to root up.(464)
Thou, dost thou seek thee great things? 5
Seek thou them not,
For behold, on all flesh I bring evil--
Rede of the Lord--
But I give thee thy life as a prey,
Wheresoever thou goest.

The younger man, with youth's high hopes for his people and ambitions for
himself in their service--ambitions which he could honestly cherish by
right both of his station in life(465) and the firmness of his
character--felt his spirit spent beneath the long-drawn weight of all the
Oracles of Doom, which it was his fate to inscribe as final. Now to Baruch
in such a mood the older man, the Prophet, might have appealed from his
own example, for none in that day was more stripped than Jeremiah himself,
of family, friends, affections, or hopes of positive results from his
ministry; nor was there any whose life had been more often snatched from
the jaws of death. But instead of quoting his own case Jeremiah brought to
his despairing servant and friend a still higher example. The Lord Himself
had been forced to relinquish His designs and to destroy what He had built
and to uproot what He had planted. In face of such Divine surrender, both
of purpose and achievement, what was the resignation by a mere man, or
even by a whole nation, of their hopes or ambitions? Let Baruch be content
to expect nothing beyond bare life: _thy life shall I give thee for a
prey_. This stern phrase is found four times in the Oracles of
Jeremiah,(466) and nowhere else. It is not more due to the Prophet than to
the conditions of his generation. Jeremiah only put into words what must
have been felt by all the men of his time--those terrible years in which,
through the Oracles quoted in this lecture, he has shown us War, Drought,
Famine and Pestilence fatally passing over his land; when _Death came up
by the windows_, children were cut off from their playgrounds and youths
from the squares where they gathered, and the corpses of men were
scattered like dung on the fields. It was indeed a time when each survivor
must have felt that his life had been _given_ him _for a prey_.

To the hearts of us who have lived through the Great War, with its heavy
toll on the lives both of the young and of the old, this phrase of
Jeremiah brings the Prophet and his contemporaries very near.

Yet more awful than the physical calamities which the prophet unveils
throughout these terrible years are his bitter portraits of the character
of his