In all this nothing has been said of a prediction by these prophets of a Messianic future for Israel, or of a happy consummation of the history of the world. As a matter of fact that which these prophets are at one in foretelling is judgment, not deliverance. That good must prevail in the end is of course involved in their belief that Yahweh is the God of righteousness, and that he is the God of human history. But the hopes that Israel had set on his coming intervention, hopes of national greatness and even primacy among the nations of the world, were denied, not affirmed, by these prophets, who were therefore, in this sense critics, not creators, of the Messianic hope. Of this something more will be said later on.

From the summary we have thus far made it will not seem strange that different definitions have been possible of what constitutes the most distinctive message of the prophets. Some still say prediction, but the prediction of disaster. Some say that a belief in an all inclusive plan of God and in his revelation of this to the prophets, God's foretelling through them of the things which he is about to do, constitutes their distinctive teaching. Again it is possible to say that the righteousness of Yahweh is their characteristic doctrine, upon which everything turns; and that this moral conception of the character of God explains their criticism of national and ceremonial religion alike, and involves as its inevitable outcome that peculiar type of ethical monotheism which it is Israel's glory to have achieved. After all, these various definitions are not inconsistent. The important thing for our present purpose is to have it clearly in mind that ethical and spiritual religion was the concern of these prophets, and that to this all details as to the manner of their inspiration and everything external, whether in their experience or in their forecasts, were subjected.

It must already be evident that the sort of truth which a prophet has to impart will necessarily affect the manner

in which he receives it and in which he expresses it. We should not expect vision to have an important place in conveying the conviction that Yahweh is righteous and that he demands righteousness of men. These are not things that can be seen with the eye. God himself is the fact that the prophets know, and they know him not as a thing, but as a person, so that the question as to the nature of their inspiration becomes a question of the sort of experience by which men become assured of the reality of this divine moral personality and have a vivid sense of his glory and power and a deep enthusiasm and courageous loyalty toward him. It has been said that the poetic monologues of Jeremiah are the highest point in the development of prophecy, its 'most exalted literary creation." But the monologues of Jeremiah reveal a great personality in intimate conversation with the supreme personality; and their effect is to help us to know God through our knowing the prophet himself. In fact the best final summary of the message of the prophets would be to say that they are themselves their message. They are great, distinctive, living persons, in whose spirit, even more than in their words, we see and feel the presence of God.

Let us turn, now, from the message of the prophets to their own account of their prophetic experiences. They are still prophets, nebiim, and no one thinks of calling them by any other name, in spite of the difference that separates them from others before and about and after them. There is, indeed, in their accounts of their call and of other crises in their lives, and sometimes in their manner and actions, enough that reminds us of the prophets of popular story and of the later apocalyptic seers. So that there are two quite different ways in which modern writers characterize them, some emphasizing their likeness to others of their order, and some setting them apart, as ethical teachers and

the founders of spiritual religion. It would be a mistake to suppose that they are not men of their times, and that they anticipate modern science in its interpretation of trance and vision, and in its rationalizing of man's experience of the Divine. Nevertheless it is evident that these men were fully conscious of the contrast between them and other prophets. Amos refuses to class himself with the professional prophets of his time, although he has no other word to substitute when he describes his own office and function (7:14-15, 3:8). The difference is evident enough, both as to their message and as to the nature of their experience. The popular prophets preach peace and prosperity for their nation, while these prophets announce woes. The ethical condition upon which alone the great prophets rest their hope of good was lacking in the case of the others; and with this difference belongs naturally the consequence that while ecstasy, vision, and miracle are primary marks of the professional prophet, these are altogether in the background, and in some cases entirely lacking, in the case of the men we are considering.

Let us see, briefly, how this is in the case of the individual prophets of this higher order. Amos says nothing about his calling except that God took him from his flock and said to him, "Go, prophesy unto my people Israel." The visions narrated in chapters 7 and 8 do not suggest trance or anything abnormal, but are interpretations, as if in parable, of things actually happening before the prophet's eye. A plague of locusts, a drought, a builder's plumbline, a basket of summer fruit, are enough as points of contact for the prophet's thought and for its effective utterance. The appeal of Amos throughout is to the common conscience of man; and in one striking though difficult passage he seems to say that when conditions and events are what they then were, every one ought to hear the word of Yahweh and to prophesy (3:8). That which seems most extraordinary in

the message of Amos is his confident announcement that it is Yahweh's purpose to bring a destructive and final judgment upon his own people. Such a possibility had never been imagined before; and the incalculable importance of the prophet's foresight of the coming fall of the nation, and his interpretation of it as Yahweh's own deed, for the whole future development of religion, makes even the most modern and scientific student of the prophets wonder whether something more than observation and inference lies behind it. Amos gives us no help in answering the question whence this assurance came to him. We can see that it was in part a statesman's insight into the inevitable results of Assyria's encroachments and of the resistance of small nations. We can see, also, that the prophet's soul was filled with indignation at the religious practices and ideas of the people, and at their contradiction in conduct of everything that was demanded by the righteousness of God. Whether the unshaken certainty that disaster was at hand came upon him as a mysterious foreboding or presentment in some sudden moment of intense emotional experience, or grew more gradually within him, we have no means of deciding. What we know is that in inseparable connection with his conviction that the Day of Yahweh would be a day of darkness to Israel stand his two great denials of the religious faith of his people: his denial that sacrifice and festival are pleasing to God, and his denial that Yahweh cares for Israel more than for Israel's enemies, or will deal with them on any different terms (5:21-25, 9:7). Here, then, is one of the greatest of the prophets, the first to take the most radical positions in reversal of the popular religion, whose experiences involve nothing mystical in the sense that ecstatic or visionary crises have a place in them, and who impresses one much more as a man whose ethical and rational judgments are expressions of his own nature, and are to him only what every man should recognize for himself as true.

The professional prophets were claiming supernatural gifts, but Amos makes his appeal to common sense, to reason, to conscience, and in and with these to the character of Yahweh, as all his people ought to know it.

Hosea, the younger contemporary of Amos, is like him in his message, though as different from him in his nature as two men could well be. Behind the obscure allusions of his first chapters we seem to have an account of Hosea's call to be a prophet and of the source of what was new in his message. If we can truly recover his experience it would seem that vision had even less place in it than in that of Amos, perhaps, indeed, no place at all, and that it was in a thoroughly human experience that he learned that love in God as in man can persist in spite of unworthiness, and will prove itself, even though severe in discipline, in the end redeeming in its effect. To Hosea Yahweh's purpose to destroy Israel is not the denial but the expression of his love, and is meant to result, and must in the end result, in the recovery of the nation to worthiness and fidelity in a new marriage covenant with him. Here everything lies in the region of the human, and God is discovered and understood in the light of what is deepest and highest in human nature. Passion does belong to Hosea in abundant measure. Indeed, without passion no one would be called a prophet. But of exceptional sights and hearings we read nothing. The prophet seems to be always himself; and when most himself, nearest to God. This, of course, means that the word of Yahweh to Hosea in regard to his marriage (1:2, 3:1), is the prophet's later interpretation of his painful and yet revealing experiences as being from the first the purpose of God. This is far more likely than that the prophet in an ecstatic condition actually heard these strange and cruel demands.

The case of Isaiah is different. His account of his call, in chapter 6, is beyond doubt an account of a real vision