeremiah's hands, is more clearly the direct
object of the Divine Interest and Grace, and the instrument of the Divine
Will. The single soul is searched, defined and charged as never before in
Israel.

But this sculpture of the individual out of the mass of the nation, this
articulation of his immediate relation to God apart from Law, Temple and
Race, achieved as it was by Jeremiah only through intense mental and
physical agonies, opened to him the problem of the sufferings of the
righteous. In his experience the individual realised his Self only to find
that Self--its rights, the truths given it and its best service for
God--baffled by the stupidity and injustice of those for whom it laboured
and agonised. The mists of pain and failure bewildered the Prophet and to
the last his work seemed in vain. Whether or not he himself was conscious
of the solution of the problem, others reached it through him. There are
grounds for believing that the Figure of the Suffering Servant of the
Lord, raised by the Great Prophet of the Exile, and the idea of the
atoning and redemptive value of His sufferings were, in part at least, the
results of meditation upon the spiritual loneliness on the one side, and
upon the passionate identification of himself with the sorrows of his
sinful people on the other, of this the likest to Christ of all the
prophets.(3)

* * * * *

For our knowledge of this great life--there was none greater under the Old
Covenant--we are dependent on that Book of our Scriptures, the Hebrew text
of which bears the simple title "Jeremiah."

The influence of the life and therefore the full stature of the man who
lived it, stretches, as I have hinted, to the latest bounds of Hebrew
history, and many writings and deeds were worshipfully assigned to him.
Thus the Greek Version of the Old Testament ascribes Lamentations to
Jeremiah, but the poems themselves do not claim to be, and obviously are
not, from himself. He is twice quoted in II. Chronicles and once in Ezra,
but these quotations may be reasonably interpreted as referring to
prophecies contained in our book, which were therefore extant before the
date of the Chronicler.(4