and labour just proportions of their joint earnings?  Would a sermon on verse 11 be welcome in the suburbs of industrial centres, where the employers have their ’houses of hewn stone’?  Such houses, side by side with the poor men’s huts, struck the eye of the shepherd from Tekoa as the height of sinful luxury, and still more sinful disproportion in the social condition of the two classes.  What would he have said if he had lived in England or America?  Justice, too, was bought and sold.  A murderer could buy himself off, while the poor man, who could not pay, lost his case.  We do not bribe juries, but (legal) justice is an expensive luxury still, and counsel’s fees put it out of the reach of poor men.

One of the worst features of such a state of society as Amos saw is that men are afraid to speak out in condemnation of it, and the ill weeds grow apace for want of a scythe.  Amos puts a certain sad emphasis on ‘prudent,’ as if he was feeling how little he could be called so, and yet there is a touch of scorn in him too.  The man who is over-careful of his skin or his reputation will hold his tongue; even good men may become so accustomed to the glaring corruptions of society in the midst of which they have always lived, that they do not feel any call to rebuke or wage war against them; but the brave man, the man who takes his ideals from Christ, and judges society by its conformity with Christ’s standard, will not keep silence, and the more he feels that ’It is an evil time’ the more will he feel that he cannot but speak out, whatever comes of his protest.  What masquerades as prudence is very often sinful cowardice, and such silence is treason against Christ.

The third part repeats the exhortation to ‘seek,’ with a notable difference.  It is now ‘good’ that is to be sought, and ‘evil’ that is to be turned from.  These correspond respectively to ‘Jehovah,’ and ’Bethel, Gilgal, and Beersheba,’ in former verses.  That is to say, morality is the garb of religion, and religion is the only true source of morality.  If we are not seeking the things that are lovely and of good report, our professions of seeking God are false; and we shall never earnestly and successfully seek good and hate evil unless we have begun by seeking and finding God, and holding Him in our heart of hearts.  Modern social reformers, who fancy that they can sweeten society without religion, might do worse than go to school to Amos.

Notable, too, is the lowered tone of confidence in the beneficial result of obeying the Prophet’s call.  In the earlier exhortation the promise had been absolute.  ‘Seek ye Me, and ye shall live’; now it has cooled to ‘it may be.’  Is Amos faltering?  No; but while it is always true that blessed life is found by the seeker after God, because He finds the very source of life, it is not always true that the consequences of past turnings from Him are diverted by repentance.  ‘It may be’ that these have to be endured, but even they become tokens of Jehovah’s graciousness, and the purified ‘remnant of Joseph’ will possess the true life more abundantly because they have been exercised thereby.