Alien help, whether in the protection of Assyria or the cavalry which Pharaoh sends in return for Israel's homage; alien gods, whose idols we have ourselves made,—we abjure them all, for we remember how Thou didst promise to show a father's love to the people whom Thou didst name, for their mother's sins, Lo-Ruhamah, the Unfathered. Then God replies:—
smell of clear mountain air with the scent of the pines upon it. The figure in the end of ver. 6 seems forced to some critics, who have proposed various emendations, such as "like the fast-rooted trees of Lebanon,"[658] but any one who has seen how the mountain himself rises from great roots, cast out across the land like those of some giant oak, will not feel it necessary to mitigate the metaphor.
The prophet now speaks:—
God speaks:—
This version is not without its difficulties; but the alternative that God is addressed and Ephraim is the speaker—Ephraim says, What have I to do any more with idols? I answer and look to Him: I am like a green fir-tree; from me is Thy fruit found—has even greater difficulties,[661] although it avoids the unusual comparison of the Deity with a tree. The difficulties of both interpretations may be overcome by dividing the verse between God and the people:—
In this case the speaking would be intended in the same sense as the speaking in chap. ii. to the heavens and earth, that they might speak to the corn and wine.[662] Then Ephraim replies:—
But the division appears artificial, and the text does not suggest that the two I's belong to different speakers. The first version therefore is the preferable.
Some one has added a summons to later generations to lay this book to heart in face of their own problems and sins. May we do so for ourselves!
We have now finished the translation and detailed exposition of Hosea's prophecies. We have followed his minute examination of his people's character; his criticism of his fickle generation's attempts to repent; and his presentation of true religion in contrast to their shallow optimism and sensual superstitions. We have seen an inwardness and spirituality of the highest kind—a love not only warm and mobile, but nobly jealous, and in its jealousy assisted by an extraordinary insight and expertness in character. Why Hosea should be distinguished above all prophets for inwardness and spirituality must by this time be obvious to us. From his remote watchfulness, Amos had seen the nations move across the world as the stars across heaven; had seen, within Israel, class distinct from class, and given types of all: rich and poor; priest, merchant and judge; the panic-stricken, the bully; the fraudulent and the unclean. The observatory of Amos was the world, and the nation. But Hosea's was the home; and there he had watched a human soul decay through every stage from innocence to corruption. It was a husband's study of a wife which made Hosea the most inward of all the prophets. This was the beginning of God's word by him.[663]
Among the subjects in the subtle treatment of which Hosea's service to religion is most original and conspicuous, there are especially three that deserve a more detailed treatment than we have been able to give them. These are the Knowledge of God, Repentance and the Sin against Love. We may devote a chapter to each of them, beginning in this with the most characteristic and fundamental truth Hosea gave to religion—the Knowledge of God.
If to the heart there be one pain more fatal than another, it is the pain of not being understood. That prevents argument: how can you reason with one who will not come to quarters with your real self? It paralyses influence: how can you do your best with one who is blind to your best? It stifles Love; for how dare she continue to speak when she is mistaken for something else? Here as elsewhere "against stupidity the gods themselves fight in vain."
This anguish Hosea had suffered. As closely as two souls may live on earth, he had lived with Gomer. Yet she had never wakened to his worth. She must have been a woman with a power of love, or such a heart had hardly wooed her. He was a man of deep tenderness and exquisite powers of expression. His tact, his delicacy, his enthusiasm are sensible in every chapter of his book. Gomer must have tasted them all before Israel did. Yet she never knew him. It was her curse that, being married, she was not awake to the meaning of marriage, and, being married to Hosea, she never appreciated the holy tenderness and heroic patience which were deemed by God not unworthy of becoming a parable of His own.
Now I think we do not go far wrong if we conclude that it was partly this long experience of a soul that loved, but had neither conscience nor ideal in her love, which made Hosea lay such frequent and pathetic emphasis upon Israel's ignorance of Jehovah. To have his character ignored, his purposes baffled, his gifts unappreciated, his patience mistaken—this was what drew Hosea into that wonderful sympathy with the heart of God towards Israel which comes out in such passionate words as these: My people perish for lack of knowledge.[664] There is no troth, nor leal love, nor knowledge of God in the land.[665] They have not known the Lord.[666] She did not know that I gave her corn and wine.[667] They knew not that I healed them.[668] For now, because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will reject thee.[669] I will have leal love and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather than burnt-offerings.[670] Repentance consists in change of knowledge. And the climax of the new life which follows is again knowledge: I will betroth thee to Me, and thou shall know the Lord.[671] Israel shall cry, My God, we know Thee.[672]
To understand what Hosea meant by knowledge we must examine the singularly supple word which his language lent him to express it. The Hebrew root "Yadh'a,"[673] almost exclusively rendered in the Old Testament by the English verb to know, is employed of the many processes of knowledge, for which richer languages have separate terms. It is by turns to perceive, be aware of, recognise, understand or conceive, experience and be expert in.[674] But there is besides nearly always a practical effectiveness, and in connection with religious objects a moral consciousness.
