and impatient; and then again he rises over the gloom which envelops him, in the conviction that there will be a new covenant between God and man, after the punishment for sin shall have been inflicted.  But his prevailing feelings are grief and despair, since he has no hopes of national reform.  So he predicts woes and calamities at no distant day, which are to be so overwhelming that his soul is crushed in the anticipation of them.  He cannot laugh, he cannot rejoice, he cannot sing, he cannot eat and drink like other men.  He seeks solitude; he longs for the desert; he abstains from marriage, he is ascetic in all his ways; he sits alone and keeps silence, and communes only with his God; and when forced into the streets and courts of the city, it is only with the faint hope that he may find an honest man.  No persons command his respect save the Arabian Rechabites, who have the austere habits of the wilderness, like those of the early Syrian monks.  Yet his gloom is different from theirs:  they seek to avert divine wrath for their own sins; he sees this wrath about to descend for the sins of others, and overwhelm the whole nation in misery and shame.

Jeremiah was born in the little ecclesiastical town of Anathoth, about three miles from Jerusalem, and was the son of a priest.  We do not know the exact year of his birth, but he was a very young man when he received his divine commission as a prophet, about six hundred and twenty-seven years before Christ.  Josiah had then been on the throne of Judah twelve years.  The kingdom was apparently prosperous, and was unmolested by external enemies.  For seventy-five years Assyria had given but little trouble, and Egypt was occupied with the siege of Ashdod, which had been going on for twenty-nine years, so strong was that Philistine city.  But in the absence of external dangers corruption, following wealth, was making fearful strides among the people, and impiety was nearly universal.  Every one was bent on pleasure or gain, and prophet and priest were worldly and deceitful.  From the time when Jeremiah was first called to the prophetic office until the fall of Jerusalem there was an unbroken series of national misfortunes, gradually darkening into utter ruin and exile.  He may have shrunk from the perils and mortifications which attended him for forty years, as his nature was sensitive and tender; but during this long ministry he was incessant in his labors, lifting up his voice in the courts of the Temple, in the palace of the king, in prison, in private houses, in the country around Jerusalem.  The burden of his utterances was a denunciation of idolatry, and a lamentation over its consequences.  “My people, saith Jehovah, have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn out for themselves underground cisterns, full of rents, that can hold no water....  Behold, O Judah! thou shalt be brought to shame by thy new alliance with Egypt, as thou wast in the past by thy old alliance with Assyria.”