or any sense of a place for
them in the Divine Providence. There is no missionary spirit nor hope for
mankind outside of Israel.

Further it is due to the almost exclusively national outlook and interest
of the Book that it has no guidance or comfort to offer for another
element of personal experience--question and doubt. While it illustrates
from the nation's history the purifying discipline of suffering because of
sin it says nothing of the sufferings of righteous individuals, but by the
absoluteness of its doctrines of morality and Providence suggests, if
indeed it does not inculcate, the dogma that right-doing will always meet
with prosperity and wrong-doing with pain and disaster--a dogma which
provoked the thoughtful to scepticism, as we shall see with Jeremiah
himself.

Again, the fact that the Book, while superbly insistent upon justice,
holiness and humanity, lays equal emphasis on a definite ritual, with One
Altar and an exclusive system of sacrifices, tempted the popular mind to a
superstitious confidence in these institutions. And while it was of
practical advantage to have the principles of the prophets reduced to a
written system, which could be enforced as public law and taught to the
young--two ends on which the authors of Deuteronomy are earnestly
bent--there was danger of the people coming thereby to trust rather in the
letter than in the spirit of the new revelation. Both these dangers were
soon realised. As Dr. A. B. Davidson has said, "Pharisaeism and Deuteronomy
came into the world on the same day."

* * * * *

Such was the Book discovered in the Temple in 621-20 and accepted as
Divine by King and Nation. Modern efforts to connect Jeremiah with its
discovery and introduction to the Monarch, and even with its composition,
may be ignored. Had there been a particle of evidence for this, it would
have been seized and magnified by the legalists in Israel, not to speak of
those apocryphal writers who foist so much else on Jeremiah and
Baruch.(268) That they have not even attempted this is proof--if proof were
needed--that Jeremiah, the youthful son of a rural family, and probably
still unknown to the authorities in the Capital, had nothing whatever to
do either with the origins, or with the discovery, of the Book of the Law
or with its presentation to the King by the priests of the Temple.

Yet so great a discovery, so full a volume of truth poured forth in a
style so