From his call the Prophet went forth, as we saw, with a heavy sense of the responsibility and the power of the single soul, so far as he himself was concerned; and while we study his ministry we shall find him coming to feel the same for each of his fellow-men. But in these his earliest utterances he follows his predecessors, and especially Hosea, in addressing his people as a whole, and treating Israel as a moral unit from the beginning of her history to the moment of his charge to her. He continues the figures which Hosea had used. Long ago in Egypt God chose Israel for His child, for His bride, and led her through the desert to a fair and fruitful land of her own. Then her love was true. The term used for it, _ḥeṣedh_, is more than an affection; it is loyalty to a relation. To translate it but _kindness_ or _mercy_, as is usually done, is wrong—_troth_ is our nearest word. I remember the troth of thy youth, Thy love as a bride, Thy following Me through the desert, The land unsown. Upon the unsown land there were no rival gods. But in fertile Canaan the nation encountered innumerable local deities, the Baalîm, husbands of the land, begetters of its fruits and lords of its waters. We conceive how tempting these Baalîm were both to the superstitious prudence of tribes strange to agriculture and anxious to conciliate the traditional powers thereof; and to the people’s passions through the sensuous rites and feasts of the rural shrines. Among such distractions Israel lost her innocence, forgot what her own God was or had done for her, and ceased to enquire of Him. Hence her present vices and misery in contrast with her early troth and safety. Hence the twin evils of the time—on the one hand the nation’s trust in heathen powers and silly oscillation between Egypt and Assyria; on the other the gross immoralities to which the Baals had seduced its sons. There was a double prostitution, to gods and to men, so foul that the young prophet uses the rankest facts in the rural life which he is addressing in order to describe it. The cardinal sin of the people, the source of all their woes is religious, Is not this being done thee For thy leaving of Me? This was so, not only because He was their ancestral God—though such an apostasy was unheard of among the nations—but because He was such a God and had done so much for them; because from the first He had wrought both with grace and with might, while the gods they went after had neither character nor efficiency—mere breaths, mere bubbles!