His first word is one of shrinking, _I cannot speak, I am too young_.(682) The voice of pain and protest is in most of his Oracles. He curses the day of his birth and cries woe to his mother that she bare him. He makes us feel that he has been charged against his will and he hurtles on his career like one slung at a target who knows that in fulfilling his commission he shall be broken—as indeed he was. Lord, Thou beguiled’st me, and beguiled I let myself be, Thou wast too strong for me, Thou hast prevailed.(683) Power was pain to him; he carried God’s Word as _a burning fire in his heart_.(684) If the strength and the joy in which others rise on their gifts ever came to him they quickly fled. Isaiah, the only other prophet comparable, accepts his mission and springs to it with freedom. But Jeremiah, always coerced, shrinks, protests, craves leave to retire. So that while Isaiah’s answer to the call of God is _Here am I, send me_, Jeremiah’s might have been “I would be anywhere else than here, let me go.” He spent much of himself in complaint and in debate both with God and with his fellow-men: Mother! Ah me! As whom hast thou borne me? A man of quarrel and of strife To the whole of the land— All of them curse me.(685) Nor did he live to see any solid results from his work. His call was To root up, pull down and destroy, To build and to plant.(686) If this represents the Prophet’s earliest impression of his charge, the proportion between the destructive and constructive parts of it is ominous; if it sums up his experience it is less than the truth. Though he sowed the most fruitful seeds in the fields of Israel’s religion, none sprang in his lifetime. For his own generation he built nothing. Sympathetic with the aims and the start of the greatest reform in Israel’s history, he grew sceptical of its progress and had to denounce the dogmas into which the spirit of it hardened. A king sought his counsel and refused to follow it; the professional prophets challenged him to speak in the Name of the Lord and then denied His Word; the priests were ever against him, and the overseer of the Temple put him in the stocks. Though the people came to his side at one crisis, they rejected him at others and fell back on their formalist teachers, and the prophets of a careless optimism. Though he loved his people with passion, and pled with them all his life, he failed to convince or move them to repentance—and more than once was forbidden even to pray for them. He was charged not to marry nor found a family nor share in either the griefs or the joys of society. His brethren and his father’s house betrayed him, and he was stoned out of Anathoth by his fellow-villagers. Though he could count on a friend or two at court, he had to flee into hiding. King Ṣedekiah, who felt a slavish reverence for his word, was unable to save him from imprisonment in a miry