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 ap peal 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

experience, and it is very much to our present purpose to understand its nature. The prophet was no doubt in the temple when he saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up. In the details of the vision which follow one recognizes in the background the phenomena of storm, but also the influence of imagery derived from some ancient mythological tradition. The seraphim may have been personifications of lightning, though hardly so in Isaiah's thought. They are here for the sake of what they say,

Holy, holy, holy, is Yahweh of Hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory"; and for what they do, since it is one of them who touches the prophet's lips with a coal from the altar and takes away his iniquity. The vision is remarkable for its contents of thought and feeling, rather than for its outward details. It is a vision of the holiness of God. Holiness, especially in connection with the temple and its cultus, meant to the people not sinlessness, but unapproachableness, transcendence, or, one might say, divinity, in contrast to everything human and earthly. Isaiah seems to have been the first clearly to realize that the holiness of God meant not merely his contrast to man's weakness and mortality, but especially his separateness from man's sin; for it is unclean lips of which the prophet is immediately conscious, wrong thoughts and words, and that not only in Israel, but in himself. He is the first prophet whose call comes with the consciousness of his own sin and the experience of forgiveness. The right response of man to the holiness of God is humility. "Woe is me! for I am undone." Amos says in effect, "Ye shall be righteous, for Yahweh is righteous"; Hosea, "Ye shall be loving, for Yahweh is loving." Isaiah does not make Yahweh say, "Ye shall be holy, for I am holy"; and when this is finally said (Lev. 19:2) it does not mean the imitation of God. Holiness was never the quality in God which man could imitate, but precisely that which distinguished God from man. So

even although Isaiah sees that the holiness of God is a spiritual rather than a physical transcendence, it still means transcendence and not likeness to man. To the holiness of God man's natural response is fear. So it was at first with Isaiah. But what followed was the truly epoch-making discovery that the holiness of God is itself purifying and redemptive, not destructive, toward the man who responds to it with humility and the confession of sin. It is one of the seraphim who voiced the holiness of God, that touches the prophet's lips; and it is the fire itself, emblem of the holiness of God, which purges his sin. Then follows,not as a hard duty, but as an eager, grateful response to the voice, "Whom shall I send?"— obedience. Here am I; send me." The order of this religious experience is not that of later Jewish legalism; it is exactly that of the Christianity of Paul. We have, then, here a vision which seems beyond doubt to have come in a highly wrought crisis of emotional experience, and may well have involved the actual loss of the consciousness of what stood before the physical senses, but of which the significance lies not at all in its objectivity as vision, but in the most inward and exalted regions of the spiritual life. From this time on Isaiah is wholly dominated by the sense of God, the certainty that the holy and spiritual One, unseen by the eye, his presence unfelt because of the dullness of men's minds, is the only reality with which man has to reckon, the only one to be feared, the only one to be trusted. Another word, not used in the account of the vision, but involved in it, expresses the essential nature of Isaiah's religion, the word "faith" (7:9, 28: 16). The pride that belongs to men who have no sense of God, the self-trust and confidence in the human and the material that belongs to this dullness and insensibility, are the sins that are to bring disaster upon Israel; and these disasters which humble man will only exalt Yahweh and manifest his holiness.