For lo, he that formeth the mountains, and createth the wind, That maketh the morning darkness, And treadeth upon the high places of the earth, – 1 wherein it is left undefined whether His "hosts" are the hosts of heaven, the forces of nature, or the armies of men. It is a comprehensive term for whatever agency, natural or spiritual, works His purpose in the world. Hence the great natural forces, not deified as by the heathen, nor distributed among various wills as by polytheists, are rather Jehovah's ways of speaking to men and thereby revealing warnings and directions for human life. They are not blind or occult forces, such as men invoke by divination, but the reasonable work of a single mind and a justifiable purpose; hence consistent with themselves and meant for the comprehension of men (see Amos iii, 3-8). A notable feature of the prophetic utterance, therefore, is the immense part that nature plays. The prophets are the earliest and greatest poets of nature. Not only the violent and exceptional forces, seemingly so arbitrary and unguided, such as earthquake, volcanic fires, destructive storms, blight and locusts, devouring worms, pestilence (see, for example, Joel i, 2-ii, 14; Amos iv, 6-13; vii, 1–9), -but the regular and beneficent powers too, the fruitful round of seasons, the gentle influences of sun and rain, the response of nature to cultivation (see, for example, Hos. ii, 8-23; Isa. v, I-7), are eloquent of Jehovah's will and purpose. The mind of God is thus felt as intimately inwoven with nature, making its aspects the reflection of the spiritual condition of men; so that in the more highly wrought passages nature is prophesied as smiling and fertile, or barren and desolate, according to the prevailing spirit that actuates the inhabitants. 1 Amos iv, 13. NOTE. See, for instance, Isa. xi, 6-9, where all venomous reptiles and beasts of prey are figured as in peaceful harmony with the wise and beneficent sway of the shoot out of the stock of Jesse," a state of things repeated in Isa. lxv, 25; see also Isa. xxxiv, 8-15, where utter desolation and barrenness are predicated of a land (Edom) wherein blood feud and the spirit of cruelty hold sway. toward His In the world of human affairs, likewise, where are devastating wars and mysterious movements of empire, Jehovah Attitude is still the Director and Wielder, choosing and torical Move- using his fitting agencies, making men's small ments purposes work out his great one. All this comes to light in a gradually enlarging view, of which all the prophets are in greater or less degree aware. The brutal Assyrian power, coming upon Israel so resistlessly, is interpreted and limited as an instrument of Jehovah's purpose (Isa. x, 5-19; xxxvii, 28, 29); the limits of Nebuchadnezzar's power, under whom the people of the kingdom of Judah were subdued and carried into exile, are predicted and bounded (Jer. li, 34, 44); the later more humane and civilizing function of Cyrus is approved and supported (Isa. xliv, 28-xlv, 7). In a word, the prophets are conforming their thought and imagery not to the provincial scale of Palestine but to the universal scale of the world. As prophecy goes on, too, it becomes as limitless in time as in space. It forecasts a range and height of conditions which must needs require all history and all time to make eternal (Isa. ii, 2-4; lxv, 17-25). As the message of the prophets was rather to nations. than to individuals, their conception of character is in the Large Units absolute and in the mass, -a whole nation's traits of Character at once. The nation or race, with the large resultant of its inherited and cultivated traits, was its unit of character; its fortunes and destiny those of an organic community. The religious and moral principles inculcated are indeed the same for individual and nation; but it is with the kind of nation that the sum of individual traits produces, the whole nation as it were a solidarity and composite personality, that the prophets are concerned. The Hebrew race's survival and mission in the large movements of the times, accordingly, depend on their character and stamina as a people educated in Jehovah's ways and molded morally to his will. This solidarity of estimate holds for other nations as truly as for Israel. The various nations by whom they were surrounded, with the type of character impressed on them by history and culture, were to the prophets like persons in a great world drama. They were individualized and judged accordingly; much as in modern thought we estimate the French or Teutonic or Celtic type of character. There was Moab with its aristocratic pride; Edom with its heartless inhumanity; Tyre 'with its trafficking commercial spirit; Assyria with its brutal arrogance; Babylonia with the "exactress" spirit of its ancient culture; Egypt with its