[441] viii. 14 is also rejected by Wellhausen and Cornill.
[442] _Loc. cit._
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.