Mourn him they shall not, “Woe brother!” “Woe sister!” Nor beweep him, “Woe Lord!” Or “Woe Highness!” With the burial of an ass shall they bury him, 19 Dragged and flung out— Out from the gates of Jerusalem. Such a prophet to such a king must have been intolerable, and through the following years Jeremiah was pursued by the royal hatred. There were other and more poisonous enemies. We have found him, from the first, steadily seeing through, and stoutly denouncing the great religious orders—the priests, natural believers in the Temple, with a belief, since Deuteronomy came into their hands, more dogmatic and arrogant than ever; and the professional prophets with their shallow optimism that all was well for Judah, and that her God could never bring upon her the doom which Jeremiah threatened in His Name. _Not He!_ was their answer to him. These two classes were in conspiracy, deluding themselves and the people; in their trust upon the letter of the Law, they had no sense, as he told them, of _The Living God_.(313) Roused by his scorn they watched for an occasion to convict and destroy him.(314) This he bravely gave by making, in obedience to God’s call, public prediction of the ruin of the Temple. It is uncertain whether Jeremiah did so only once, as many think who read in Chs. VII and XXVI reports of the same address, or whether, as I am inclined to believe, the former chapter reports an address delivered under Josiah, and the latter the repetition of its substance in the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim.(315) However this be, Ch. XXVI alone relates the consequences of his outspoken courage. It represents the priests and the prophets as quoting his sentence upon the Temple in absolute terms; though both reports, in the form in which they have reached us, render his own delivery of it as conditional upon the nation’s refusal to repent and to better their ways.(316) This, of course, was ever their way; they were ready distorters.