craftiness and its inefficiency. All these were organic communal forces which Jehovah was wielding to his will and purpose. The prophets were keen and penetrative students of their neighbor nationalities, and knew their hereditary and developed traits. A considerable proportion of the work of the three leading literary prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, is devoted to oracles on the nations (Isa. xiii– xxiii; Jer. xlvi-li; Ezek. xxv-xxxii); their fate, with that of Israel, being also a matter of intimate concern to Jehovah. Even Amos the herdsman prophet, in the beginning of the era of prophetic stress, shows his acquaintance with national origins, and scores their sins against humanity as one who has followed their history and temperament (Amos ix, 7; i, 3-ii, 8). In the midst of these nations, its destiny vitally inwoven with theirs, the little Hebrew nation must needs maintain its own racial type of culture and character intact, so that it The Hebrew can hold its own and fulfill its unique mission in the movement of the ages. To this object the prophets, in singleness of spirit and aim, conform their warnings and promises. They have for Israel an ideal of communal integrity, of civic and social righteousness; which ideal must be held clear and strong before the people, and to which they must be brought back from all their perverseness and errors. As their standard of life was higher than that of any other nation, so it was of corresponding moment that they be held sternly to it, in order to be, as a prophet expresses it, "an ensign of the peoples" (see Isa. xi, 10, 12; xlix, 22; lxii, 10). Hence the prophets' prevailing tone of rebuke and judgment. As we read their utterances superficially, reproof and correction seems the dominating note; and the boon held out to the people is not that of glory and ascendancy in the earth but of penitence and return to Jehovah. In their view, as Israel must evolve a type of character for the spiritual uses of the world, so this must be correspondingly thorough and morally sound. "You only have I known of all the families of the earth," was Jehovah's word to them through Amos; "therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities (Amos iii, 2). III The Forecast in Joel. From these general considerations. of the prophetic style we return now to the historic and prophetic situation with which the literary prophets deal. As we have seen, they are working in the dim presage of an impending world movement, in which Israel is to play a momentous though hidden part. As preparation for this, the nation must pass through a searching ordeal: must suffer from invasions and cruel wrongs on the part of the stronger nations, must experience the break-up of their state and the evils of exile, must endure outrage of injustice which will seem to make their allegiance to Jehovah a futile thing. Yet out of it all will come some destiny nobler than could otherwise be (cf. Hab. i, 5). The prophetic foresight of this strange experience comes but gradually, each successive prophet having a presage only of the next stage; but along with this progress of prophecy comes by degrees the sense that it is to be not only an ordeal to be weathered but an opportunity to be seized and turned to good. It takes a long period of prophetic education to forecast and interpret the successive stages of this national experience; each prophet contributing his share as fitting the existing situation. One prophet there is, however, who, taking occasion of a destructive scourge of nature, announces that "the day of Jehovah is at hand,” and draws a presage of the larger design of God, from the mysterious present judgment to the divine purpose far beyond. It is the prophet Joel. We know nothing of him, except that he is called "Joel, the son of Pethuel"; nor of the date of his book. The opinion of critics is divided as to whether he is the earliest or the latest of the literary prophets, the majority holding that he is late. My opinion is that he is the earliest of them; that he was a native of the kingdom of Judah, prophesying a few years before Amos. The purport of his message is the same, whatever period we assign him to; but it seems better to fit the times soon after the death of Elisha. He is a kind of herald prophet, who in brief outline gives, so to say, a broad program of Jehovah's progressive design in the momentous crisis now impending. A tremendous plague of locusts, such as the oldest inhabitants have never seen or heard of, has ravaged the The Locust land, destroying all the vegetation, so that even Scourge the offering of grains and fruits for the Temple fails. The prophet uses this as the cue of his message; describing in realistic details the widespread desolation and distress it has wrought, and calling on the priests of the |