The Song of Solomon : and the Lamentations of Jeremiah

iv. 13-16.] LEPERS 28J
flatters the people—who are then in fact the great.
The peculiar danger of our own day is that the preacher
should simply echo popular cries, and voice the demands
of the majority irrespective of the question of their
justice. Thrust into the position of a social leader
with more urgency than his predecessors of any time
since the age of the Hebrew prophets, it is expected
that he will lead whither the people wish to go, and
if he declines to do so he is denounced as retrograde.
And yet as the messenger of Heaven he should con-
sider it his supreme duty to reveal the whole counsel of
God, to speak for truth and righteousness, and therefore
to condemn the sins of the democracy equally with
the sins of the aristocracy. Brave labour-leaders have
fallen into disfavour for telling working-men that their
worst enemies were their own vices— such as intem-
perance. The wickedness of a responsible teacher
who treasonably neglects thus to warn his brethren
of danger is powerfully expressed by Ezekiel's clear,
antithetical statements concerning the respective guilt of
the watchman and his fellow-citizen, which show con-
clusively that the greatest burden of blame must rest
on the unfaithful watchman.'^
In the hour of their exposure these wretched pro-
phets and priests lose all sense of dignity, even lose
their self-possession, and stumble about like blind men,
helpless and bewildered. Their behaviour suggests
the idea that they must be drunk with the blood they
have shed, or overcome by the intoxication of their
thirst for blood ; but the explanation is that they cannot
lift up their heads to look a neighbour in the face,
because all their little devices have been torn to shreds,
' Ezek. iii. 16-21.