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.