to hear him because they liked it and because they had nothing better to do. If he passed unscathed through the dangers of the position, it was through his overpowering sense of the reality of divine things and the importance of men’s spiritual destiny; and also we may add through his fidelity in a department of ministerial duty which popular preachers are sometimes apt to neglect—the duty of close personal dealing with individual men about their sins and their state before God. To this subject we shall revert by‐and‐by. This passage reveals to us the people in their lighter moods, when they were able to cast off the awful burden of life and destiny and take advantage of such sources of enjoyment as their circumstances afforded. Mental dejection in a community, from whatever cause it originates, is rarely continuous. The natural elasticity of the mind asserts itself in the most depressing circumstances; and the tension of almost unendurable sorrow is relieved by outbursts of unnatural gaiety. Hence we need not be surprised to find that beneath the surface levity of these exiles there lurked the feeling of despair expressed in the words of ver. 10 and more fully in those of ch. xxxvii. 11: “Our transgressions and our sins are upon us, and we waste away in them: how should we then live?” “Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off.” These accents of despondency reflect the new mood into which the more serious‐minded portion of the community had been plunged by the calamities that had befallen them. The bitterness of unavailing remorse, the consciousness of national death, had laid fast hold of their spirits and deprived them of the power of hope. In sober truth the nation was dead beyond apparent hope of revival; and to an Israelite, whose spiritual interests were all identified with those of his nation, religion had no power of consolation apart from a national future. The people therefore abandoned themselves to despair, and hardened themselves against the appeals which the prophet addressed to them in the name of Jehovah. They looked on themselves as the victims of an inexorable fate, and were disposed perhaps to resent the call to repentance as a trifling with the misery of the unfortunate.