er human
factors, carried Judah, with the faith she enshrined, through the first
great crisis of her history. Yet recognise, as we justly may, the
personalities of these prophets in the nerve, the colour, the accent, and
even the substance of their messages, we must feel the still greater
significance of Jeremiah's temperament and other personal qualities both
for his own teaching and for the teaching of those who came after him.
Thanks to his loyal scribe, Baruch, we know more of the circumstances of
his career, and thanks to his own frankness, we know more of his
psychology than we do in the case of any of his predecessors. He has, too,
poured out his soul to us by the most personal of all channels; the charm,
passion and poignancy of his verse lifting him high among the poets of
Israel.

So far as our materials enable us to judge no other prophet was more
introspective or concerned about himself; and though it might be said that
he carried this concern to a fault, yet fault or none, the fact is that no
prophet started so deeply from himself as Jeremiah did. His circumstances
flung him in upon his feelings and convictions; he was constantly
searching, doubting, confessing, and pleading for, himself. He asserted
more strenuously than any except Job his individuality as against God, and
he stood in more lonely opposition to his people.

Jeremiah was called to prophesy about the time that the religion of Israel
was re-codified in Deuteronomy--the finest system of national religion
which the world has seen, but only and exclusively national--and he was
still comparatively young when that system collapsed for the time and the
religion itself seemed about to perish with it. He lived to see the Law
fail, the Nation dispersed, and the National Altar shattered; but he
gathered their fire into his bosom and carried it not only unquenched but
with a purer flame towards its everlasting future. We may say without
exaggeration that what was henceforth finest in the religion of Israel
had, however ancient its sources, been recast in the furnace of his
spirit. With him the human unit in religion which had hitherto been mainly
the nation was on the way to become the individual. Personal piety in
later Israel largely grew out of his spiritual struggles.(2)

His forerunners, it is true, had insisted that religion was an affair not
of national institutions nor of outward observance, but of the people's
heart--by which heart they and th