al for him to
expand them in terms of his intervening experience. And we must remember
the summary bent of the Hebrew mind--how natural it was to that mind to
describe processes as if they were acts of a day, done by a fiat as in the
story of the Creation; or to state a system of law and custom, which took
centuries to develop, as though it were the edict of a single lawgiver and
all spoken at once, when the development entered on a new and higher
stage, as we see in the case of Deuteronomy and its attribution to Moses.

Yet the forebodings at least of a task so vast as that of _prophet to the
nations_ were anything but impossible to the moment of Jeremiah's call;
for the time surged, as we have seen, with the movements of the nations
and their omens for his own people. Indeed it would have been strange if
the soul of any prophet, conscious of a charge from the Almighty, had not
the instinct, that as the meaning of this charge was gradually unfolded to
him, it would reveal, and require from him the utterance of, Divine
purposes throughout a world so full even to the uninspired eye of the
possibilities both of the ruin of old states and of the rise of new ones--a
world so close about his own people, and so fraught with fate for them,
that in speaking of _them_ he could not fail to speak of the _whole of it_
also. If at that time a Jew had at all the conviction that he was called
to be a prophet, it must have been with a sense of the same
responsibilities, to which the older prophets had felt themselves bound:
men who knew themselves to be ministers of the Lord of Hosts, Lord of the
Powers of the Universe, who had dealt not with Israel only but with Moab
and Ammon and Aram, with Tyre and the Philistines and Egypt, and who had
spoken of Assyria herself as His staff and the rod of His judgment.
Jeremiah's three contemporaries, Sephaniah, Nahum and Habakkuk, all deal
with the foreign powers of their day--why should he in such an age not have
been conscious from the first that his call from the Lord of Hosts
involved a mission as wide as theirs? I am sure that if we had lived with
this prophet through his pregnant times, as we have lived through these
last ten years and have been compelled to think constantly not of our own
nation alone--concentrated as we had to be on our duties to her--but of
_all_ the nations of the world as equally involved in the vast spiritual
interests at stake, we should have no difficulty in understand