The barest meaning is to be aware that something is present or has happened, and perhaps the root meant simply to see.[675] But it was the frequent duty of the prophets to mark the difference between perceiving a thing and laying it to heart. Isaiah speaks of the people seeing, but not so as to know;[676] and Deuteronomy renders the latter sense by adding with the heart, which to the Hebrews was the seat, not of the feeling, but of the practical intellect:[677] And thou knowest with thy heart that as a man chastiseth his son, so the Lord your God chastiseth you.[678] Usually, however, the word know suffices by itself. This practical vigour naturally developed in such directions as intimacy, conviction, experience and wisdom. Job calls his familiars my knowers;[679] of a strong conviction he says, I know that my Redeemer liveth,[680] and referring to wisdom, We are of yesterday and know not;[681] while Ecclesiastes says, Whoso keepeth the commandment shall know—that is, experience, or suffer—no evil.[682] But the verb rises into a practical sense—to the knowledge that leads a man to regard or care for its object. Job uses the verb know when he would say, I do not care for my life;[683] and in the description of the sons of Eli, that they were sons of Belial, and did not know God, it means that they did not have any regard for Him.[684] Finally, there is a moral use of the word in which it approaches the meaning of conscience: Their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked.[685] They were aware of this before, but they felt it now with a new sense. Also it is the mark of the awakened and the fullgrown to know, or to feel, the difference between good and evil.[686]
Here, then, we have a word for knowing, the utterance of which almost invariably starts a moral echo, whose very sound, as it were, is haunted by sympathy and by duty. It is knowledge, not as an effort of, so much as an effect upon, the mind. It is not to know so as to see the fact of, but to know so as to feel the force of; knowledge, not as acquisition and mastery, but as impression, passion. To quote Paul's distinction, it is not so much the apprehending as the being apprehended. It leads to a vivid result—either warm appreciation or change of mind or practical effort. It is sometimes the talent conceived as the trust, sometimes the enlistment of all the affections. It is knowledge that is followed by shame, or by love, or by reverence, or by the sense of a duty. One sees that it closely approaches the meaning of our "conscience," and understands how easily there was developed from it the evangelical name for repentance, Metanoia—that is, change of mind under a new impression of facts.
There are three writers who thus use knowledge as the key to the Divine life—in the Old Testament Hosea and the author of Deuteronomy, in the New Testament St. John. We likened Amos to St. John the Baptist: it is not only upon his similar temperament, but far more upon his use of the word knowledge for spiritual purposes, that we may compare Hosea to St. John the Evangelist.
Hosea's chief charge against the people is one of stupidity. High and low they are a people without intelligence.[687] Once he defines this as want of political wisdom: Ephraim is a silly dove without heart, or, as we should say, without brains;[688] and again, as insensibility to every ominous fact: Strangers have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not; yea, grey hairs are scattered upon him, and he knoweth it not,[689] or, as we should say, lays it not to heart.
But Israel's most fatal ignorance is of God Himself. This is the sign and the cause of every one of their defects. There is no troth, nor leal love, nor knowledge of God in the land.[690] They have not known the LORD.[691] They have not known Me.
With the causes of this ignorance the prophet has dealt most explicitly in the fourth chapter.[692] They are two: the people's own vice and the negligence of their priests. Habitual vice destroys a people's brains. Harlotry, wine and new wine take away the heart of My people.[693] Lust, for instance, blinds them to the domestic consequences of their indulgence in the heathen worship, and so the stupid people come to their end.[694] Again, their want of political wisdom is due to their impurity, drunkenness and greed to be rich.[695] Let those take heed who among ourselves insist that art is independent of moral conditions—that wit and fancy reach their best and bravest when breaking from any law of decency. They lie: such licence corrupts the natural intelligence of a people, and robs them of insight and imagination.
Yet Hosea sees that all the fault does not lie with the common people. Their teachers are to blame, priest and prophet alike, for both stumble, and it is true that a people shall be like its priests.[696] The priests have rejected knowledge and forgotten the Torah of their God; they think only of the ritual of sacrifice and the fines by which they fill their mouths. It was, as we have seen, the sin of Israel's religion in the eighth century. To the priests religion was a mass of ceremonies which satisfied the people's superstitions and kept themselves in bread. To the prophets it was an equally sensuous, an equally mercenary ecstasy. But to Hosea religion is above all a thing of the intellect and conscience: it is that knowing which is at once common-sense, plain morality and the recognition by a pure heart of what God has done and is doing in history. Of such a knowledge the priests and prophets are the stewards, and it is because they have ignored their trust that the people have been provided with no antidote to the vices that corrupt their natural intelligence and make them incapable of seeing God.
In contrast to such ignorance Hosea describes the essential temper and contents of a true understanding of God. Using the word knowledge, in the passive sense characteristic of his language, not so much the acquisition as the impression of facts, an impression which masters not only a man's thoughts but his heart and will, Hosea describes the knowledge of God as feeling, character and conscience. Again and again he makes it parallel to loyalty, repentance, love and service. Again and again he emphasises that it comes from God Himself. It is not something which men can reach by their own endeavours, or by the mere easy turning of their fickle hearts. For it requires God Himself to speak, and discipline to chasten. The only passage in which the knowledge of God is described as the immediate prize of man's own pursuit is that prayer of the people on whose facile religiousness Hosea pours his scorn.[697] Let us know, let us follow on to know the Lord, he heard them say, and promise themselves, As soon as we seek Him we shall find Him. But God replies that He can make nothing of such ambitions; they will pass away like the morning cloud and the early dew.[698] This discarded prayer, then, is the only passage in the book in which the knowledge of God is described as man's acquisition. Elsewhere, in strict conformity to the temper of the Hebrew word to know, Hosea presents the knowledge of the Most High, not as something man finds out for himself, but something which comes down on him from above.
