1

to beget new crime and along with it the depraved audacious will that settles, like an irresistible spirit of ill, on the house." But to the Athenians Paul says, "The times of ignorance, therefore, God overlooked"; and those times are alluded to as a period when men were doing their best to find and to worship "God Unknown." We must not, of course, demand that the entire theology of Paul should be compressed into this single address; but yet there is a notable omission of an element that was unfamiliar and probably repugnant to his audience, and an equally notable insistence on an element that was familiar to them.

NOTE.-In v. 18 an explanatory clause is added in almost all MSS. at the conclusion: "because he was giving the good news of Jesus' and the Resurrection."" A similar explanatory clause is found in xviii. 3. Both are omitted in the Bezan Text and in one old Latin Version (Gig.). In xiv. 12 a similar explanatory clause (introduced however by eneidŋ, not by yáp) is omitted in an old Latin version (Fl.), but given in the Bezan Text. Probably all three are very early explanatory glosses, which crept into the text in a similar fashion to many Bezan additions. The only one which adds anything to the meaning is the second, xviii. 3; but it seems not to have formed part of the original text, for the words dià tò óμótexvov eiva in the early part of the verse would hardly have been used by a writer who was going to say at the end of the sentence ἦσαν γὰρ σκηνοποιοὶ τῇ τέχνῃ, and the double statement, with the second partly agreeing with and partly adding to the first, is not in the brief, concise style of Luke.

W. M. RAMSAY.

1 Agamemnon, 730 f., a passage where the text is very uncertain and is terribly maltreated by many editors. Paley turns it into an elaborate genealogical tree, while Wecklein conjectures away the depravation of the will, which is the key to the philosophic position of Eschylus.

278

JEREMIAH: THE MAN AND HIS MESSAGE.

VI. GOD.

As man's God is, so is man himself - there is no more accurate standard of measurement than this. It applies to nations the station and degree reached by any people in the scale of humanity may be determined by discovering what kind of deity they worship. And it applies to individuals the statement about God in a man's creed may not, indeed, be a very accurate index of his character, but, if the conception of God which he carries about in his secret mind can be discovered, everything else about him. can easily be deduced from it.

If this be true of men in general, it is specially true of prophets. No measurement of the stature of a prophet's mind, or of the power of his message, is so decisive as that supplied by his conception of God. A man was a prophet just because he discerned God in the universe around him more clearly than other people. That man is a prophet who, if religion did not exist, would be able to invent it. The prophet was taken possession of by God and became in his whole life the servant of this inspiration. Yet there were great differences in the impressions made by the inspiring Divinity on different prophets; and the purpose of this paper is to trace out the image of God which was reflected on the mirror of Jeremiah's mind.

Jeremiah's God is the God of Nature.

"He hath made the earth by His power, He hath established the world by His wisdom, and hath stretched out the heavens by His discretion. When He uttereth His voice, there is a multitude of waters in the heavens, and He causeth the vapours to ascend from the ends of the earth. He maketh lightnings with rain, and bringeth forth

the wind out of His treasures." In this quotation emphasis is laid on the gift of rain; and, if any one of the divine operations in nature specially affected the imagination of Jeremiah, it seems to have been the process by which rain is gathered in the atmosphere and then distilled in showers to water the earth. Of course in the Orient, where rain is so precious, this was natural; and we must remember the delicate and dazzling beauty imparted by a shower to the fields and woods of an Eastern landscape.

Although, however, there are here and there in Jeremiah remarkable sentences inspired by the perception of God's presence in the beauty of the world, it cannot be said that in this respect he even approaches some of the other prophets and psalmists. His temper was naturally too sombre, and his spirit was too heavy-laden with the burden and the mystery of all this unintelligible world, to permit the impressions of external nature to play freely on his mind. He cannot drag himself sufficiently away from the scenes and the problems of practical life to enjoy thoroughly the peace and the exaltation which other men of God in Old Testament times enjoyed as they looked upon the face of the earth or the face of the sky. Not infrequently his allusions to the presence of God in nature are charged with a polemical purpose. Thus he has a sublime outburst in which he speaks of God placing "the sand for the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass; and though the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it"; but this picture is painted merely to emphasize the contrast between the sea, which, in spite of its stormy nature, obeys the control of the Heaven-appointed boundary, and the revolting and rebellious heart of his fellow-countrymen, whose passions acknowledged no control. His most striking passages on God in nature occur

1 Ch. x. 12.

in his polemic against idolatry. He ridicules the idols, because they can do nothing: they cannot even move, but require to be carried; they are upright as the palm-tree, but cannot speak; they are put together with hammer and nails. "Be not afraid of them; for they cannot do evil, neither also is it in them to do good." the true God; He is the living God and an everlasting "But the Lord is King; at His wrath the earth shall tremble, and the nations shall not be able to abide His indignation."

Jeremiah's God is the God of Israel.

If Jeremiah has not the eye for the glories of nature possessed by some of the other writers of Scripture, he is surpassed by none in setting forth God's love to His chosen people. Jeremiah's was a hidden and brooding nature; he was full of suppressed fire and passion; he was without wife or children, and the whole force of his affections was given to his country. Sometimes his love took the form of jealousy and indignation, but it was love all the same; and it enabled him to understand the love of God and to be the organ through which the divine heart found expression. No prophet,

unless it be Hosea-also a nature of the brooding and passionate type - equals him in the lyrical tenderness of outbursts like this: "Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love; therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn thee"; and he is never weary of repeating the story of the ancient time of what he calls the espousals of Jehovah and Israel, when Jehovah "brought forth His people out of the land of Egypt with signs and with wonders, and with a strong hand, and with a stretched-out arm, and with great terror, and gave them the land which He had sworn to their fathers to give them, a land flowing with milk and honey." No prophet is so conscious of the splendid chance which Israel thus obtained, because to be

thus brought nigh to God was to be close to "the fountain of living waters"; and, had the nation realised its privilege, it would have been like "a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth forth her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green, and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit."1

The notion that God had made a special choice of Israel and felt for that nation a peculiar love may appear to us inconsistent with what we now know of God's love for the world. Some may even consider it on a level with what all nations have believed about their deities at a certain stage. But in Jeremiah there is a noble universality. Jehovah is no fetish, confined to a limited territory; Jeremiah calls Him "the King of nations," and "the God of all flesh." He himself was conscious of being ordained by Jehovah a prophet to the nations; and he actually sent divine messages to the kings of nations outside his native land. It is true that these were messages of judgment; but he expresses the most poignant sympathy with the woe about to befall some of Israel's bitterest enemies; he teaches that the providence of God presides over the movements of even the most distant peoples; and here and there he drops a hint, sometimes in very unlikely places, of the purpose of God to bring even His most stubborn enemies within the empire of His grace."

Jeremiah's God is the God of Morality.

The notion that Israel was specially beloved of Heaven was capable of another perversion: the divine choice might be conceived as a piece of favouritism, and it might be thought that the object of it was to ensure the safety and happiness of Israel at all hazards and under 1 Comp. also xii. 7 ff. 2 xlviii. 47; xlix. 39.