XLV. 1. The Word, which Jeremiah the prophet spake to Baruch, the son of Neriah, while he was writing these words in a book at the mouth of Jeremiah,(459) in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, son of Josiah, king of Judah.(460) 2. Thus saith the Lord(461) concerning thee, O Baruch, [3] for thou didst say:— Woe is me! Woe is me!(462) How hath the Lord on my pain heaped sorrow! I am worn with my groaning, Rest I find none! [Thus shalt thou say to him(463)] thus sayeth the Lord: 4 Lo, what I built I have to destroy, And what I planted I have to root up.(464) Thou, dost thou seek thee great things? 5 Seek thou them not, For behold, on all flesh I bring evil— Rede of the Lord— But I give thee thy life as a prey, Wheresoever thou goest. The younger man, with youth’s high hopes for his people and ambitions for himself in their service—ambitions which he could honestly cherish by right both of his station in life(465) and the firmness of his character—felt his spirit spent beneath the long-drawn weight of all the Oracles of Doom, which it was his fate to inscribe as final. Now to Baruch in such a mood the older man, the Prophet, might have appealed from his own example, for none in that day was more stripped than Jeremiah himself, of family, friends, affections, or hopes of positive results from his ministry; nor was there any whose life had been more often snatched from the jaws of death. But instead of quoting his own case Jeremiah brought to his despairing servant and friend a still higher example. The Lord Himself had been forced to relinquish His designs and to destroy what He had built and to uproot what He had planted. In face of such Divine surrender, both of purpose and achievement, what was the resignation by a mere man, or even by a whole nation, of their hopes or ambitions? Let Baruch be content to expect nothing beyond bare life: _thy life shall I give thee for a prey_. This stern phrase is found four times in the Oracles of Jeremiah,(466) and nowhere else. It is not more due to the Prophet than to the conditions of his generation. Jeremiah only put into words what must have been felt by all the men of his time—those terrible years in which, through the Oracles quoted in this lecture, he has shown us War, Drought, Famine and Pestilence fatally passing over his land; when _Death came up by the windows_, children were cut off from their playgrounds and youths from the squares where they gathered, and the corpses of men were scattered like dung on the fields. It was indeed a time when each survivor must have felt that his life had been _given_ him _for a prey_. To the hearts of us who have lived through the Great War, with its heavy toll on the lives both of the young and of the old, this phrase of Jeremiah brings the Prophet and his contemporaries very near.