The means which God took to impress Himself upon the heart of His people were, according to Hosea, the events of their history. Hosea, indeed, also points to another means. The Torah of thy God, which in one passage[699] he makes parallel to knowledge, is evidently the body of instruction, judicial, ceremonial and social, which has come down by the tradition of the priests. This was not all oral; part of it at least was already codified in the form we now know as the Book of the Covenant.[700] But Hosea treats of the Torah only in connection with the priests. And the far more frequent and direct means by which God has sought to reveal Himself to the people are the great events of their past. These Hosea never tires of recalling. More than any other prophet, he recites the deeds done by God in the origins and making of Israel. So numerous are his references that from them alone we could almost rebuild the early history. Let us gather them together. The nation's father Jacob in the womb overreached his brother, and in his manhood strove with God; yea, he strove with the Angel and he overcame,[701] he wept and supplicated Him; at Bethel he found Him, and there He spake with us—Jehovah God of Hosts, Jehovah is His name.[702] ... And Jacob fled to the territory[703] of Aram, and he served for a wife, and for a wife he tended sheep. And by a prophet Jehovah brought Israel up out of Egypt, and by a prophet he was tended.[704] When Israel was young,[705] then I came to love him, and out of Egypt I called My son.[706] As often as I called to them, so often did they go from Me:[707] they to the Ba'alim kept sacrificing, and to images offering incense. But I taught Ephraim to walk, taking him upon Mine[708] arms, and they did not know that I nursed them.[709] ... Like grapes in the wilderness I found Israel, like the firstfruits on an early fig-tree I saw your fathers; but they went to Ba'al-Peor, and consecrated themselves to the Shame.[710] ... But I am Jehovah thy God from the land of Egypt, and gods besides Me thou knowest not, and Saviour there is none but Me. I knew thee in the wilderness, in the land of burning heats. But the more pasture they had, the more they fed themselves full; as they fed themselves full their heart was lifted up: therefore they forgat Me.[711] ... I Jehovah thy God from the land of Egypt.[712] And all this revelation of God was not only in that marvellous history, but in the yearly gifts of nature and even in the success of the people's commerce: She knew not that it was I who have given her the corn and the wine and the oil, and silver have I multiplied to her.[713]
This, then, is how God gave Israel knowledge of Himself. First it broke upon the Individual, the Nation's Father. And to him it had not come by miracle, but just in the same fashion as it has broken upon men from then until now. He woke to find God no tradition, but an experience. Amid the strife with others of which life for all so largely consists, Jacob became aware that God also has to be reckoned with, and that, hard as is the struggle for bread and love and justice with one's brethren and fellow-men, with the Esaus and with the Labans, a more inevitable wrestle awaits the soul when it is left alone in the darkness with the Unseen. Oh, this is our sympathy with those early patriarchs, not that they saw the sea dry up before them or the bush ablaze with God, but that upon some lonely battle-field of the heart they also endured those moments of agony, which imply a more real Foe than we ever met in flesh and blood, and which leave upon us marks deeper than the waste of toil or the rivalry of the world can inflict. So the Father of the Nation came to find God at Bethel, and there, adds Hosea, where the Nation still worship, God spake with us[714] in the person of our Father.
The second stage of the knowledge of God was when the Nation awoke to His leading, and through a prophet, Moses, were brought up out of Egypt. Here again no miracle is adduced by Hosea, but with full heart he appeals to the grace and the tenderness of the whole story. To him it is a wonderful romance. Passing by all the empires of earth, the Almighty chose for Himself this people that was no people, this tribe that were the slaves of Egypt. And the choice was of love only: When Israel was young I came to love him, and out of Egypt I called My son. It was the adoption of a little slave-boy, adoption by the heart; and the fatherly figure continues, I taught Ephraim to walk, taking him upon Mine arms. It is just the same charm, seen from another point of view, when Hosea hears God say that He had found Israel like grapes in the wilderness, like the firstfruits on an early fig-tree I saw your fathers.
Now these may seem very imperfect figures of the relation of God to this one people, and the ideas they present may be felt to start more difficulties than ever their poetry could soothe to rest: as, for instance, why Israel alone was chosen—why this of all tribes was given such an opportunity to know the Most High. With these questions prophecy does not deal, and for Israel's sake had no need to deal. What alone Hosea is concerned with is the Character discernible in the origin and the liberation of his people. He hears that Character speak for itself; and it speaks of a love and of a joy, to find figures for which it goes to childhood and to spring—to the love a man feels for a child, to the joy a man feels at the sight of the firstfruits of the year. As the human heart feels in those two great dawns, when nothing is yet impossible, but all is full of hope and promise, so humanly, so tenderly, so joyfully had God felt towards His people. Never again say that the gods of Greece were painted more living or more fair! The God of Israel is Love and Springtime to His people. Grace, patience, pure joy of hope and possibility—these are the Divine elements which this spiritual man, Hosea, sees in the early history of his people, and not the miraculous, about which, from end to end of his book, he is utterly silent.
