10.  In passing from Isaiah to Jeremiah, the contrast is as great as it can well be; and yet it is a contrast necessary to the completeness of divine revelation, which employs men of all characters and temperaments, and living in every variety of outward circumstances.  Isaiah, like the apostle John, seems to have lived above his personal relations in the sphere of divine truth.  He never alludes to his private history, except where the nature of a given narrative requires it.  It is not probable that he was subjected to such an ordeal of persecution as that through which Jeremiah passed.  However this may be, we gain almost no knowledge of his private life from the book of his prophecies.  But Jeremiah, like the apostle Paul, unfolds to us very fully the history of his inward and outward life.  With his peculiarly tender and sensitive mind it could not have been otherwise.  If he had not woven into his prophecies his own inner and outer life, he would not have written naturally, and therefore truthfully.  Through this interweaving of biography with revelation, God has given in the case of Jeremiah, as in that of the great apostle to the Gentiles, a rich storehouse of truth for the instruction and comfort of his persecuted and suffering servants in all ages.  With the simplicity of truth, the prophet informs us how the men of Anathoth, his native place, conspired to take away his life (11:18-23; 12:6); how Pashur, the son of Immer, smote him and put him in the stocks (20:1-6); how in the beginning of Jehoiakim’s reign he was accused before the princes by the priests and false prophets as a man worthy of death, but acquitted by them (chap. 26); how afterwards he and Baruch were hidden by Jehovah (chap 36); how under Zedekiah he was repeatedly imprisoned (chaps. 32:2; 33:1), and thrust into dungeons (chaps. 37, 38); how upon the conquest of the city by the Chaldeans he was released from his fetters and honorably treated (chs. 39:11-14; 40:1-4); and how afterwards he was forced to go into Egypt with the fugitive Jews (chaps. 42, 43).

In connection with this external history, we have a vivid portraiture of his inward conflicts.  Most deeply does he sympathize with his countrymen in the calamities which their sins have brought upon them; yet he is rewarded only with curses, because he faithfully forewarns them of the judgments of heaven which are fast approaching, and which can be averted only by hearty repentance and reformation.  “Woe is me, my mother,” he cries out in his anguish, “that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth!  I have neither lent on usury, nor men have lent to me on usury; yet every one of them doth curse me” (15:10); and like Job he loses all composure under the pressure of his sorrows, and bitterly curses the day of his birth (20:14-18).  Again we see him in the hands of his persecutors serenely committing himself to God, and calmly warning them against the guilt of shedding his blood (26:12-15).  In such alternations of impatience and faith we have a true portraiture of the struggle of grace against the weakness of nature; and it is this which gives it especial value as a part of revelation, which never exhibits good men in a fictitious light, but always in the sober livery of truth.