And to consummate, as it were, his threats of divine punishment so soon to be visited on the degenerate city, Jeremiah is directed to buy an earthenware bottle, such as was used by the peasants to hold their drinking-water, and to summon the elders and priests of Jerusalem to the southwestern corner of the city, and to throw before their feet the bottle and shiver it in pieces, as a significant symbol of the approaching fall of the city, to be destroyed as utterly as the shattered jar.  “And I will empty out in the dust, says Jehovah, the counsels of Judah and Jerusalem, as this water is now poured from the bottle.  And I will cause them to fall by the sword before their enemies and by the hands of those that seek their lives; and I will give their corpses for meat to the birds of heaven and the beasts of the earth; and I will make this city an astonishment and a scoffing.  Every one that passes by it will be astonished and hiss at its misfortunes.  Even so will I shatter this people and this city, as this bottle, which cannot be made whole again, has been shattered.”  Nor was Jeremiah contented to utter these fearful maledictions to the priests and elders; he made his way to the Temple, and taking his stand among the people, he reiterated, amid a storm of hisses, mockeries, and threats, what he had just declared to a smaller audience in reference to Jerusalem.

Such an appalling announcement of calamities, and in such strong and plain language, must have transported his hearers with fear or with wrath.  He was either the ambassador of Heaven, before whose voice the people in the time of Elijah would have quaked with unutterable anguish, or a madman who was no longer to be endured.  We have no record of any prophet or any preacher who ever used language so terrible or so daring.  Even Luther never hurled such maledictions on the church which he called the “scarlet mother.”  Jeremiah uttered no vague generalities, but brought the matter home with awful directness.  Among his auditors was Pashur, the chief governor of the Temple, and a priest by birth.  He at once ordered the Temple police to seize the bold and outspoken prophet, who was forthwith punished for his plain speaking by the bastinado, and then hurried bleeding to the stocks, into which his head and feet and hands were rudely thrust, to spend the night amid the jeers of the crowd and the cold dews of the season.  In the morning he was set free, his enemies thinking that he now would hold his tongue; but Jeremiah, so far from keeping silence, renewed his threats of divine vengeance.  “For thus saith Jehovah, I will give all Judah into the hands of the king of Babylon, and he shall carry them captive to Babylon, and slay them with the sword.”  And then turning to Pashur, before the astonished attendants, he exclaimed:  “And thou, Pashur, and all that dwell in thy house, will be dragged off into captivity; and thou wilt come to Babylon, and thou wilt die and be buried there,—­thou and all thy partisans to whom thou hast prophesied lies.”