How easy it is to force a nation to give up its usages and peculiarities, and to accept those of strangers, if the rulers act with subtlety and force combined! The Israelites in the kingdom of the Ten Tribes had already been demoralised, owing to their half-century's separation from Jerusalem (the centre of intellectual activity), and to the bull-worship which they had long been practising. The cities had acquired a taste for luxury, and a love of dissipation, which the impure worship of Baal and Astarte only served to foster. The towns doubtless, for the most part, yielded to the new state of things, or, in any case, offered no opposition to it. Seven thousand individuals alone remained firm, and would not pay homage to Baal, nor adore him with their lips. A part of the nation, amongst them the villagers, meanwhile wavered in their ideas and actions, and not knowing whether God or Baal was the mightier divinity, they worshipped the one publicly and the other secretly. It was a period of uncertainty and confusion, such as usually precedes an historical crisis. It remained to be seen whether the ancient belief in the God of Israel, and the demands of holiness had taken sufficiently deep root, and had acquired enough vitality and power to conquer an opposing force and eradicate what was foreign. In such times a man of striking personality, in whom lives a pure faith, and who is entirely ruled by it, naturally assumes leadership, and by firmness, enthusiasm and heroic self-sacrifice convinces the waverers, strengthens the weak, incites the indifferent, and thus collects an army of defenders to rescue from imminent destruction their own national, peculiar endowments. When such an individual is roused by the very opposition of the enemy, and spurred on to action, he becomes a vivifying principle, and brings about a new state of things, a mingling of both old and new elements. Such an individual arose during this crisis in the person of the prophet Elijah (920-900).