There were in this prophetism various elements.[348] First, it contained a nomadic element; that is, some of the prophets were men who looked backward to the simple pastoral life of the desert as the ideal moral life. They regarded civilization as the sum of all evils. Their reading of history was, in the words of Wellhausen, that “as the human race goes forward in civilization, it goes backward in the fear of God.” Second, there was in it a socialistic element. These prophets were the first socialists. Theirs was the first passionate plea for the poor, the wretched, and the heavy-burdened. Third, it contained a predictive element. The prophets were regarded as seers, as foretellers of future events. Fourth, there was in this prophetism an element of pure intuitional morality which was in irreconcilable antagonism to all legal ritual morality. Fifth, it contained a monotheistic element. The later prophets were distinctively teachers of the doctrine that there is only one God, beside whom there is no other. Of these several elements the predictive, or prophetic in the popular sense, has been given such undue prominence that Hebrew prophetism in the minds of many stands for little else than a supernatural forecasting of future events. But, in truth, this is the element of least importance. In the words of Kuenen, the business of the prophets was “not to communicate what shall happen, but to insist upon what _ought_ to happen.”[349] They were preachers of individual and social righteousness. It is this ethical element, forming the very heart and core of their message, which makes the appearance of prophetism in Israel a matter of such transcendent importance for universal history. Our main task in the following pages of this chapter will be to point out this moral element in the message of the prophets, to show how the conception of Yahweh was by them moralized, and how the morality they inculcated became purer and more elevated as the centuries passed, till the evolution culminated in the lofty teachings of the Prophet of Nazareth. [Sidenote: The beginnings of historical prophetism: Elijah and Elisha] The real history of Hebrew prophetism opens with the appearance in the northern kingdom, about the beginning of the ninth century B.C., of the great prophets Elijah and Elisha. It was the moral degeneracy of the times of the monarchy, the inrush of the hateful vices of civilization,--the greed of land[350] and of wealth, the cruel inequalities of the new society, the selfish luxury of the rich, the harsh oppression of the poor, the forgetting of men’s kinship, the substitution of the worship of other gods for the sole worship of Yahweh,--it was all this which called out the vehement protest of these teachers of social justice and national righteousness.