That stretches its roots to the stream;
Unafraid at the coming of heat,
His leaf shall be green;
Sans care in the season of drought
He fails not in yielding his fruit.[811]
The individual soul rooted in faith and drawing life from the Fountain of Living Water, independent of all disaster to the nation and famine on earth—could not be more beautifully drawn.
Now all this advance by Jeremiah from the idea of the nation as the human unit in religion—Deuteronomy's ideal and at first his own—to the individual as the direct object of the Divine Grace and Discipline was promoted, we have seen, by the dire happenings of the time, the unworthy conduct of the people, their abandonment by God, the ruin of the State and of the national worship—which cut off individuals from all political and religious associations, leaving to each (in Jeremiah's repeated phrase) only his life, or [pg 373] his soul, for a prey.[812] But all these could have furthered the advance but little unless Jeremiah had felt by bitter experience his own soul searched and re-searched by God—
But Thou, Lord, hast known me,
Thou seest and triest my heart towards Thee—[813]
unless through doubt and struggle he himself had won into the confidence of an immediate and intimate knowledge of God. At his call he had learned how a man could be God's before he was his mother's or his nation's—God's own and to the end answerable only to Him. He had proved his solitary conscience under persecution. He had known how personal convictions can overbear the traditions of the past and the habits of one's own generation—how God can hold a single man alone to His Will against his nation and all its powers, and vindicate him at last to their faces. In all this lay much of the vicarious service which Jeremiah achieved for his own generation; what he had won for himself was possible for each of them. And sure it is that the personal piety which henceforth flourished in Israel as it had never flourished before, weaving its delicate tendrils about the ruins of the state, the city and the altar, and (as the Psalms show) blooming behind the shelter of the Law [pg 374] like a garden of lilies within a fence of thorns, sprang from seeds in Jeremiah's heart, and was watered by his tears and the sweat of his spiritual agonies.