t was a singular mark of Israel, that the hope of a
great prophet never died from her heart. Where earnest souls were left
they prayed for his coming and looked for the Word of the Lord by him more
than they who wait for the morning. The same conditions prevailed out of
which a century before had come an Amos, a Hosea, a Micah and an Isaiah.
Israel needed judgment and the North again stirred with its possibilities.
Who would rise and spell into a clear Word of God the thunder which to all
ears was rumbling there?

The call came to Jeremiah and, as he tells the story, came sudden and
abrupt yet charged with the full range and weight of its ultimate meaning,
so far as he himself was concerned:--

Before in the body I built thee, I knew thee,
Before thou wast forth of the womb, I had hallowed thee,
And a prophet to the nations had set thee.(117)

A thought of God, ere time had anything to do with him, or the things of
time, even father or mother, could make or could mar him; God's alone, and
sent to the world; out of the eternities with the Divine will for these
days of confusion and panic and for the peoples, small and great, that
were struggling through them. It was a stupendous consciousness--this that
then broke in the village of Anathoth and in the breast of the young son
of one its priests; the spring of it deeper and the range of it wider than
even that similar assurance which centuries later filled another priest's
home in the same hill country:--

And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest,
For thou shalt go before the face of the Lord,
To prepare His ways.(118)

The questions of foreknowledge and predestination, with which Jeremiah
engaged himself not a little, I leave for a future lecture.(119) Here we
may consider the range of his mission.

This was very wide--not for Judah only, but _a prophet to the nations had I
set thee_. The objection has been taken, that it is too wide to be
original, and the alternative inferences drawn: either that it is the
impression of his earliest consciousness as a prophet but formed by
Jeremiah only after years of experience revealed all that had been
involved in his call; or that it is not Jeremiah's own but the notion
formed of him by a later exaggerating generation. It is true that Jeremiah
did not dictate the first words of the Lord to him till some twenty-three
years after he heard them, when it was possible and natur