It is ignorance, then, of such a Character, so evident in these facts of their history, with which Hosea charges his people—not ignorance of the facts themselves, not want of devotion to their memory, for they are a people who crowd the sacred scenes of the past, at Bethel, at Gilgal, at Beersheba, but ignorance of the Character which shines through the facts. Hosea also calls it forgetfulness, for the people once had knowledge.[715] The cause of their losing it has been their prosperity in Canaan: As their pastures were increased they grew satisfied; as they grew satisfied their heart was lifted up, and therefore they forgat Me.[716]
Equally instructive is the method by which Hosea seeks to move Israel from this oblivion and bring them to a true knowledge of God. He insists that their recovery can only be the work of God Himself—the living God working in their lives to-day as He did in the past of the nation. To those past deeds it is useless for this generation to go back, and seek again the memory of which they have disinherited themselves. Let them rather realise that the same God still lives. The knowledge of Him may be recovered by appreciating His deeds in the life of to-day. And these deeds must first of all be violence and terror, if only to rouse them from their sensuous sloth. The last verse we have quoted, about Israel's complacency and pride, is followed by this terrible one: I shall be[717] to them like a lion, like a leopard I shall leap[718] upon the way. I will meet them as a bear bereft of her cubs, that I may tear the caul of their heart, that I may devour them there like a lion: the wild beast shall rend them.[719] This means that into Israel's insensibility to Himself God must break with facts, with wounds, with horrors they cannot evade. Till He so acts, their own efforts, then shall we know if we hunt up to know,[720] and their assurance, My God, we do know Thee,[721] are very vain. Hosea did not speak for nothing. Events were about to happen more momentous than even the Exodus and the Conquest of the Land. By 734 the Assyrians had depopulated Gilead and Galilee; in 725 the capital itself was invested, and by 721 the whole nation carried into captivity. God had made Himself known.
We are already aware, however, that Hosea did not count this as God's final revelation to His people. Doom is not doom to him, as it was to Amos, but discipline; and God withdraws His people from their fascinating land only that He may have them more closely to Himself. He will bring His Bride into the wilderness again, the wilderness where they first met, and there, when her soul is tender and her stupid heart broken, He will plant in her again the seeds of His knowledge and His love. The passages which describe this are among the most beautiful of the book. They tell us of no arbitrary conquest of Israel by Jehovah, of no magic and sudden transformation. They describe a process as natural and gentle as a human wooing; they use, as we have seen, the very terms of this: I will woo her, bring her into the wilderness, and speak home to her heart.... And it shall be in that day that thou shalt call Me, My husband, ... and I will betroth thee to Me for ever in righteousness and in justice, and in leal love and in mercies and in faithfulness; and thou shalt know Jehovah.[722]
If we keep in mind what Hosea meant by knowledge—a new impression of facts implying a change both of temper and of conduct—we shall feel how natural it is to pass at once from his doctrine of knowledge to his doctrine of repentance. Hosea may be accurately styled the first preacher of repentance yet so thoroughly did he deal with this subject of eternal interest to the human heart, that between him and ourselves almost no teacher has increased the insight with which it has been examined, or the passion with which it ought to be enforced.
One thing we must hold clear from the outset. To us repentance is intelligible only in the individual. There is no motion of the heart which more clearly derives its validity from its personal character. Repentance is the conscience, the feeling, the resolution of a man by himself and for himself—"I will arise and go to my Father." Yet it is not to the individual that Hosea directs his passionate appeals. For him and his age the religious unit was not the Israelite but Israel. God had called and covenanted with the nation as a whole; He had revealed Himself through their historical fortunes and institutions. His grace was shown in their succour and guidance as a people; His last judgment was threatened in their destruction as a state. So similarly, when by Hosea God calls to repentance, it is the whole nation whom He addresses.
At the same time we must remember those qualifications which we adduced with regard to Hosea's doctrine of the nation's knowledge of God.[723] They affect also his doctrine of the national repentance. Hosea's experience of Israel had been preceded by his experience of an Israelite. For years the prophet had carried on his anxious heart a single human character—lived with her, travailed for her, pardoned and redeemed her. As we felt that this long cure of a soul must have helped Hosea to his very spiritual sense of the knowledge of God, so now we may justly assume that the same cannot have been without effect upon his very personal teaching about repentance. But with his experience of Gomer, there conspired also his intense love for Israel. A warm patriotism necessarily personifies its object. To the passionate lover of his people, their figure rises up one and individual—his mother, his lover, his wife. Now no man ever loved his people more intimately or more tenderly than Hosea loved Israel. The people were not only dear to him, because he was their son, but dear and vivid also for their loneliness and their distinction among the peoples of the earth, and for their long experience as the intimate of the God of grace and lovingkindness. God had chosen this Israel as His Bride; and the remembrance of the unique endowment and lonely destiny stimulated Hosea's imagination in the work of personifying and individualising his people. He treats Israel with the tenderness and particularity with which the Shepherd, leaving the ninety and nine in the wilderness, seeks till He find it the one lost lamb. His analysis of his fickle generation's efforts to repent, of their motives in turning to God, and of their failures, is as inward and definite as if it were a single heart he were dissecting. Centuries have passed; the individual has displaced the nation; the experience of the human heart has been infinitely increased, and prophecy and all preaching has grown more and more personal. Yet it has scarcely ever been found either necessary to add to the terms which Hosea used for repentance, or possible to go deeper in analysing the processes which these denote.
