_THE PROBLEM THAT AMOS LEFT_
Amos was a preacher of righteousness almost wholly in its judicial
and punitive offices. Exposing the moral conditions of society in
his day, emphasising on the one hand its obduracy and on the other
the intolerableness of it, he asserted that nothing could avert the
inevitable doom--neither Israel's devotion to Jehovah nor Jehovah's
interest in Israel. _You alone have I known of all the families of
the ground: therefore will I visit upon you all your iniquities._
The visitation was to take place in war and in the captivity of the
people. This is practically the whole message of the prophet Amos.
That he added to it the promise of restoration which now closes his
book, we have seen to be extremely improbable.[443] Yet even if that
promise is his own, Amos does not tell us how the restoration is to
be brought about. With wonderful insight and patience he has traced
the captivity of Israel to moral causes. But he does not show what
moral change in the exiles is to justify their restoration, or by
what means such a moral change is to be effected. We are left to
infer the conditions and the means of redemption from the principles
which Amos enforced while there yet seemed time to pray for the
doomed people: _Seek the Lord and ye shall live_.[444] According to
this, the moral renewal of Israel must precede their restoration; but
the prophet seems to make no great effort to effect the renewal. In
short Amos illustrates the easily-forgotten truth that a preacher to
the conscience is not necessarily a preacher of repentance.
Of the great antitheses between which religion moves, Law and Love,
Amos had therefore been the prophet of Law. But we must not imagine
that the association of Love with the Deity was strange to him.
This could not be to any Israelite who remembered the past of his
people--the romance of their origins and early struggles for freedom.
Israel had always felt the grace of their God; and, unless we be
wrong about the date of the great poem in the end of Deuteronomy,
they had lately celebrated that grace in lines of exquisite beauty
and tenderness:--
_He found him in a desert land,_
_In a waste and a howling wilderness._
_He compassed him about, cared for him,_
_Kept him as the apple of His eye._
_As an eagle stirreth up his nest,_
_Fluttereth over his young,_
_Spreadeth his wings, taketh them,_
_Beareth them up on his pinions--_
_So Jehovah alone led him._[445]
The patience of the Lord with their waywardness and their stubbornness
had been the ethical influence on Israel's life at a time when
they had probably neither code of law nor system of doctrine. _Thy
gentleness_, as an early Psalmist says for his people, _Thy gentleness
hath made me great_.[446] Amos is not unaware of this ancient grace of
Jehovah. But he speaks of it in a fashion which shows that he feels it
to be exhausted and without hope for his generation. _I brought you up
out of the land of Egypt, and led you forty years in the wilderness,
to possess the land of the Amorites. And I raised up of your sons for
prophets and of your young men for Nazirites._[447] But this can now
only fill the cup of the nation's sin. _You alone have I known of
all the families of the earth: therefore will I visit upon you all
your iniquities._[448] Jehovah's ancient Love but strengthens now the
justice and the impetus of His Law.
We perceive, then, the problem which Amos left to prophecy. It
was not to discover Love in the Deity whom he had so absolutely
identified with Law. The Love of God needed no discovery among a
people with the Deliverance, the Exodus, the Wilderness and the Gift
of the Land in their memories. But the problem was to prove in God so
great and new a mercy as was capable of matching that Law, which the
abuse of His millennial gentleness now only the more fully justified.
There was needed a prophet to arise with as keen a conscience of
Law as Amos himself, and yet affirm that Love was greater still; to
admit that Israel were doomed, and yet promise their redemption by
processes as reasonable and as ethical as those by which the doom
had been rendered inevitable. The prophet of Conscience had to be
followed by the prophet of Repentance.
Such an one was found in Hosea, the son of Be'eri, a citizen and
probably a priest of Northern Israel, whose very name, _Salvation_,
the synonym of Joshua and of Jesus, breathed the larger hope, which
it was his glory to bear to his people. Before we see how for this
task Hosea was equipped with the love and sympathy which Amos lacked,
let us do two things. Let us appreciate the magnitude of the task
itself, set to him first of prophets; and let us remind ourselves
that, greatly as he achieved it, the task was not one which could be
achieved even by him once for all, but that it presents itself to
religion again and again in the course of her development.
For the first of these duties, it is enough to recall how much all
subsequent prophecy derives from Hosea. We shall not exaggerate if we
say that there is no truth uttered by later prophets about the Divine
Grace, which we do not find in germ in him. Isaiah of Jerusalem was a
greater statesman and a more powerful writer, but he had not Hosea's
tenderness and insight into motive and character. Hosea's marvellous
sympathy both with the people and with God is sufficient to foreshadow
every grief, every hope, every gospel, which make the books of Jeremiah
and the great Prophet of the Exile exhaustless in their spiritual value
for mankind. Those others explored the kingdom of God: it was Hosea
who took it by storm.[449] He is the first prophet of Grace, Israel's
earliest Evangelist; yet with as keen a sense of law, and of the
inevitableness of ethical discipline, as Amos himself.
But the task which Hosea accomplished was not one that could be
accomplished once for all. The interest of his book is not merely
historical. For so often as a generation is shocked out of its
old religious ideals, as Amos shocked Israel, by a realism and a
discovery of law, which have no respect for ideals, however ancient
and however dear to the human heart, but work their own pitiless way
to doom inevitable; so often must the Book of Hosea have a practical
value for living men. At such a crisis we stand to-day. The older
Evangelical assurance, the older Evangelical ideals have to some
extent been rendered impossible by the realism to which the sciences,
both physical and historical, have most healthily recalled us, and by
their wonderful revelation of Law working through nature and society
without respect to our creeds and pious hopes. The question presses:
Is it still possible to believe in repentance and conversion, still
possible to preach the power of God to save, whether the individual
or society, from the forces of heredity and of habit? We can at least
learn how Hosea mastered the very similar problem which Amos left to
him, and how, with a moral realism no less stern than his predecessor
and a moral standard every whit as high, he proclaimed Love to be
the ultimate element in religion; not only because it moves man to
a repentance and God to a redemption more sovereign than any law;
but because if neglected or abused, whether as love of man or love
of God, it enforces a doom still more inexorable than that required
by violated truth or by outraged justice. Love our Saviour, Love our
almighty and unfailing Father, but, just because of this, Love our
most awful Judge--we turn to the life and the message in which this
eternal theme was first unfolded.
FOOTNOTES:
[443] See above, pp. 193 ff.
[444] v. 4.
[445] Deut. xxxii. 10-12: a song probably earlier than the eighth
century. But some put it later.
[446] Psalm xviii.
[447] ii. 10 f.
[448] iii. 2.
[449] Matt. xi. 12.