Thou hast run with the foot and they wore thee— 5 How wilt thou vie with the horse? If in peaceful country thou can’st not trust, How wilt thou do in the rankness of Jordan? For even thy brothers, the house of thy father, 6 Even they have betrayed thee. Even they have called after thee loudly, Trust them not, though they speak thee fair.(738) _The rankness_ or _luxuriance of Jordan_ is the jungle on both sides of the river, in which the lions lie. This then is all the answer that the wearied and perplexed servant gets from his Lord. The troubles of which he complains are but the training for still sorer. The only meaning of the checks and sorrows of life is to brace us for worse. It is the strain that ever brings the strength. Life is explained as a graded and progressively strenuous discipline, the result of it a stronger and more finely tempered soul. But this surely suggests the questions: Is that the whole result? Is the soul thus to be trained, braced and refined, only at last to be broken and vanish? These are natural questions to the Lord’s answer, but Jeremiah does not put them. Unlike Job he makes no start, even with this stimulus, to break through to another life. 3. Sacrifice. But in thus achieving his individuality over against both his nation and his God, Jeremiah accomplished only half of the work he did for Israel and mankind. It is proof of how great a prophet we have in him that he who was the first in Israel to realise the independence of the single self in religion should also become the supreme example under the Old Covenant of the sacrifice of that self for others, that he should break from one type of religious solidarity only to illustrate another and a nobler, that the prophet of individuality should be also the symbol if not the conscious preacher of vicariousness. This further stage in Jeremiah’s experience is of equally dramatic interest, though we cannot always trace the order of his utterances which bear witness to it. There must often have come to him the temptation to break loose from a people who deserved nothing of him, but cruelly entreated him, and who themselves were so manifestly doomed. Once at least he confesses this. O that I had in the wilderness IX. 2 A wayfarers’ lodge! Then would I leave my people, And get away from them; For adulterers all of them be, A bundle of traitors. They stretch their tongues 3 Like a falsing bow, And never for truth Use their power in the land. But from evil to evil go forth And Me they know not!(739)