and
providence. To his age worship was the business of the nation: public
reverence for symbols and institutions, and rites in which the
individual's share was largely performed for him by official
representatives. The prophets, and Jeremiah himself at first, dealt with
the people as a moral unity from the earliest times to their own. The Lord
had loved and sought, redeemed and tended them as a nation. As a nation
they fell away from Him and now they were wholly false to Him. When
Jeremiah first urges them to return, it is of a public and general
repentance that he speaks, as Deuteronomy had done; and when his urgency
fails it is their political disappearance which he pronounces for doom.

But when the rotten surface of the national life thus broke under the
Prophet he fell upon the deeper levels of the individual heart, and not
only found the native sinfulness of this to be the explanation of the
public and social corruption but discovered also soil for the seed-bed of
new truths and new hopes. Among these there is none more potent than that
of the immediate relation of the individual to God. Jeremiah never lost
hope of the ultimate restoration of Israel. Nevertheless the individual
aspects of religion increase in his prophesying, and though it is
impossible to trace their growth with any accuracy because of the want of
dates to many of his Oracles, we may be certain that as he watched under
Josiah the failure of the national movements for reform, inspired by
Deuteronomy, and under Jehoiakim and Sedekiah the gradual breaking up of
the nation, and still more as his own personal relations with the Deity
grew closer, Jeremiah thought and spoke less of the nation and more of the
individual as the object of the Divine call and purposes.

One has travelled by night through a wooded country, by night and on into
the dawn. How solid and indivisible the dark masses appear and how
difficult to realise as composed of innumerable single growths, each with
its own roots, each by itself soaring towards heaven. But as the dawn
comes up one begins to see all this. The mass breaks; first the larger,
more lonely trees stand out and soon every one of the common crowd is
apparent in its separate strength and beauty.

It seems to me as I travel through the Book of Jeremiah that here also is
a breaking of dawn--but they are men whom it reveals. There is a stir of
this even in the earliest Oracles; for the form of address to the nation
wh