original and compelling, cannot have left unmoved a young prophet
of the conscience and heart of Jeremiah.(269) That he was in sympathy with
the temper and the general truths of Deuteronomy we need not doubt. As for
its ethics, its authors were of the same school as himself and among their
teachers they had the same favourite, Hosea. In his earliest Oracles
Jeremiah had expressed the same view as theirs of God's constant and clear
guidance of Israel and of the nation's obstinacy in relapsing from this.
His heart, too, must have hailed the Book's august enforcement of that
abolition of the high places and their pagan ritual, which he had ventured
to urge from his obscure position in Anathoth. Nor did he ever throughout
his ministry protest against the substitute which the Book prescribed for
those--the concentration of the national worship upon a single sanctuary.
On the contrary in a later Oracle he looks for the day when that shall be
observed by all Israel and the watchmen on Mount Ephraim shall cry,

Rise, let us up to Sion,
To the Lord our God!(270)

On the other hand, the emphasis which Deuteronomy equally lays upon ethics
and upon ritual, and its absolute doctrines of morality and Providence
were bound to provoke questions in a mind so restlessly questioning as
his. Then there was the movement of reform which followed upon the appeal
of the Book to the whole nation. Jeremiah himself had called for a
national repentance and here, in the people's acceptance of the Covenant
and consent to the reforms it demanded, were the signs of such a
repentance. No opposition appears to have been offered to those reforms.
The King who led them was sincere; a better monarch Judah never knew, and
his reign was signalised by Jeremiah at its close as a reign of justice
when _all was well_. Yet can we doubt that the Prophet, who had already
preached so rigorous a repentance and had heard himself appointed by God
as the tester of His people, would use that detached position jealously to
watch the progress of the reforms which the nation had so hurriedly
acclaimed and to test their moral value?

In modern opinion of Jeremiah's attitude to the discovered Law-Book there
are two extremes. One is of those who regard him as a legalist and
throughout his career the strenuous advocate of the Book and the system it
enforced. The other is of those who maintain that he had no sympathy with
legal systems or official reforms, and th