Hosea's most simple definition of repentance is that of returning unto God. For turning and re-turning the Hebrew language has only one verb—shûbh. In the Book of Hosea there are instances in which it is employed in the former sense;[724] but, even apart from its use for repentance, the verb usually means to return. Thus the wandering wife in the second chapter says, I will return to my former husband;[725] and in the threat of judgment it is said, Ephraim will return to Egypt.[726] Similar is the sense in the phrases His deeds will I turn back upon him[727] and I will not turn back to destroy Ephraim.[728] The usual meaning of the verb is therefore, not merely to turn or change, but to turn right round, to turn back and home.[729] This is obviously the force of its employment to express repentance. For this purpose Hosea very seldom uses it alone.[730] He generally adds either the name by which God had always been known, Jehovah,[731] or the designation of Him, as their own God.[732]
We must emphasise this point if we would appreciate the thoroughness of our prophet's doctrine, and its harmony with the preaching of the New Testament. To Hosea repentance is no mere change in the direction of one's life. It is a turning back upon one's self, a retracing of one's footsteps, a confession and acknowledgment of what one has abandoned. It is a coming back and a coming home to God, exactly as Jesus Himself has described in the Parable of the Prodigal. As Hosea again and again affirms, the Return to God, like the New Testament Metanoia, is the effect of new knowledge; but the new knowledge is not of new facts—it is of facts which have been present for a long time and which ought to have been appreciated before.
Of these facts Hosea describes three kinds: the nation's misery, the unspeakable grace of their God, and their great guilt in turning from Him. Again it is as in the case of the prodigal: his hunger, his father, and his cry, "I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight."
We have already felt the pathos of those passages in which Hosea describes the misery and the decay of Israel, the unprofitableness and shame of all their restless traffic with other gods and alien empires. The state is rotten;[733] anarchy prevails.[734] The national vitality is lessened: Ephraim hath grey hairs.[735] Power of birth and begetting have gone; the universal unchastity causes the population to diminish: their glory flieth away like a bird.[736] The presents to Egypt,[737] the tribute to Assyria, drain the wealth of the people: strangers devour his strength.[738] The prodigal Israel has his far-off country where he spends his substance among strangers. It is in this connection that we must take the repeated verse: the pride of Israel testifieth to his face.[739] We have seen[740] the impossibility of the usual exegesis of these words, that by the Pride of Israel Hosea means Jehovah; the word "pride" is probably to be taken in the sense in which Amos employs it of the exuberance and arrogance of Israel's civilisation. If we are right, then Hosea describes a very subtle symptom of the moral awakening whether of the individual or of a community. The conscience of many a man, of many a kingdom, has been reached only through their pride. Pride is the last nerve which comfort and habit leave quick; and when summons to a man's better nature fail, it is still possible in most cases to touch his pride with the presentation of the facts of his decadence. This is probably what Hosea means. Israel's prestige suffers. The civilisation of which they are proud has its open wounds. Their politicians are the sport of Egypt;[741] their wealth, the very gold of their Temple, is lifted by Assyria.[742] The nerve of pride was also touched in the prodigal: "How many hired servants of my father have enough and to spare, while I perish with hunger." Yet, unlike him, this prodigal son of God will not therefore return.[743] Though there are grey hairs upon him, though strangers devour his strength, he knoweth it not; of him it cannot be said that "he has come to himself." And that is why the prophet threatens the further discipline of actual exile from the land and its fruits,[744] of bitter bread[745] and poverty[746] on an unclean soil. Israel must also eat husks and feed with swine before he arises and returns to his God.
But misery alone never led either man or nation to repentance: the sorrow of this world worketh only death. Repentance is the return to God; and it is the awakening to the truth about God, to the facts of His nature and His grace, which alone makes repentance possible. No man's doctrine of repentance is intelligible without his doctrine of God; and it is because Hosea's doctrine of God is so rich, so fair and so tender, that his doctrine of repentance is so full and gracious. Here we see the difference between him and Amos. Amos had also used the phrase with frequency; again and again he had appealed to the people to seek God and to return to God.[747] But from Amos it went forth only as a pursuing voice, a voice crying in the wilderness. Hosea lets loose behind it a heart, plies the people with gracious thoughts of God, and brings about them, not the voices only, but the atmosphere, of love. I will be as the dew unto Israel, promises the Most High; but He is before His promise. The chapters of Hosea are drenched with the dew of God's mercy, of which no drop falls on those of Amos, but there God is rather the roar as of a lion, the flash as of lightning. Both prophets bid Israel turn to God; but Amos means by that, to justice, truth and purity, while Hosea describes a husband, a father, long-suffering and full of mercy. "I bid you come back," cries Amos. But Hosea pleads, "If only you were aware of what God is, you would come back." "Come back to God and live," cries Amos; but Hosea, "Come back to God, for He is Love." Amos calls, "Come back at once, for there is but little time left till God must visit you in judgment"; but Hosea, "Come back at once, for God has loved you so long and so kindly." Amos cries, "Turn, for in front of you is destruction"; but Hosea, "Turn, for behind you is God." And that is why all Hosea's preaching of repentance is so evangelical. "I will arise and go to my Father."
