JEREMIAH'S message made him to be hated of all men. Prophets, priests, and people looked with abhorrence upon the man who could speak thus of his country and its holy city. Yet among them all, there was no more loyal and patriotic heart than that of Jeremiah. But his very love of country made his message harder to utter, and added a peculiar heartache to the bitterness of the unjust taunts with which it was received. When Jerusalem was invested, Isaiah could cheer on his fellow countrymen to resist, but not he. ... He had to preach national submission, only to have his words discredited and to go down with his nation into its grave. No other one of the prophets had such a task, — "to go always downward but never upward, to pass from gloom into thicker darkness, to see each national shame merged in a deeper, to see defeat added to defeat, but never a victory, to see calamity fall on calamity, yet the people never wiser or more penitent."
That Jeremiah kept his unswerving devotion to the will of God, his dauntless courage in rebuking vice, and his supreme faith in God's plans for Israel to the end shows how truly strong and noble his nature must have been. . . .
His thought of Israel was as Israel existed in the original purpose of God. He looked back across the centuries of disloyalty to Mount Sinai and the holy covenant there made between Jehovah and His people. Alas, Israel had not been true, and so that covenant in the fall of the nation was now dissolved. But the purpose of the old covenant was to be more fully met by a new one; for Israel was still Jehovah's people, and He their God. Under this new covenant His law was to be written, not on tables of stone, but on their hearts, and circumcision was to be of the heart. . . .
