ions of his long
ministry of forty years, employed but one metre and that only in its
strictest form allowing of no irregularities. This, I say, is not
credible.(49)

The other question, whether in addition Jeremiah ever used prose in
addressing his people, may be still more confidently answered. Duhm
maintains that with the exception of the letter to the Jewish exiles in
Babylonia,(50) the Prophet never spoke or wrote to his people in prose,
and that the Book contains no Oracles from him, beyond some sixty short
poems in a uniform measure. These Duhm alleges--and this is all that he
finds in them--reveal Jeremiah as a man of modest, tender, shrinking
temper, "no ruler of spirits, a delicate observer, a sincere exhorter and
counsellor, a hero only in suffering and not in attack."(51) Every passage
of the Book, which presents him in any character beyond this--as an
advocate for the Law or as a didactic prophet--is the dream of a later age,
definitely separable from his own Oracles not more by its inconsistence
with the temper displayed in these than by its prose form; for in prose,
according to Duhm, Jeremiah never prophesied. On the evidence we have
reviewed this also is not credible. That Jeremiah never passed from verse
to prose when addressing his people is a theory at variance with the
practice of other poets of his race; and the more unlikely in his case,
who was not only a poet but a prophet, charged with truths heavier than
could always be carried to the heart of his nation upon a single form of
folk-song. Not one of the older prophets, upon whom at first he leant, but
used both prose and verse; and besides there had burst upon his young ear
a new style of prophetic prose, rhythmical and catching beyond any
hitherto publicly heard in Israel. At least some portions of our Book of
Deuteronomy were discovered in the Temple a few years after his call, and
by order of King Josiah were being recited throughout Judah. Is it
probable that he, whose teaching proves him to have been in sympathy with
the temper and the practical purpose of that Book, should never have
yielded to the use of its distinctive and haunting style?

It is true that, while the lyrics which are undoubtedly the prophet's own
are terse, concrete, poignant and graceful, the style of many--not of
all--of the prose discourses attributed to him is copious, diffuse, and
sometimes cold. But then it is verse which is most accurately gripped by
the memory an