peculiar experiences. The birth of a son is planned
for, and told of for the purpose of making more emphatic the message to
the dull ears and slow heart of the nation.[115] His two sons bore names
of strange meaning, as a means of teaching truths that were peculiarly
distasteful to the people. Isaiah takes one of these strangely named sons
as he goes to deliver a message to the king. And the son standing by his
father's side is a reminder in his name of a disagreeable truth.[116] A
little later the man is actually required to go about barefooted, and
without clothing sufficient for conventional respectability, and to
continue this for three years.[117] When we remember that he was not an
erratic extremist, but a sober-minded, fine-grained gentleman of
refinement and of a good family, it helps us to understand a little how
hard-hearted and stubborn were a people that could be appealed to only in
such a way.

And it tells us, too, how utterly surrendered was the man who was willing
thus to give up his private personal life. How much easier to have been
simply an earnest, eloquent preacher, with his inner personal life lived
free from public gaze, a thing sacred to himself. Following meant the
giving up of the sacred private life to a strangely marked degree, for God
to use.

Even more marked are the experiences that _Jeremiah_ was asked and
consented to go through. It would seem as though the repeated conspiracies
against his life, the repeated imprisonments in vile dungeons dangerous to
health and life, and the shame of being put in the public stocks before
the rabble, would have been much for God to ask, and for a man to give.
But there is something that goes much farther and deeper into the very
marrow of his life than these. He is bidden not to marry, not to have a
family life of his own.[118] And he obeyed. This was to be so only and
solely as a message to the people. A message couched in such startling
language they might listen to. Again we must remember the Oriental setting
to appreciate the significance of this. In the East the unit of society is
not the individual but the _family_. A man's marriage is planned for by
the family, as a means of building up the family. To be childless and
especially son-less was felt to be peculiarly unfortunate, almost
bordering on disgrace.

This meant for Jeremiah not only the loss of personal joys and delights,
but that his line would be broken off from his father's family. He