Thou wast too strong for me, Thou hast prevailed.[683]
Power was pain to him; he carried God's Word as a burning fire in his heart.[684] If the strength and the joy in which others rise on their gifts ever came to him they quickly fled. Isaiah, the only other prophet comparable, accepts his mission and springs to it with freedom. But Jeremiah, always coerced, shrinks, protests, craves leave to retire. So that while Isaiah's answer to the call of God is Here am I, send me, Jeremiah's might have been “I would be anywhere else than here, let me go.” He spent much of himself in complaint and in debate both with God and with his fellow-men:
Mother! Ah me!
As whom hast thou borne me?
A man of quarrel and of strife
To the whole of the land—
All of them curse me.[685]
Nor did he live to see any solid results from his work. His call was
To root up, pull down and destroy,
To build and to plant.[686]