82 SEMITIC LANGUAGE 



by night. He saw the seasons come and go with regularity and with 

 their constant phenomena. The thinking shepherd saw and learned. 

 He grasped in some rude fashion the thought of nature's uniformities. 

 Even in the lion's roar there was proclaimed the mighty law of 

 cause and effect. That' which he learned from the world of nature he 

 carried up into his thought of Yahwe's moral government. Here, 

 too, there was invariable antecedent and consequent, cause and 

 effect; evil antecedents, evil consequences, evil causes, evil effects. 

 It must be so. He thunders it forth before the calf-worshiping priest 

 Amaziah, before Israel's king, that moral emasculate, -Jeroboam, 

 before the vampire nobles and their wine-soaked courtesans, before 

 venal priests and sycophant prophets. " It must be so " runs through 

 his stern denunciations. Doom dogs the heels of crime. Thus Amos 

 became the prophet of law, the stern Puritan, bred, as so often, where 

 the limpid waters run, on the hillside where the horizon is wide, on 

 the open veldt, wherever the air blows free and pure. 



Look again, this time at Hosea, who followed Amos, and see him 

 swinging clear to the opposite pole and declaring the transcendent 

 attribute of Yah we to be Love. Why Love? Why? Because it was 

 the feeling that welled up in his own heart. Won by the natural 

 charms of beauty in woman he had taken to himself Gomer bath 

 Diblaim. Alas, that beauty is not always the seamless cloak of nice 

 virtue! Temptation came, and Gomer sinned, but the cry of Hosea 's 

 heart went up for her. The steel of anguish entered his soul, but the 

 noble affection of his heart was not outraged. He loved her still, and 

 out of this human experience in which the eternal passion emerged 

 triumphant over the assaults of shame and crucifying pain, there 

 came, eight hundred years before Jesus and John, the message to 

 men that God is Love. God could not be less good than he. 



Look again at Isaiah, patrician and priest of the temple. What is 

 his distinctive message? What as priest could it be but holiness, 

 with its antithetic correlates of sin and righteousness? It was most 

 natural that the live coal which purged his unclean lips should be 

 carried by cherub hands from the temple altar. Amos the herdsman 

 found God and his call as he wrenched the leg of the lamb from the 

 mouth of the lion. Note again, that Isaiah, of noble birth, a resident 

 of Jerusalem, a sort of Judaean metropolitan as compared with the 

 other prophets, proclaimed the inviolability of Zion. The spears 

 of the enemy, the arms of Assyria, would break upon her walls. With 

 all Isaiah's sincerity and moral uprightness, he lived too near the 

 centre of evil to see it in all the hideousness lent by perspective. His 

 aristocratic shield protected him from its worst assaults. He was 

 not deaf to its cries, not blind to its miseries, far from it, but they did 

 not touch home to the bone of him or his. How was it with his con- 

 temporary in the country village Micah of Moresheth of Gath ? 



