2.  The office of the prophets under the Theocracy, which we first notice, was that of bold reprovers.  They came to rulers and people with an immediate commission from God to rebuke them for their sins; and as the contents of their messages were received from God himself, they exposed the hypocrisy and wickedness of their times in the pure sunlight of truth, denouncing upon great and small alike the awful judgments of Jehovah if they persisted in their impenitence.  If we except the preaching of Christ and his apostles, the history of the world furnishes no such bright examples of faithful dealing with men’s consciences.  They never spare kings and princes from fear of their power and patronage.  They never go round about men’s sins, but declare them directly and faithfully.  With what majesty of severity did Samuel reprove Saul, and Nathan David, and Elijah Ahab, and Elisha Jehoram, and Jehu Jehoshaphat!  And if we open the books of Hebrew prophecy which have come down to us from distant ages and from a very different civil and social order, we find them not in the least antiquated, but fresh as yesterday, instinct with life and power.  They are a mirror of terrible brightness in which we may see reflected our pride, self-sufficiency, vain ostentation, and worldliness; our avarice, fraud, overreaching artifices, breaches of trust, bribery, oppression of the weak, and corrupt combinations for the amassing of filthy lucre; our ambition, slander, falsehood, intrigues, hypocrisy, and vain pretensions; our luxury, prodigality, sensuality, and intemperance; our profaneness, Sabbath-breaking, neglect of God’s ordinances and contempt of his written word—­a mirror too in which we can see in the background dark clouds of judgment, big with awful thunder, such as have already come forth upon our land from the inexhaustible storehouse of divine justice, and are ready to come forth again, but over which hangs the rainbow of mercy for all that will repent and humble themselves before God.

3.  We may next consider the office of the Hebrew prophets as expounders of the Mosaic law—­the Mosaic law in its substance, as distinguished from its outward form.  They never undervalued the letter of the law, since that too was of divine appointment; but they taught men that true obedience must rise above the letter to its spirit.  When Saul excused himself to Samuel for disobeying God’s command on the ground that the people had spared the best of the sheep and oxen to sacrifice to the Lord, the prophet indignantly answered:  “Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt-offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord?  Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.” 1 Sam. 15:22.  “Bring no more vain oblations,” says God to the Jews whose hands were full of oppression and blood; “incense is an abomination unto me:  the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.