The difference between the prophets and the wise men is equally marked. We have seen that the characteristic of the wise men, as illustrated by the books of Proverbs and of Ecclesiastes, is that they inculcate ethical maxims based sometimes upon conscience, but more generally upon prudential considerations. There are few or no maxims in the prophets. They rarely even quote a proverb, still more rarely employ the proverbial method. Their appeal is not to experience; their theme is not the duty of man to man. It is true that they have much to say of the sin of inhumanity, much of the duty of considering the poor and the oppressed; but the sin is almost invariably treated as a sin against Jehovah, the punishment as inflicted by Jehovah. To oppress the poor, keep the debtor's pledge of clothing overnight in violation of the law, live in sensuality and intemperance, is to transgress the law of Jehovah; to seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow, is to return to Jehovah and be cleansed by him. The teachings of the prophets are ethical, but the sanctions of those teachings are divine; sin is more than folly, more than violation of law; more than wrong inflicted upon a neighbor; it is disloyalty to God- who is the king, the father, the husband, of his people, disobedience to whom is treachery in the citizen, unfilial conduct in the son, unfaithfulness in the wife.

1 Amos ii. 6-8; Micah ii. 1, 2; iii. 9-12; Isa. iii. 15; v. 8-20; i. 16-18.

The difference between the prophets and the poets is perhaps not so striking; for the poet is also a prophet and the prophet is also a poet. There is reason to believe that the prophets sometimes sang their utterances in a monotonous chant; some of them are poetic in form, more of them in spirit.1 Yet there is a real difference between the poets whether lyric, epic, or dramatic and the prophets, in that the former describe experiences either their own or dramatically that of others, and leave the experience to convey its own lesson, while the prophets are distinctly and directly didactic. The poets are interpreters of life, generally of religious life; the prophets are teachers of truth, always of religious truth. The conscious object of the former is to express themselves, the conscious object of the latter to impress their auditors; the former sing, the latter speak; the former are poets primarily, preachers secondarily; the latter are preachers primarily, poets secondarily. Speaking broadly, we shall not be far wrong if we say that the poets are didactic poets and the prophets are poetical teachers; the poetry of the first is imbued with a religious purpose, the preaching of the second is imbued with a poetic spirit.

That Jehovah is a righteous Person, that his laws are righteous laws, that obedience to them requires sobriety, humanity, and reverence, that no

1 1 Sam. x. 5. For poetical forms see the translations in the Polychrome Bible, or in The Book of Isaiah or The Book of the Twelve Prophets, by George Adam Smith.

sacred ceremonial can serve as a substitute for such obedience, that man's inhumanity to man is a sin against God and that the only genuine repentance is a return to Jehovah and to a life of righteousness, is the common teaching of all these prophets : and yet their messages are as various as their characters. Amos is a moral reformer, appears suddenly in the midst of Israel's greatest apparent prosperity but real corruption and hastening decay, to denounce the nation's profligacy and inhumanity, expose the falsity of hopes built on a traditional theology and a ceremonial religion, and foretell coming disaster and doom; Hosea is a poet, who has learned the deepest truths of human sinfulness and divine love in the school of his own bitter experience, the infidelity of his wife has brought home to him the guilt of Israel's disloyalty to Jehovah, his own long-suffering love for his wife has taught him the strong love of Jehovah, too deep to be destroyed by human sin, however damnable; Isaiah is a statesman, strong leader of the people, wise counselor of kings, whose courage sustains the heart of the people in dire disaster, whose wisdom might have saved the kingdom from destruction had the kings followed his counsels; Micah is the prophet of the poor, the religious socialist of his age, who denounces the greed of the rich and the vices of the capital, and for the nation's redemption looks not to the court or the city but to the country village and the ranks of the plain people; Zephaniah, living in the superficial

and transient reforms of King Josiah, perceives how superficial and transient they are, and utters the one word of warning against the hopes which are built upon them; Nahum, with a fine scorn of imperial greatness inspired by the spirit of cruelty, foretells the siege and fall of Nineveh, city of blood and of ceaseless rapine; Habakkuk is a skeptic with clinging faith, whose verse begins with the skeptic's cry, “O Lord, how long shall I cry and thou wilt not hear," and ends with the answer of faith, "Though the fig tree shall not blossom neither shall fruit be in the vines, . yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation; "1 Obadiah is an outraged idealist, whose indignation in the hour of his nation's apparent ruin cries out against the apathy of a kindred people gloating over his brother's misfortune; Jeremiah is the first distinctive individualist among the Hebrew prophets, a Huguenot in an age ruled by the Medici, a Savonarola in an age of Alexander VI., execrating himself, at times execrating his age and his people, at other times pleading with them for Jehovah and with Jehovah for them, with infinite pathos, and amidst the ruins of the old covenant destroyed by Israel's sin and Jehovah's consequent repudiation of it, prophesying a new covenant with the elect individuals saved from the nation's wreck, strange, sad, self-contradictory, eloquent, pathetic, despairing, brave, a Protestant before Protestantism, a Puritan before 1 Nah. iii. 1; Hab. i. 2; iii. 17, 18.

Puritanism; Ezekiel is the prophet of the Exile, endeavoring to preserve the faith of his people by solidifying their religious institutions and codifying their ecclesiastical laws, the first of the prophets to prophesy in writing, the literary prophet, therefore, churchman among prophets, prophet among churchmen, unlike most churchmen of later history, emphasizing the universal Presence where there is neither Temple nor ritual, and the divine Immanence as the secret of all life and the hope of all the future; the Great Unknown is the most catholic of all the prophets, recognizes even in the pagan Emperor Cyrus the Great a messenger and servant of Jehovah, foresees the coming of pagan peoples to share Israel's future glory, is the first of Hebrew teachers to see that suffering is not a sign of divine displeasure but a commission to divine service, first to see that the suffering for sin is to be cured by sinless suffering, first to foresee a Suffering Servant of Jehovah yet to come, out of the travail of whose soul a new Israel will be born,- of all the Hebrew prophets the one with the widest horizon and the deepest insight; Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi are prophets of the restoration: Haggai, a churchman who urges on the rebuilding of the Temple; Zechariah, a contemporary of the same school, whose mystic visions are as untranslatable into prose as those of Percivale in Tennyson's "Holy Grail;" Malachi, a Puritan prophet who protests against those corruptions of life and doctrine which always accompany an ecclesiastical