The period in which the prophet's youth was passed was rich in influence that must have powerfully affected him. Though too young to take part in the reform of Josiah he would remember it, and he grew up in the midst of the changes which it had introduced, and probably learned to estimate previous history from the point of view which it gave him. The tragic events which followed one another closely at this epoch, such as the death of Josiah, the exile of Jehoahaz to Egypt and of Jehoiachin to Babylon, made an enduring impression on his mind. The last event formed the chief landmark of his life, and that not solely because his own history was so closely connected with it. How deeply the fate of the two young princes touched him, and how well he could sympathize with the country's sorrow over it, a sorrow recorded also by Jeremiah, is seen in his elegy on the princes of Israel. He has a fondness for historical study, and no history is to him without a moral; and silently the events of this time were writing principles upon his mind to which in after years he was to give forcible enough expression.
1. We ask ourselves, as we trace the mental history of poets, thinkers, statesmen, what was their environment, who were they who, somewhat older it may be than themselves, were working round them, influencing them, directly or indirectly, by action or reaction. Among Ezekiel's contemporaries one name stands out with an illustrious pre-eminence. Jeremiah, the priest of Anathoth, ministering in the Temple, prophesying in the streets of Jerusalem, must have been known to the son of Buzi who was in training for the priesthood; and there, or at Anathoth, he may have listened eagerly to his teaching. Looking to the chronology of Jeremiah's life, we find that at an earlier age than was common, probably therefore between twenty and twenty-five, he was called to his work as a prophet in the thirteenth year of Josiah, four years before the discovery of the “book of the law of the Lord,” and five years before the date which has been fixed for the birth of Ezekiel. During the whole of the younger prophet's earlier years, therefore, he must have lived as under the shadow of the elder. At the death of Josiah in 608 b.c., Jeremiah was from thirty-eight to forty-three years of age, while Ezekiel was only fifteen. The time of companionship which remained after that date was comparatively short. During a period of eleven years and a half Ezekiel must have been under Jeremiah's immediate influence, but as he was only twenty-five or twenty-six at its close, and had received no direct call to the office of a prophet, we cannot wonder that he abstained as yet from being more than a silent witness of his work. After the deportation his direct knowledge of Jeremiah's teaching ceased, and all that reached him must have been through such messengers as came from time to time from Jerusalem to the land of his exile, or through the epistle which the older prophet sent “to the priests and to the prophets and to all the people” whom Nebuchadnezzar had carried into captivity in Babylon.
2. A careful study of Ezekiel's prophecies will show how largely he had profited by the teaching of the prophet at whose feet he had thus sat. That symbolic eating of the roll of a book which was sweet as honey in his mouth (Eze_3:2) was the acted rendering of Jeremiah's words, “Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart.” The great lesson of the personal responsibility of each man for his own sin-as distinct from the distorted view of a transmitted and inherited guilt which embodied itself in the popular proverb: “the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge”-which was expanded by the one prophet (Eze_18:2-29), was the distinct echo of the self-same teaching proclaimed more concisely by the other.
It would, no doubt, be a mistake to ascribe every idea in Ezekiel which coincides with Jeremiah's teaching to the influence of that prophet. There is a common circle of thoughts and feelings which even the greatest minds share with those of their own age. Striking out some new conceptions, and opening up some lines of advancement which mark an epoch, the chief elements of their faith and life are common to them with others of their day and have been inherited from the past. The surprise with which we read Jeremiah might be lessened if the means of comparing him with others were not so narrow as the paucity of writers in the century before the Exile causes it to be. At any rate his influence upon the language and thought of Ezekiel can readily be observed. It could hardly have been otherwise. For thirty years before Ezekiel's captivity Jeremiah had been a prophet, speaking in the courts and chambers of the Temple and in the streets of Jerusalem, and having such a history as made him the most prominent figure of the day. Ezekiel was familiar with his history and had listened to his words from his infancy. Many of his prophecies had circulated in writing for a number of years previous to the captivity of Jehoiachin which Ezekiel shared, and the constant intercourse between Jerusalem and the exiles kept the prophet of the Chebar well informed regarding the course of events at home, and the views which prominent persons there took of them.
3. Jeremiah had earned the hatred of his fellow-countrymen by his bold proclamation of destruction against the city and of doom to the nation. The stern logic of facts had proved that he was right and the rulers wrong. Yet he had to bear the brunt of obloquy which any public teacher must sustain who is charged with anti-patriotism. And therefore no reconstruction of State policy or ecclesiastical organization was easily feasible for him. What he had accomplished for his fellow-countrymen was the task of dispelling the illusions of the past and setting up in their place loftier and more permanent ideals. To this inheritance Ezekiel succeeded. He continued what Jeremiah had begun, but in a different spirit, and under altered and more favourable conditions. The external bases of Israel's religion had been swept away, and in exchange for these Jeremiah led the people to the more permanent internal grounds of a spiritual renewal. But could a religion permanently subsist in this world of space and time without some external concrete embodiment? Can a people and a people's religion be utterly cut off from the past? This was the problem that now engaged Ezekiel's attention. The externalities of the past seemed to be buried in ashes and ruins. It was for Ezekiel to take up once more the broken threads of Israel's religious traditions and weave the strands anew into statelier and more attractive forms of ritual and national policy, adapted to the new conditions of thought and life. The attempt was ideal and tentative, but it was a worthy attempt, and, as history has shown, when truly read, it had abiding and far-reaching consequences.
The past is not, in any effective sense, irrevocable. We may yet make it, in large measure, what we will. For detached experiences are in themselves mere unintelligible fragments. It is when they are taken as parts of a whole that they have their meaning. And what is the whole of which our past is a part? Is that irrevocably fixed beyond our control? Nay, our past as well as our future shall be what we shall make it. It is a fragment that awaits interpretation, nay, awaits its full being, its true creation, from the whole.1 [Note: P. H. Wicksteed, in Studies in Theology, 24.]
Each generation or age of men is under a twofold temptation, the one to overrate its own performances and prospects, the other to undervalue the times preceding or following its own. No greater calamity can happen to a people than to break utterly with its Past. But the proposition in its full breadth applies more to its aggregate than to its immediate Past. Our judgment on the age that last preceded us should be strictly just. But it should be masculine, not timorous; for, if we gild its defects, and glorify its errors, we dislocate the axis of the very ground which forms our own point of departure.2 [Note: W. E. Gladstone, in The Nineteenth Century, xxi. 4.]
In some of those to whom Christ said, “Go and sin no more,” there can have been but a very halting faith, so far as intellectual understanding went. In all of them there was the forsaking of the broken and wasted past, to face the future with that which remained. The power to do this certainly lay in Him who inspired them with new courage and offered them the new chance. But when we see a man obviously inspired for duty, undismayed by failure, facing the future as Stevenson ever faced it for himself and urged his fellows to face it, may we not discern behind the gallant figure of the human combatant the form of the Son of Man? At least we may be sure of this, that there are very many persons whose moral condition needs exactly this message. With faith confused and dim, with the irrevocable past filling all their souls with discouragement, it cannot but be well for them to hear the voice that calls to them to hold fast that which remains. If they will take heart and obey, sooner or later the Master will reveal Himself to them; for it was Himself who said that many acts done strenuously and lovingly by those who knew not that they were serving Him would prove at the last to have been done unto Him.3 [Note: J. Kelman, The Faith of Robert Louis Stevenson, 239.]
