Having this experience of God’s ways with man it was not possible for Jeremiah to succumb to those influences of a strong unqualified faith in predestination which have often overwhelmed the personalities of its devotees. Someone has talked of “the wine of predestination,” and history both in the East and in the West furnishes cases of men so drugged by it as to lose their powers of will, reason and heart, and become either apathetic unquestioning slaves of fate, or violent and equally unquestioning dogmatists and tyrants—the soul-less instruments of a pitiless force. God overpowers them: He is all and they are nothing. It was far otherwise with Jeremiah, who realised and preserved his individuality not only as against the rest of his people but as against God Himself. His earlier career appears from the glimpses we get of it to have been, if not a constant, yet a frequent struggle with the Deity. He argues against the Divine calls to him. And even when he yields he expresses his submission in terms which almost proudly define his own will as over against that of God: Lord thou beguiledst me, and I let myself be beguiled, Thou wast stronger than I and hast conquered. The man would not be mastered, but if mastered is not crushed. He questions each moment of his own sufferings, each moment of his people’s oncoming doom. He debates with God on matters of justice. He wrestles things out with God and emerges from each wrestle not halt and limping like Jacob of old, but firm and calm, more clear in his mind and more sure of himself—as we see him at last when the full will of God breaks upon his soul with the Battle of Carchemish and he calmly surrenders to his own and his people’s fate. That is how this prophet, by nature so fluid, and so shrinking stands out henceforth _a fenced city and a wall of bronze over against the whole people of the land_: the one unbreakable figure in the breaking-up of the state and the nation. We perceive the method in God’s discipline of such a soul. He sees his servant’s weakness and grants him the needful athletic for it, by wrestling with him Himself. We may here take in full the remarkable passage, part of which we have already studied.(736) Too Righteous art Thou, O Lord, XII. 1 That with Thee I should argue. Yet cases there are I must speak with Thee of:— The way of the wicked—why doth it prosper, And the treacherous all be at ease? Thou did’st plant them, yea they take root, 2 They get on, yea they make fruit; Near in their mouths art Thou, But far from their reins. But me, O Lord, Thou hast known,(737) 3 And tested my heart with Thee; Drag them out like sheep for the shambles, To the day of slaughter devote them.