His prophet recognises two moral standards; right is everywhere right, wrong always wrong, even though committed against Israel’s worst enemies (ii. 1).  What Jehovah demands is righteousness,—­nothing more and nothing less; what He hates is injustice.  Sin or offence to the Deity is a thing of purely moral character; with such emphasis this doctrine had never before been heard.  Morality is that for the sake of which all other things exist; it is the alone essential thing in the world.  It is no postulate, no idea, but at once a necessity and a fact, the most intensely living of personal powers-Jehovah the God of Hosts.  In wrath, in ruin, this holy reality makes its existence known; it annihilates all that is hollow and false.

Amos calls Jehovah the God of Hosts, never the God of Israel.  The nation as such is no religious conception to him; from its mere existence he cannot formulate any article of faith.  Sometimes it seems as if he were denying Israel’s prerogative altogether.  He does not really do so, but at least the prerogative is conditional and involves a heavy responsibility.  The saying in iii. 2 recalls Luke xii. 47.  The proposition “Jehovah knows Israel” is in the mouth of Amos almost the same thing as “Israel knows Jehovah; " save only that this is not to be regarded as any merit on Israel’s part, but as a manifestation of the grace of Jehovah, who has led His people by great deeds and holy men, and so made Himself known.  Amos knows no other truth than that practical one which he has found among his own people and nowhere else, Iying at the foundation of life and morality, and which he regards as the product of a divine providential ordering of history.  From this point of view, so thoroughly Israelitish, he pronounces Israel’s condemnation.  He starts from premisses generally conceded, but he accentuates them differently and draws from them divergent conclusions.

Amos was the founder, and the purest type, of a new phase of prophecy.  The impending conflict of Asshur with Jehovah and Israel, the ultimate downfall of Israel, is its theme.  Until that date there had subsisted in Palestine and Syria a number of petty kingdoms and nationalities, which had their friendships and enmities with one another, but paid no heed to anything outside their own immediate environment, and revolved, each on its own axis, careless of the outside world, until suddenly the Assyrians burst in upon them.  These commenced the work which was carried on by the Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks, and completed by the Romans.  They introduced a new factor, the conception of the world,—­the world of course in the historical sense of that expression.  In presence of that conception the petty nationalities lost their centre of gravity, brute fact dispelled their illusions, they flung their gods to the moles and to the bats (Isaiah ii.).  The prophets of Israel alone did not allow themselves to be taken by surprise by what had occurred, or to be plunged in