The Song of Solomon : and the Lamentations of Jeremiah

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THE LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAH >
call to prayer. The helplessness which it so eloquently
proclaims is just the condition in which the soul is
most ready to cast itself on the mercy of God. Calm
fortitude must always be better than an undisciplined
abandonment to grief. But before this has been at-
tained there may come an apathy of despair, under the
influence of which the feelings are simply benumbed.
That apathy is the very opposite to drying up the
fountain of grief as it may be dried in the sunshine
of love ; it is freezing it. The first step towards
deliverance will be to melt the glacier. The soul must
feel before it can pray. Therefore the tears are en-
couraged to run like torrents, and the sufferer to give
himself no respite, nor let the apple of his eye cease
from weeping.
Next the poet exhorts the object of his sympathy—
this strange personification of the " wall of the daughter
of Zion," under the image of which he is thinking of
the Jews—to arise. The weeping is but a preliminary
to more promising acts. The sufferer is not to spend
the long night in an unbroken flow of grief, like the
psalmist "watering his couch with his tears." ^ The
very opposite attitude is now suggested. Grief must not
be treated as a normal condition, to be acquiesced in
or even encouraged. The victim is tempted to cherish
his sorrow as a sacred charge, to feel hurt if any
mitigation of it is suggested, or ashamed of confessing
that relief has been received. When he has reached
this condition it is obvious that the substance of grief
has passed ; the ghost of it that remains is fast becoming
a harmless sentiment. If, however, the trouble
should be still maintaining the tightness of its grip on
' Psalm vi. 6.
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