for his plain speaking by the bastinado, and
then hurried bleeding to the stocks, into which his head and feet and
hands were rudely thrust, to spend the night amid the jeers of the crowd
and the cold dews of the season. In the morning he was set free, his
enemies thinking that he now would hold his tongue; but Jeremiah, so far
from keeping silence, renewed his threats of divine vengeance. "For thus
saith Jehovah, I will give all Judah into the hands of the king of
Babylon, and he shall carry them captive to Babylon, and slay them with
the sword." And then turning to Pashur, before the astonished
attendants, he exclaimed: "And thou, Pashur, and all that dwell in thy
house, will be dragged off into captivity; and thou wilt come to
Babylon, and thou wilt die and be buried there,--thou and all thy
partisans to whom thou hast prophesied lies."

We observe in these angry words of Jeremiah great directness and great
minuteness, so that his meaning could not be mistaken; also that the
instrument of punishment on the degenerate and godless city was to be
the king of Babylon, a new power from whom Judah as yet had received no
harm. The old enemies of the Hebrews were the Assyrians and Egyptians,
not the Babylonians and Medes.

Whatever may have been the malignant animosity of Pashur, he was
evidently afraid to molest the awful prophet and preacher any further,
for Jeremiah was no insignificant person at Jerusalem. He was not only
recognized as a prophet of Jehovah, but he had been the friend and
counsellor of King Josiah, and was the leading statesman of the day in
the ranks of the opposition. But distinguished as he was, his voice was
disregarded, and he was probably looked upon as an old croaker, whose
gloomy views had no reason to sustain them. Was not Jerusalem strong in
her defences, and impregnable in the eyes of the people; and was she not
regarded as under the special protection of the Deity? Suppose some
austere priest--say such a man as the Abbe Lacordaire--had risen from
the pulpit of Notre Dame or the Madeleine, a year before the battle of
Sedan, and announced to the fashionable congregation assembled to hear
his eloquence, and among them the ministers of Louis Napoleon, that in a
short time Paris would be surrounded by conquering armies, and would
endure all the horrors of a siege, and that the famine would be so great
that the city would surrender and be at the entire mercy of the
conquerors,--would he have been b