From the year of Carchemish onward he appears not again to have tried or prayed to escape. Through the rest of the reign of Jehoiakim they persecuted him to the edge of death. Prophets and priests called for his execution. He was stoned, beaten and thrust into the stocks. The king scornfully cut up the roll of his prophecies; and the people following their formalist leaders rejected his word. With the first captivity under Jehoiakim all the better classes left Jerusalem, but he elected to remain with the refuse. When in the reign of Ṣedekiah the Chaldeans came down on the city and Jeremiah counselled its surrender he was again beaten and was flung into a pit to starve to death. When he was freed and the besiegers gave him the opportunity, he would not go over to them. Even when the city had fallen and her captors hearing of his counsel offered him security and a position in Babylonia, he chose instead to share the fortunes of the little remnant left in their ruined land. When they broke up it was the worst of them who took possession of his person and disregarding his appeals hurried him down to Egypt. There, on alien soil and among countrymen who had given themselves to an alien religion, the one great personality of his time, who had served the highest interests of his nation for forty years, reluctant but unfaltering, and whose scorned words, every one, had been vindicated by events, is with the dregs of his people swept from our sight. _He had given his back to the smiters and his cheeks to them who plucked out the hair; he had not hidden his face from the shame and the spitting. He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He was taken from prison and from judgment and cut off from the land of the living; and they made his grave with the wicked, though he had done no violence neither was deceit in his mouth._ It is the second greatest sacrifice that Israel has offered for mankind. If Jeremiah thus of his own will suffered _with_ his people, and to the bitter end with the worst of them, was he also conscious of suffering _for_ them? After his death, when the full tragedy of his life came home to his people’s heart, the sense of the few suffering for the many, the righteous for the sinners, began to be articulate in Israel—remarkably enough, let us remember, in the very period when owing to the break-up of the nation the single soul came to its own and belief in the responsibility of every man for his own sins also emerged and prevailed. Of the influence of the example of Jeremiah’s spiritual loneliness, combined with his devotion to his sinful people, in developing these doctrines of individualism and self-sacrifice for others there can be no doubt. The stamp of his sufferings is on every passage in that exilic work “Isaiah” XL-LXVI, which presents the Suffering Servant of the Lord and declares the atoning virtues of His Agonies and Death.