Yet more awful than the physical calamities which the prophet unveils throughout these terrible years are his bitter portraits of the character of his people, whom no word of their God nor any of His heavy judgments could move to repentance. He paints a hopeless picture of society in Jerusalem and Judah under Jehoiakim, rotten with dishonesty and vice. Members of the same family are unable to trust each other; all are bent on their own gain by methods unjust and cruel—from top to bottom so hopelessly false as even to be blind to the meaning of the disasters which rapidly befal them and to the final doom that steadily draws near. Yet, for all the wrath he pours upon his generation and the Divine vengeance of which he is sure, how the man still loves and clings to them, and takes their doom as his own! And, greatest of all, how he reads in the heart that was in him the Heart of God Himself—the same astonishment that the people are so callous, the same horror of their ruin, nay the same sense of failure and of suffering under the burden of such a waste—_on Me is the waste!_(467) _What I built I have to destroy!_ Except that he does not share these secrets of the Heart of God, it is of Victor Hugo among moderns that I have been most reminded when working through Jeremiah’s charges against the king, the priests, the prophets and the whole people of Judah—Victor Hugo in his _Châtiments_ of the monarch, the church, the journalists, the courtiers and other creatures of the Third French Empire. There is the same mordant frankness and satiric rage combined with the same desire to share the miseries of the critic’s people in spite of their faults. I have already quoted Hugo’s lines on Napoleon III as parallel to Jeremiah’s on Jehoiakim.(468) Here are two other parallels. To Jeremiah’s description of his people being persuaded that all was well, when well it was not, and refusing to own their dishonour, VIII. 11, 12, take Hugo’s “on est infâme et content” and Et tu chantais, en proie aux éclatants mensonges Du succès. And to Jeremiah’s acceptance of the miseries of his people as his own and refusal to the end to part from them take these lines to France:— Je te demanderai ma part de tes misères, Moi ton fils. France, tu verras bien qu’humble tête éclipsée J’avais foi, Et que je n’eus jamais dans l’âme une pensée Que pour toi. France, être sur ta claie à l’heure où l’on te traine Aux cheveux, O ma mère, et porter mon anneau de ta chaine Je le veux! Lecture VI. TO THE END AND AFTER. 597-? B.C. The few remaining years of the Jewish kingdom ran rapidly down and their story is soon told.