This brought upon him a load of calumny, insult, and persecution, which he keenly felt, but bore with fortitude, never swerving from the path of strict fidelity towards God. The prophecies of Jeremiah do not contain so many animating visions of the distant future as are found in Isaiah. He is more occupied with the sins of his own age, and the heavy judgments of God that impend over his countrymen. His mission is emphatically to unfold the connection between national profligacy and national ruin. This he does with a masterly hand, holding up to the world, in the character and fate, of his countrymen, a mirror for all time, in which wicked nations may see themselves and the ruin which awaits them. The whole compass of profane history does not contain so much clear instruction on this point as is crowded into the few pages of "the weeping prophet." If the book of God's revelation could not have been complete without the ecstatic visions of Isaiah, so neither could it have spared Jeremiah's vivid delineation of a profligate nation plunging itself into remediless ruin by its iniquities. At times, however, we find in Jeremiah also joyous anticipations of the good reserved for God's people in the latter days. He predicted not only the Babylonish captivity, but its termination at the end of seventy years, and the perpetual overthrow of Babylon and the Chaldean power (25:12-14; 29:10-14). See also chapters 30-33, where he describes, after the manner of Isaiah, the glory of the latter days.