This dissipation of the national mind upon many deities was reflected in the nation’s politics. With no faith in One Supreme God the statesmen of Judah, just as in Isaiah’s earlier days, fluttered between the great powers which were bidding for the empire of the world. Egypt under Psamtik’s vigorous direction pressed north, flying high promises for the restless vassals of Assyria. But Assyria, though weakened, had not become negligible. Between the two the anchorless policy of Judah helplessly drifted. To use Jeremiah’s figure, suitable alike to her politics and her religion, she was a faithless wife, off from her husband to one paramour after another. All this was chaos worse than the desert that crumbled before Anathoth, a tragedy more bitter than the past which moaned through the land behind. What had God to say? It was a singular mark of Israel, that the hope of a great prophet never died from her heart. Where earnest souls were left they prayed for his coming and looked for the Word of the Lord by him more than they who wait for the morning. The same conditions prevailed out of which a century before had come an Amos, a Hosea, a Micah and an Isaiah. Israel needed judgment and the North again stirred with its possibilities. Who would rise and spell into a clear Word of God the thunder which to all ears was rumbling there? The call came to Jeremiah and, as he tells the story, came sudden and abrupt yet charged with the full range and weight of its ultimate meaning, so far as he himself was concerned:— Before in the body I built thee, I knew thee, Before thou wast forth of the womb, I had hallowed thee, And a prophet to the nations had set thee.(117) A thought of God, ere time had anything to do with him, or the things of time, even father or mother, could make or could mar him; God’s alone, and sent to the world; out of the eternities with the Divine will for these days of confusion and panic and for the peoples, small and great, that were struggling through them. It was a stupendous consciousness—this that then broke in the village of Anathoth and in the breast of the young son of one its priests; the spring of it deeper and the range of it wider than even that similar assurance which centuries later filled another priest’s home in the same hill country:— And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest, For thou shalt go before the face of the Lord, To prepare His ways.(118) The questions of foreknowledge and predestination, with which Jeremiah engaged himself not a little, I leave for a future lecture.(119) Here we may consider the range of his mission.