C

LOSELY following Amos, and in part contemporaneous with him, was Hosea. He belonged to Israel, not to Judah, and lived in the time when the penalties Amos had announced were already beginning to fall upon this corrupt nation. For though the reign of Jeroboam II. had been characterized by imperial expansion, increasing trade, and growth of wealth and luxury, there had been no enlargement of liberty, no expansion of justice, no increase of purity. Jeroboam II. died. His kingdom became the prey of faction. In twelve years seven "puppet kings," as Hosea contemptuously called them, reigned over Israel. Of these seven kings four were assassinated. Revolution followed revolution, and no change brought reformation. "The time," says Dr. Pusey, "during which Hosea prophesied was the darkest period in the history of Israel. Politically all was anarchy or misrule; kings made their way to the throne through the murder of their predecessors, and made way for their successors through their own. Shallum slew Zechariah; Menahem slew Shallum; Pekah slew the son of Menahem; Hoshea slew Pekah. The whole kingdom of Israel was a military despotism, and, as in the Roman Empire, those in command came to the throne; Baasha, Zimri, Omri, Jehu, Menahem, Pekah, held military office before they became kings."1

The public troubles would have been quite enough to make sore the heart of so tender a man as Hosea, but he had troubles of his own which might have but did not make it bitter. His references to them are brief and enigmatical, but from them it is not difficult to construct the tragic story of his domestic life. He married. His wife was unfaithful to him. His first child he recognized as his own, and named him Jezreel, from the famous battlefield of Israel. Then a daughter was born, but not until he had discovered the infidelity of his wife, although he had not "The Minor Prophets," Vol. I., p. 9, 10.

put her away. Two years later a son was born. He had as little faith in the legitimacy of the son as in that of the daughter. The one he called "Not knowing a father's love," or "The unloved one;" the other he called "No kin of mine." We are not to regard these as their real names, but this his designation of them in his prophecy tells sufficiently the tragical story of his life. Still he did not divorce his wife nor send her away from him. He was living in an age like that of the Stuarts in England, when unchastity among men was regarded as honorable rather than shameful, and perhaps he thought a time in which man justified unchastity in himself was not one in which man should be vindictive toward an unchaste woman. Certainly he did not turn his faithless wife away from him. But she grew weary of him-perhaps of his very piety and love and abandoned him. Prophets have rarely been rich men, either in olden or in modern times. And she was ambitious; eager for wealth and what wealth could give her. She abandoned her husband for some other lover, whose name is unknown to us, who would give her earrings and jewels and fine dresses. The next scene in the tragic story was inevitable. She sank lower and lower; went from lover to lover; and finally sold herself into a life of public harlotry. But though Hosea had never forgotten, he had always forgiven her; and when he finally found her a slave-by what process he traced her and discovered her he does not tell us he brought her back, though she had fallen so low that he paid for her less than would be paid for one of the cheaper and poorer slaves. Her beauty and her charm were gone; love for her was impossible; and when he took her he said to her, "No more wife of mine are you, no more husband of yours am I, but I will be your guardian and your protector." And there the story ends.

Wise is the man who knows how to extract honey from the thistle; wise the

man who knows how out of his profound sorrow to learn lessons of God's love and God's truth. Such a wise man was Hosea. He did not devote himself to a discussion of the problem of moral evil. He did not even consider the question, Does God send trouble? But he said to himself: This experience has not been sent to me in vain; it was a part of the divine plan that I should have such a wife, and such an experience with her, and that I should learn some lesson from it: what is that lesson? And he learned it; and this was the lesson that he learned: That God is the faithful lover, and the unrighteous nation is the unfaithful wife; and the sin against God is a sin, not against law chiefly, but against love; and that love. is infinite and eternal and unbroken, and cannot be destroyed. So out of this hard experience of bitter personal grief, looking upon the corruption of an unfaithful nation, and learning from his own parable the reality of the history and its meaning, he teaches that meaning.

If we compare Amos with Hosea, we may say that Amos is the prophet of law, and Hosea is the prophet of love: Amos recognizes sin as breaking law; to Hosea, sin is contempt of love: to Amos, repentance is the breaking off of sin; to Hosea, repentance is the returning to love to Amos, men are to be driven to God by threats of judgment; to Hosea, men are to be drawn to God by the enticement of affection. Perhaps this antithesis is too sharp to be quite true, as most antitheses are; but it will serve to indicate the characteristic difference of these two prophets

of Israel.

The relation between the people of Israel and their God is, in the conception of Hosea, the relation between a wife and her husband. Sin is disloyalty to the husband; suffering is the discipline which God administers that the unfaithful wife may be brought back to her husband again.

