problems of
Providence, which such things naturally raise. Passionate for peace, he
was called to proclaim the inevitableness of war, in opposition to the
popular prophets of a false peace; but later he had to counsel his people
to submit to their foes and to accept their captivity, thus facing the
hardest conflict a man can who loves his own--between patriotism and common
sense, between his people's gallant efforts for freedom and the stern
facts of the world, between national traditions and pieties on the one
side and on the other what he believed to be the Will of God. These are
issues which the successive generations of our race are called almost
ceaselessly to face; and the teaching and example of the great Prophet,
who dealt with them through such strenuous debates both with his
fellow-men and with his God, and who brought out of these debates
spiritual results of such significance for the individual and for the
nation, cannot be without value for ourselves.

Lecture I.

THE MAN AND THE BOOK.

In this and the following lectures I attempt an account and estimate of
the Prophet Jeremiah, of his life and teaching, and of the Book which
contains them--but especially of the man himself, his personality and his
tempers (there were more than one), his religious experience and its
achievements, with the various high styles of their expression; as well as
his influence on the subsequent religion of his people.

It has often been asserted that in Jeremiah's ministry more than in any
other of the Old Covenant the personality of the Prophet was under God the
dominant factor, and one has even said that "his predecessors were the
originators of great truths, which he transmuted into spiritual life."(1)
To avoid exaggeration here, we must keep in mind how large a part
personality played in their teaching also, and from how deep in their
lives their messages sprang. Even Amos was no mere _voice crying in the
wilderness_. The discipline of the desert, the clear eye for ordinary
facts and the sharp ear for sudden alarms which it breeds, along with the
desert shepherd's horror of the extravagance and cruelties of
civilisation--all these reveal to us the Man behind the Book, who had lived
his truth before he uttered it. Hosea again, tells the story of his
outraged love as _the beginning of the Word of the Lord by him_. And it
was the strength of Isaiah's character, which, unaided by oth