It never is a pleasure to be despised. Contempt usually embitters a man or suppresses him. The derisive laugh against a man is more powerful in breaking him than the compactest argument. Many men can remain steadfast to convictions in estrangement or in opposition who give way when they hear that their words and actions are the subject of twitting and ridicule. "Who is this Jeremiah, and what are his words, that we should think of them a second time? I will cut these words into fragments even with my pocket-knife, and then I will burn them in this little brazier, and that shall be the last of them!" So said and did King Jehoiakim. And his princes heard and saw. But whatever the effect produced on others, the effect produced on Jeremiah must have been to the king a great disappointment. Jeremiah heard God's voice saying in his heart, "You must write those same words of truth again." And again he wrote them on a roll. And just here comes out one of the sweetest and most characteristic features of Jeremiah's character. The ordinary man, if he has made up his mind to retort or to ridicule, says to himself, "Now I will pour out my wrath on my adversary." But such was Jeremiah's self-control and peacefulness of temper that perhaps he would have erred on the side of leniency unless God had charged him, not to soften or to suppress one part of the message, but to write _all_ the words that were in the former roll and add thereto other special predictions. To this charge, whatever his obedience might lead to, Jeremiah immediately and completely responded. Then came Jeremiah's fourth experience. His persistence in duty now cost him _imprisonment_. Not an ordinary imprisonment, but such an imprisonment as Oriental monarchs employ when they wish to place those whom they dislike in a living death. The king first put Jeremiah in a dungeon-house where there were cells. This was not very bad. Then, when Jeremiah still was true to his testimony, the king put him in the court of the guard, giving him a daily allowance of one little eastern bread-loaf. This also was not very bad. But later the king, when the princes claimed Jeremiah for their victim, as afterward the rabble claimed Christ from Pilate for their victim, gave Jeremiah into the hands of the princes to do with him as they pleased. Then it was that they with cords dropped him down into a deep subterranean pit, whose bottom was mire, so that Jeremiah sank in the mire.