But the third element of the new knowledge which means repentance is the conscience of guilt. My Father, I have sinned. On this point it might be averred that the teaching of Hosea is less spiritual than that of later prophets in Israel, and that here at last he comes short of the evangelical inwardness of the New Testament. There is truth in the charge; and here perhaps we feel most the defects of his standpoint, as one who appeals, not to the individual, but to the nation as a whole. Hosea's treatment of the sense of guilt cannot be so spiritual as that, say, of the fifty-first Psalm. But, at least, he is not satisfied to exhaust it by the very thorough exposure which he gives us of the social sins of his day, and of their terrible results. He, too, understands what is meant by a conscience of sin. He has called Israel's iniquity harlotry, unfaithfulness to God; and in a passage of equal insight and beauty of expression he points out that in the service of the Ba'alim Jehovah's people can never feel anything but a harlot's shame and bitter memories of the better past.
Rejoice not, O Israel, to the pitch of rapture like the heathen: for thou hast played the harlot from thine own God; 'tis hire thou hast loved on all threshing-floors. Floor and vat shall not acknowledge them; the new wine shall play them false.[748] Mere children of nature may abandon themselves to the riotous joy of harvest and vintage festivals, for they have never known other gods than are suitably worshipped by these orgies. But Israel has a past—the memory of a holier God, the conscience of having deserted Him for material gifts. With such a conscience she can never enjoy the latter; as Hosea puts it, they will not acknowledge or take to[749] her. Here there is an instinct of the profound truth, that even in the fulness of life conscience is punishment; by itself the sense of guilt is judgment.
But Hosea does not attack the service of strange gods only because it is unfaithfulness to Jehovah, but also because, as the worship of images, it is a senseless stupidity utterly inconsistent with that spiritual discernment of which repentance so largely consists. And with the worship of heathen idols Hosea equally condemns the worship of Jehovah under the form of images.
Hosea was the first in Israel to lead the attack upon the idols. Elijah had assaulted the worship of a foreign god, but neither he nor Elisha nor Amos condemned the worship of Israel's own God under the form of a calf. Indeed Amos, except in one doubtful passage,[750] never at all attacks idols or false gods. The reason is very obvious. Amos and Elijah were concerned only with the proclamation of God as justice and purity: and to the moral aspects of religion the question of idolatry is not relevant; the two things do not come directly into collision. But Hosea had deeper and more wide views of God, with which idolatry came into conflict at a hundred points. We know what Hosea's knowledge of God was—how spiritual, how extensive—and we can appreciate how incongruous idolatry must have appeared against it. We are prepared to find him treating the images, whether of the Ba'alim or of Jehovah, with that fine scorn which a passionate monotheism, justly conscious of its intellectual superiority, has ever passed upon the idolatry even of civilisations in other respects higher than its own. To Hosea the idol is an 'eseb, a made thing.[751] It is made of the very silver and gold with which Jehovah Himself had endowed the people.[752] It is made only to be cut off[753] by the first invader! Chiefly, however, does Hosea's scorn fall upon the image under which Jehovah Himself was worshipped. Thy Calf, O Samaria![754] he contemptuously calls it. From Israel is it also, as much as the Ba'alim. A workman made it, and no god is it: chips shall the Calf of Samaria become! In another place he mimics the anxiety of Samaria for their Calf; his people mourn for him, and his priestlings writhe for his glory, why?—because it is going into exile:[755] the gold that covers him shall be stripped for the tribute to Assyria. And once more: They continue to sin; they make them a smelting of their silver, idols after their own modelling, smith's work all of it. To these things they speak! Sacrificing men actually kiss calves![756] All this is in the same vein of satire which we find grown to such brilliance in the great Prophet of the Exile.[757] Hosea was the first in whom it sparkled; and it was due to his conception of the knowledge of God. Its relevancy to his doctrine of repentance is this, that so spiritual an apprehension of God as repentance implies, so complete a metanoia or change of mind, is intellectually incompatible with idolatry. You cannot speak of repentance to men who kiss calves and worship blocks of wood. Hence he says: Ephraim is wedded to idols: leave him alone.[758]
There was more than idolatry, however, in the way of Israel's repentance. The whole of the national worship was an obstacle. Its formalism and its easy and mechanical methods of turning to God disguised the need of that moral discipline and change of heart, without which no repentance can be genuine. Amos had contrasted the ritualism of the time with the duty of civic justice and the service of the poor:[759] Hosea opposes to it leal love and the knowledge of God. I will have leal love and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather than burnt-offerings.[760] It is characteristic of Hosea to class sacrifices with idols. Both are senseless and inarticulate, incapable of expressing or of answering the deep feelings of the heart. True repentance, on the contrary, is rational, articulate, definite. Take with you words, says Hosea, and so return to Jehovah.[761]
To us who, after twenty-five more centuries of talk, know painfully how words may be abused, it is strange to find them enforced as the tokens of sincerity. But let us consider against what the prophet enforces them. Against the kissing of calves and such mummery—worship of images that neither hear nor speak. Let us remember the inarticulateness of ritualism, how it stifles rather than utters the feelings of the heart. Let us imagine the dead routine of the legal sacrifices, their original symbolism worn bare, bringing forward to the young hearts of new generations no interpretation of their ancient and distorted details, reducing those who perform them to irrational machines like themselves. Then let us remember how our own Reformers had to grapple with the same hard mechanism in the worship of their time, and how they bade the heart of every worshipper speak—speak for itself to God with rational and sincere words. So in place of the frozen ritualism of the Church there broke forth from all lands of the Reformation, as though it were birds in springtime, a great burst of hymns and prayers, with the clear notes of the Gospel in the common tongue. So intolerable was the memory of what had been, that it was even enacted that henceforth no sacrament should be dispensed but the Word should be given to the people along with it. If we keep all these things in mind, we shall know what Hosea means when he says to Israel in their penitence, Take with you words.
