nent danger of destruction, Jeremiah had the courage of proclaiming the patriotic prophets false. The true message to his nation was total national collapse which he claimed they fully deserved: "Lo, I will bring a nation against you from afar, O house of Israel, it is a mighty nation. . . . And they shall eat up thine harvest, and thy bread, which thy sons, and thy daughters should eat; they shall eat up thy flocks; they shall eat up thy vines and thy fig trees; they shall impoverish thy fenced cities, wherein thou trustedst, with the sword. . . . And the carcasses of the people shall be meat for the fowls of heaven, and for the beasts of the earth." Even when the Chaldeans besieged the Jewish capital, Jeremiah declared to the king: "Thus saith the Lord; Behold I will turn back the weapons in your hands wherewith you fight against the Chaldeans which besiege you, and I will assemble them into the midst of this city. And I myself will fight against you. . . . And I will smite the inhabitants of this city, both man and beast; they shall die of a great pestilence." These are not patriotic speeches. From our standpoint they are not only full of sedition, but of the worst form of treason. Still it was Jeremiah who proved in the right, and the false prophets of nationalism and patriotism in the wrong. This is the soul of the prophet's burden: Justice is above my nation, and righteousness above my people.
The prophets were but few individuals among nations and tribes, vibrant with nationalism of the narrowest type, but it was just these few chosen spirits and not the multitude of false patriots who gave voice to the tendencies of true human progress. The prophets were seized by the authorities, sentenced, mobbed, tormented, and killed, but their spirit lived, while kingdoms succumbed, empires vanished, and nations perished. The acts and decrees of the great Assyrian, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian monarchs lie buried in the ruins and dust of their once magnificent palaces, but the living words of the few humble men, the prophets, ring loud and true across the gulf of ages. Insignificant as those men might have been in the courts of a Sargon, Tiglath-Pileser, Esarhaddon, Cyrus, and Darius, it was none-the-less those lowly men who stood for human progress, and transmitted to humanity the precious treasures of human ideals.
The Gospel of Christ and his apostles ran counter to all Jewish tradition as represented by the Pharisees and Sadducees. Christianity conflicted with the imperial patriotism of the Romans. Cruel persecutions followed. The great historian, Tacitus, regarded the Chris-
