It was, however, a very different prophetism from that of the later seers of Israel which was represented by these early teachers. There was in it a large nomadic element. Its representatives looked back to the times of the simple pastoral life of the fathers as the Golden Age of Israel. They hated civilization, that grossly material civilization which Israel, under the lead of an idolatrous and luxurious court, was now adopting from the surrounding nations, and looked upon it as “the sum of all evils.” They were, furthermore, monolatrists rather than monotheists. They believed in sacrifice; but sacrifices must not be offered to strange gods--only to Yahweh. They were fanatical in their zeal for the worship of Israel’s patron God; but even here there was an ethical element, for in their view the triumph of the worship of Yahweh over that of the Baals meant a triumph of the simple, severe, desert morality over the voluptuousness and the nameless vices of the Canaanite civilization. This early prophetism, in a word, was a sort of Puritanism. Renan calls it “this terrible prophetism.” It was fierce, cruel, fanatical, intolerant, like English Puritanism. Indeed, it can best be studied in this modern seventeenth-century prophetism, which was essentially a revival of it. But notwithstanding the imperfect character of this early prophetism, because of the true ethical element it contained,[351] its appearance in Israel and its successful fight against a sensuous idolatry was a matter of vast moral import, for here in this narrow, intolerant monolatry is the real historical beginning of that long religious-ethical development which lends chief significance to the story of Israel, and constitutes a main interest of the history of European civilization. In the words of Renan, “The prophetism which struggled under Ahab and triumphed under Jehu is ... upon the whole the most decisive event in the history of Israel. It forms the commencement of the chain which, after nine hundred years, found the last link in Jesus.”[352] [Sidenote: The moral advance represented by Amos (760 B.C.) and Hosea (738–735 B.C.)]