No one, however, was more conscious of the danger of words. Upon the lips of the people Hosea has placed a confession of repentance, which, so far as the words go, could not be more musical or pathetic.[762] In every Christian language it has been paraphrased to an exquisite confessional hymn. But Hosea describes it as rejected. Its words are too easy; its thoughts of God and of His power to save are too facile. Repentance, it is true, starts from faith in the mercy of God, for without this there were only despair. Nevertheless in all true penitence there is despair. Genuine sorrow for sin includes a feeling of the irreparableness of the past, and the true penitent as he casts himself upon God does not dare to feel that he ever can be the same again. I am no more worthy to be called Thy son: make me as one of Thy hired servants. Such necessary thoughts as these Israel does not mingle with her prayer. Come and let us return to Jehovah, for He hath torn only that He may heal, and smitten only that He may bind up. He will revive us again in a couple of days, on the third day raise us up, that we may live before Him. Then shall we know if we hunt up to know the Lord. As soon as we seek Him we shall find Him: and He shall come upon us like winter-rain, and like the spring-rain pouring on the land. This is too facile, too shallow. No wonder that God despairs of such a people. What am I to make of thee, Ephraim?[763]
Another familiar passage, the Parable of the Heifer, describes the same ambition to reach spiritual results without spiritual processes. Ephraim is a broken-in heifer—one that loveth to tread out the corn. But I will pass upon her goodly neck. I will give Ephraim a yoke, Judah must plough. Jacob must harrow for himself.[764] Cattle, being unmuzzled by law[765] at threshing time, loved this best of all their year's work. Yet to reach it they must first go through the harder and unrewarded trials of ploughing and harrowing. Like a heifer, then, which loved harvest only, Israel would spring at the rewards of penitence, the peaceable fruits of righteousness, without going through the discipline and chastisement which alone yield them. Repentance is no mere turning or even re-turning. It is a deep and an ethical process—the breaking up of fallow ground, the labour and long expectation of the sower, the seeking and waiting for Jehovah till Himself send the rain. Sow to yourselves in righteousness; reap in proportion to love (the love you have sown), break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek Jehovah, until He come and rain righteousness upon us.[766]
A repentance so thorough as this cannot but result in the most clear and steadfast manner of life. Truly it is a returning not by oneself, but a returning by God, and it leads to the keeping of leal love and justice, and waiting upon God continually.[767]
The Love of God is a terrible thing—that is the last lesson of the Book of Hosea. My God will cast them away.[768]
My God—let us remember the right which Hosea had to use these words. Of all prophets he was the first to break into the full aspect of the Divine Mercy—to learn and to proclaim that God is Love. But he was worthy to do so, by the patient love of his own heart towards another who for years had outraged all his trust and tenderness. He had loved, believed and been betrayed; pardoned and waited and yearned, and sorrowed and pardoned again. It is in this long-suffering that his breast beats upon the breast of God with the cry My God. As he had loved Gomer, so had God loved Israel, past hope, against hate, through ages of ingratitude and apostasy. Quivering with his own pain, Hosea has exhausted all human care and affection for figures to express the Divine tenderness, and he declares God's love to be deeper than all the passion of men, and broader than all their patience: How can I give thee up, Ephraim? How can I let thee go, Israel? I will not execute the fierceness of Mine anger. For I am God, and not man. And yet, like poor human affection, this Love of God, too, confesses its failure—My God shall cast them away. It is God's sentence of relinquishment upon those who sin against His Love, but the poor human lips which deliver it quiver with an agony of their own, and here, as more explicitly in twenty other passages of the book, declare it to be equally the doom of those who outrage the love of their fellow men and women.
We have heard it said: "The lives of men are never the same after they have loved; if they are not better they must be worse." "Be afraid of the love that loves you: it is either your heaven or your hell." "All the discipline of men springs from their love—if they take it not so, then all their sorrow must spring from the same source." "There is a depth of sorrow, which can only be known to a soul that has loved the most perfect thing and beholds itself fallen." These things are true of the Love, both of our brother and of our God. And the eternal interest of the life of Hosea is that he learned how, for strength and weakness, for better for worse, our human and our Divine loves are inseparably joined.
