---

1. Jeremiah's age was one of great political troubles.

2. It was also an age of signal religious privileges.

3. It was an age of great moral corruption.

I. HIS IMPRISONMENT SUGGESTS THE SAD MORAL CHARACTER OF HIS AGE. The prisons of an age are often criteria by which to determine its character. When prisons are filled with men of signal excellence of character, force of conscience, and self-denying philanthropy, you have sad moral proofs of the deep moral corruption of the age that could tolerate such enormity.

II. HIS IMPRISONMENT SUGGESTS GOD'S METHOD OF RAISING HUMANITY. Heaven's plan embraces the agency of good men. The agency is twofold, primary and secondary. There are spiritual seers and spiritual mechanics.

1. Jeremiah may be regarded as a type of the primary human agents whom God employs. They are frequently in the lowest secular condition; yet in that condition God communes with them, and gives them a message for the world.

2. Baruch may be regarded as a type of the secondary agents. In this age the Baruchs are numerous. Men abound who will take down the thoughts of great thinkers; but the Jeremiahs are rare. Thought power, rather than tongue power, is wanted now.

III. HIS IMPRISONMENT SUGGESTS THE INABILITY OF THE EXTERNAL TO CRUSH A HOLY SOUL.

1. He is free in his communion with heaven. From the dungeon he cried, and God heard him (Lamentations 3:56, 57).

2. He was free in his sympathies with the race. He could not go out in body to the house of the Lord, but he went out in soul. Walls of granite, massive iron bars, chains of adamant, cannot confine the soul; nor can the densest darkness throw on it a single shadow.

(Homilist.)

---

---

KJV: Then Jeremiah called Baruch the son of Neriah: and Baruch wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the LORD, which he had spoken unto him, upon a roll of a book.

WEB: Then Jeremiah called Baruch the son of Neriah; and Baruch wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of Yahweh, which he had spoken to him, on a scroll of a book.