She shall follow after her lovers, but she shall not overtake them; and she shall seek them, but shall not find them: then shall she

say, I will go and return to my first husband; for then was it better with me than now. For she did not know that I gave her the corn, and the wine, and the oil, and multiplied unto her silver and gold, which they used for Baal. Therefore will I take back my corn in the time thereof, and my wine in the season thereof. . . . And I will lay waste her vines and

her fig trees, whereof she hath said, These are my hire that my lovers have given me: and I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall eat them. . . . Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her. And I will give her her vineyards from thence, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope: and she shall make answer there, as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt. And it shall be at that day, saith the Lord, that thou shalt call me, My husband; and shalt call me no more, My lord. . . . And I will betroth thee unto me forever; yea, I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and in judgment, and in loving-kindness, and in mercies. I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness: and thou shalt know the Lord. And it shall come to pass in that day, I will answer, saith the Lord, I will answer the heavens, and they shall answer the earth; and the earth shall answer the corn, and the wine, and the oil; and they shall answer Jezreel. And I will sow her unto me in the earth; and I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy; and I will say to them which were not my people. Thou art my people; and they shall say, Thou art my God.

Thus, according to Hosea, sin is more than violation of law. Its deep disgrace lies not in wrong inflicted upon neighbor or children or friend or wife or nation. It is not even disloyalty to a lawgiver. It is unfaithfulness to a husband whose love is deeper than the deepest and stronger than the strongest. No priesthood, no sacrifice, no ceremonial, can counterbalance this personal disloyalty of the heart to the divine love.

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I also will forget thy children. . . . And it shall be, like people, like priest and I will punish them for their ways, and will reward them their doings.

No careless conviction, no easy good faith that God is too merciful to punish, no cavalier treating of evil as good in the making, can suffice to restore the breach between the unfaithful wife and her loyal husband, between unfaithful Israel and her long-suffering God. Hosea scoffs at the airy and jaunty penitence which so misreads the divine mercy. This passage is often misunderstood because taken from its connection, and the experience which he condemns has often been quoted as though it were the experience to which

he summons Israel:

JEHOVAH: I will be unto Ephraim as a lion, and as a young lion to the house of Judah. I,

even I, will tear and go away; I will carry off, and there shall be none to deliver. I will go and return to my place, till they acknowledge their offense, and seek my face: in their affliction they will seek me earnestly.

ISRAEL: Come, and let us return unto the Lord: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up. After two days will he revive us: on the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live before him. And let us know, let us follow on to know the Lord; his going forth is sure as the morning: and he shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter rain that watereth the earth.

JEHOVAH: O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee? for your goodness is as a morning cloud, and as the dew that goeth early away. Therefore have I hewed them by the prophets; I have slain them by the words of my mouth: and thy judgments are as the light that goeth forth. For I desire mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.

Can there be any greater sin than that of a wife who betrays her husband and is unfaithful to him because she believes he will pardon her infidelity and take her back again if things go ill with her? Yes; there is one sin greater than that. It is for men to trade on the mercy of God, to say, We will take our fill of sin, will disregard his love and ignore his will because he is merciful, and, when we are weary of our wandering, he will take us back again. This was the spirit of Israel, and of this Israel-spirit there is no lack in our own time. It is the spirit which forgets the secret of life, forgets that God is truth, is purity, is righteousness, and thinks that this forgetfulness of him and the resultant disregard of truth and righteousness can be condoned by the careless penitence and the false faith which says, "After two days he will bring us to life, and we shall live before him."

This type of character Hosea illustrates by a striking metaphor. The Israelitish housewife heated a flat stone and put it before an open fire, and then, making a thin cake like a Scotch scone, laid it on the stone to bake, and when one side was baked, turned it over and baked the other side, somewhat as griddle-cakes are baked by us. Ephraim, says Hosea, is a cake not turned,' a cake burned to a cinder on the one side, unbaked dough on the other. Well does George Adam Smith interpret and apply this spirit to our own time:

How better describe a half-fed people, a half-cultured society, a half-lived religion, a 1 Hosea vii., 8.

half-hearted policy, than by a half-baked scone? We who are so proud of our political bakers, we who scorn the rapid revolutions of our neighbors and complacently dwell upon our equable ovens, those slow and cautious centuries of political development which lie behind us-have we anything better than our neighbors, anything better than Israel, to show in our civilization? Hosea's epigram fits us to the letter. After all those ages of baking, society is still with us an unturned scone; one end of the nation with strength burnt out of it by too much enjoyment of life, the other with not enough of warmth to be quickened into anything like adequate vitality. No man can deny that this is so; we are able to live only shutting our hearts to the fact. Or is religion equably distributed through the lives of the religious portion of our nation? Of late years religion has spread, and spread wonderfully, but of how many Christians is it still true that they are but half baked-living a life one side of which is reeking with the smoke of sacrifice, while the other is never warmed by one religious thought. We may have too much religion if we confine it to one day or one department of life; our worship overdone, with the sap and the freshness burnt out of it, cindery, dusty, unattractive, fit only for crumbling; our conduct cold, damp, and heavy, like dough the fire has never reached.'

