and careless mind, but he, with his tender conscience and breaking heart, who bore the reproach of their sins, the anger of the Lord, and all the agonizing knowledge of his country's inevitable doom. In Jeremiah one man did suffer for the people. In our prophecy, which is absorbed with the deliverance of the nation as a whole, there was, of course, no occasion to develop Jeremiah's remarkable suggestions about each individual soul of man. In fact, these suggestions were germs, which remained uncultivated in Israel till Christ's time. Jeremiah himself uttered them, not as demands for the moment, but as ideals that would only be realised when the New Covenant was made.[19] Our prophecy has nothing to say about them. But that figure, which Jeremiah's life presented, of One Individual--of One Individual standing in moral solitude over against the whole nation, and in a sense suffering for the nation, can hardly have been absent from the influences, which moulded the marvellous confession of the people in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, where they see the solitary servant of God on one side and themselves on the other, _and Jehovah made to light on him the iniquities of us all_. It is true that the exiles themselves had some consciousness of suffering for others. _Our fathers_, cried a voice in their midst, when Jerusalem broke up, _Our fathers have sinned, and we have borne their iniquities_. But Jeremiah had been a willing sufferer for his people; and the fifty-third chapter is, as we shall see, more like his way of bearing his generation's guilt for love's sake than their way of bearing their fathers' guilt in the inevitable entail of sin.[20] 3. To these beliefs in the unity of God, the religious worth of the individual and the virtue of his self-sacrifice, we must add some experiences of scarcely less value rising out of the DESTRUCTION OF THE MATERIAL AND POLITICAL FORMS--the temple, the city, the monarchy--with which the faith of Israel had been so long identified.