Most men learn that love is inseparable from pain where Hosea learned it—at home. There it is that we are all reminded that when love is strongest she feels her weakness most. For the anguish which love must bear, as it were from the foundation of the world, is the contradiction at her heart between the largeness of her wishes and the littleness of her power to realise them. A mother feels it, bending over the bed of her child, when its body is racked with pain or its breath spent with coughing. So great is the feeling of her love that it ought to do something, that she will actually feel herself cruel because nothing can be done. Let the sick-bed become the beach of death, and she must feel the helplessness and the anguish still more as the dear life is now plucked from her and now tossed back by the mocking waves, and then drawn slowly out to sea upon the ebb from which there is no returning.
But the pain which disease and death thus cause to love is nothing to the agony that Sin inflicts when he takes the game into his unclean hands. We know what pain love brings, if our love be a fair face and fresh body in which Death brands his sores while we stand by, as if with arms bound. But what if our love be a childlike heart, and a frank expression and honest eyes, and a clean and clever mind. Our powerlessness is just as great and infinitely more tormented when Sin comes by and casts his shadow over these. Ah, that is Love's greatest torment when her children, who have run from her to the bosom of sin, look back and their eyes are changed! That is the greatest torment of Love—to pour herself without avail into one of those careless natures which seem capacious and receptive, yet never fill with love, for there is a crack and a leak at the bottom of them. The fields where Love suffers her sorest defeats are not the sick-bed and not death's margin, not the cold lips and sealed eyes kissed without response; but the changed eyes of children, and the breaking of "the full-orbed face," and the darkening look of growing sons and daughters, and the home the first time the unclean laugh breaks across it. To watch, though unable to soothe, a dear body racked with pain, is peace beside the awful vigil of watching a soul shrink and blacken with vice, and your love unable to redeem it.
Such a clinical study Hosea endured for years. The prophet of God, we are told, brought a dead child to life by taking him in his arms and kissing him. But Hosea with all his love could not make Gomer a true whole wife again. Love had no power on this woman—no power even at the merciful call to make all things new. Hosea, who had once placed all hope in tenderness, had to admit that Love's moral power is not absolute. Love may retire defeated from the highest issues of life. Sin may conquer Love.
Yet it is in this his triumph that Sin must feel the ultimate revenge. When a man has conquered this weak thing and beaten her down beneath his feet, God speaks the sentence of abandonment.
There is enough of the whipped dog in all of us to make us dread penalty when we come into conflict with the strong things of life. But it takes us all our days to learn that there is far more condemnation to them who offend the weak things of life, and particularly the weakest of all, its love. It was on sins against the weak that Christ passed His sternest judgments: Woe unto him that offends one of these little ones; it were better for him that he had never been born. God's little ones are not only little children, but all things which, like little children, have only love for their strength. They are pure and loving men and women—men with no weapon but their love, women with no shield but their trust. They are the innocent affections of our own hearts—the memories of our childhood, the ideals of our youth, the prayers of our parents, the faith in us of our friends. These are the little ones of whom Christ spake, that he who sins against them had better never have been born. Often may the dear solicitudes of home, a father's counsels, a mother's prayers, seem foolish things against the challenges of a world, calling us to play the man and do as it does; often may the vows and enthusiasms of boyhood seem impertinent against the temptations which are so necessary to manhood: yet let us be true to the weak, for if we betray them, we betray our own souls. We may sin against law and maim or mutilate ourselves, but to sin against love is to be cast out of life altogether. He who violates the purity of the love with which God has filled his heart, he who abuses the love God has sent to meet him in his opening manhood, he who slights any of the affections, whether they be of man or woman, of young or of old, which God lays upon us as the most powerful redemptive forces of our life, next to that of His dear Son—he sinneth against his own soul, and it is of such that Hosea spake: My God will cast them away.
We talk of breaking law: we can only break ourselves against it. But if we sin against Love, we do destroy her; we take from her the power to redeem and sanctify us. Though in their youth men think Love a quick and careless thing—a servant always at their side, a winged messenger easy of despatch—let them know that every time they send her on an evil errand she returns with heavier feet and broken wings. When they make her a pander they kill her outright. When she is no more they waken to that which Gomer came to know, that love abused is love lost, and love lost means Hell.
This, however, is only the margin from which Hosea beholds an abandonment still deeper. All that has been said of human love and the penalty of outraging it is equally true of the Divine love and the sin against that.
The love of God has the same weakness which we have seen in the love of man. It, too, may fail to redeem; it, too, has stood defeated on some of the highest moral battle-fields of life. God Himself has suffered anguish and rejection from sinful men. "Herein," says a theologian, "is the mystery of this love, ... that God can never by His Almighty Power compel that which is the very highest gift in the life of His creatures—love to Himself, but that He receives it as the free gift of His creatures, and that He is only able to allow men to give it to Him in a free act of their own will." So Hosea also has told us how God does not compel, but allure or woo, the sinful back to Himself. And it is the deepest anguish of the prophet's heart, that this free grace of God may fail through man's apathy or insincerity. The anguish appears in those frequent antitheses in which his torn heart reflects herself in the style of his discourse. I have redeemed them—yet have they spoken lies against Me.[769] I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness—they went to Ba'al-Peor.[770] When Israel was a child, then I loved him ... but they sacrificed to Ba'alim.[771] I taught Ephraim to walk, but they knew not that I healed them.[772] How can I give thee up, Ephraim? how can I let thee go, O Israel?... Ephraim compasseth Me with lies, and the house of Israel with deceit![773]