Repent

Sin is contempt of God's love. ance is a profound conviction of this sin and a sincere and penitent return to him. No airy, jaunty, careless going back, with the belief that nothing serious has happened and that the account is easily settled; life no half-baked scone with emotions burnt out by revivals in the meetinghouse, by sensationalism in the pulpit, by emotionalism from the choir, while practical life is left cold, selfish, unpalatable to our neighbors in daily conduct.

How, then, will Hosea bring Israel back to God? By the portrayal of God's love. Love is the central truth in his teaching. God's love for Israel is the foundation truth; disloyalty in Israel to God's love, Israel's sin, the second great truth; return to love and God the only repentance is the third great truth; love the motive power that can bring men back to God is the fourth great truth. So this wonderful book closes. Many scholars think that the close of the book attributed to Hosea was written earlier and does not belong where it now finds its place; and other scholars do not think it was written by Hosea at all. I cannot agree with either. Hosea seems to me to be one of those intense men who sees clearly the evil of his time, yet hopes against hope 1" Book of the Twelve Prophets," Vol. I., p. 273, 274.

for the triumph of the good, whose soul is a perpetual debate between despair and hope, who now thinks that the nation is doomed to destruction, now sees in it some germ of righteousness, now warns it of an inevitable doom, now hopes to recall it from that doom by entreaty. These closing chapters eloquently portray the battle that goes on in such a mind between despair and hope, between the irrevocable sentence of condemnation and the entreaty to return to love and life.

He imagines Israel at last awaking. Alas! it was but a dream; she did not awake. He imagines Israel coming back thus to its God in loyalty and love. Alas! it was but an imagination; Israel did not return. And in this imagination, and founding his last words on this hope, he thus proclaims the joy of God in forgiving:

I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely for mine anger is turned away from

him. I will be as the dew unto Israel: he

shall blossom as the lily, and cast forth his roots as Lebanon. His branches shall spread, and his beauty shall be as the olive tree, and his smell as Lebanon. They that dwell under his shadow shall return; they shall revive as the corn, and blossom as the vine: the scent thereof shall be as the wine of Lebanon. Ephraim shall say, What have I to do any more with idols? I have answered, and will regard him: I am like a green fir tree; from me is thy fruit found.

False prophets may be divided into two classes: the careless optimist and the despairing pessimist. The careless optimist tells us there are no dangers and there need be no fears. He can see nothing in the Nation's history but triumphant democracy. He rolls off from his flattering tongue the figures of its census, the story of its increase of territory, population, and wealth. He claps his hands in exultation, and to all that is evil and corrupt he shuts his eyes; or, if he recognizes in his time some evils, he says time will cure all. As he estimates the Nation, so the individual: the young man must sow his wild oats; the married rake makes the best husband; God is too merciful to punish sin; evil is only good in the making.

Such an optimism is fatal to endeavor. If evil is only good in the making, let us go on and make evil that good may come. If a married rake is the best husband, send him to licentiousness to school to fit him for the domestic circle. If sowing wild oats in youth prepares for a harvest

of wheat in old age, then let us sow wild oats in youth, and so prepare for the harvest of wheat in age. If there are no evils in the Nation which time will not cure, why worry ourselves over primary elections and political corruption?

On the other hand is the pessimist who can see nothing but evil. To him the Nation is on the highway to destruction. We are now on the eve of a revolution as fatal as that which overtook France, as fatal as that which overthrew the Roman Empire. He sees in society only its disintegrating and corrupting influences-the liquorshops, the gambling-hells, the sensational newspapers, the corrupt politicians. He does not think of the thousands of Christian churches and the tens of thousands of homes from which influences for healing and life-giving are issuing. If he looks upon the church, he can see only the defaulting Sunday-school superintendent or the sensational preacher and the false priest. If he looks upon the home, he can see only the stories of scandal and divorce. He sees nothing good in man, nothing uplifting in society. He is inspired by no hope to make any effort for the world's improvement.

Hosea was neither a pessimist nor an optimist. He did not believe in the specious but false aphorism, "Look on the bright side of things." He dared to look on the dark side of things. He dared to face the corruption, the licentiousness, the brigandage, that were eating out the life of his nation-dared to see it and describe it at its worst. Yet in his heart there was a great hope founded on his faith in God and on his love for God. On this faith in the All-Father, on the faith that in humanity there would be found at last some response to the love of the AllFather, his hope for his people was founded. This is the optimism of the true prophet, the optimism of the New Testament, the optimism of Christ, who in the darkest period of the world's history took for his message this: "The kingdom of God is at hand."

That God is love, that sin is infidelity to love, that repentance is return to love, that love is the basis of the inspiration to repentance, and that not in blindness to evil, but in faith that it can be overcome, is the foundation of hope-this is the message of Hosea.