Again there were the startled recoil of his nature from the terrible office of a prophet in such times, and those born gifts of questioning and searching which fitted him for his allotted duty as Tester of his people,(749) but which he also turned upon the Providence and Judgments of the Lord Himself.(750) His religious experience, as we have seen, was largely a struggle with the Divine Will, and it left him not adoring but amazed and perplexed. Such wrestling man’s spirit has to encounter like Jacob of old in the dark, and if like the Patriarch it craves the Name, which is the Nature, of That with which it struggles, all the answer it may get is another question, _Wherefore askest thou after My Name?_ Morning may break, as it broke on Jacob by Jabbok with the assurance of blessing or as on Jeremiah with a firmer impression of the Will not his own; but no strength is left to glory in the Nature behind the Will. There is a horrified breathlessness about his lines— Thou wast stronger than I and hast conquered, The Lord is with me as a Mighty and Terrible.(751) From his struggles he indeed issues more sure of God and finally more trustful in Him, as is testified by his fair song on the beauty and fruitfulness of faith, beginning Blessed the wight that trusts in the Lord, And the Lord is his trust.(752) But even here is none of the awe and high wonder which fall upon Israel through other prophets. Lyrist as he is and subjective, Jeremiah dwells not so much upon the attributes of God on which faith rests as upon the effects of faith in man. Again by the desperate character of the times he was starved of hope, the hope by which the Apostle says _we are saved_, which not only braces the will but clears the inner eyes of men and liberates the imagination. As the years went on he was ever more closely bound to the prediction of his people’s ruin, and, when this came, to the sober counsel to accept their fate and settle down to a long exile in patience for the Lord’s time of deliverance. As we have seen, his intervals of release from so grim a ministry were brief, and his Oracles of a bright future but few. Even in these he does not rise, like the Evangelist of the Exile whom he inspired, to exultation in the Almighty Power of God or to visions of vast spaces of the Divine Providence, or of Israel’s service wide as the world. His happy peasant-heart is content to foresee his restored people tending their vineyards again, enjoying their village dances and festivals, and sharing with their long divided tribes the common national worship upon Ṣion.(753)