I cannot imagine that any of my readers are ignorant of the nature of the labours of the Hebrew Prophets, and therefore we need not here specially characterise their work. By Prophets we do not of course mean those soothsayers, or as they were called Seers (chôze, rôʾe), whom we meet with in the period preceding that of the Prophets, and also later[695]—to whom the young man could apply in confident expectation of finding lost property, when his father had sent him to look for his lost asses; nor do we mean those wonder-workers whose occupation was to suspend and interrupt the regular order of nature for special purposes and for a certain time; nor those who, before the priesthood had become a closed institution, occasionally attended to the sacrifices offered to Elôhîm. We mean those men who, when the people had exhausted all the inspiration which they could derive from the idea of Elôhîm, came forward as new representatives of the idealism, the inspiration and the waning conception of nationality, which they now announced in a still higher degree, and as preachers of the ideal in a nation in which ‘from the sole of the foot up to the head there was no soundness, but wounds, and stripes, and raw sores, which were not pressed out nor bound up nor softened with ointment,’ whose ‘princes’—themselves ‘rulers of Sodom’ over a ‘people of Gomorrah’—‘were dissolute, partners of thieves, all loving bribes and running after rewards, who judged not the orphan nor let the cause of widows come unto them;’ ‘who built up Zion with blood and Jerusalem with iniquity,’ in which ‘the heads judged for bribes, and the priests taught for hire, and the prophets practised magic for silver,’ and which ‘drew down guilt with cords of lies and sin as with the rope of a cart;’ and who ‘called evil good and good evil, made darkness light and light darkness, made the bitter sweet and the sweet bitter’ (Is. I. 6, 10, 23, Mic. III. 10, 11, Is. V. 18, 20). Into such a depth of immorality and carelessness was the Hebrew nation plunged by an institution which had grown up out of the Hierarchy. Centralisation of worship, formality, lip-service and a so-called piety quite mechanical, which are incapable of promoting either high idealism or morality of thought, and indeed discourage both, but which are well able to kill the most elevated soul, to cover the warmest temperament with a thick crust of ice, and to blunt the noblest heart,—these grew up at the bidding and after the pattern of the priests. A rude service of sacrifices, which brought down the idea of God more and more to the level of the senses, converted Mount Zion into a shambles, while the shameless practices of sacerdotal speculators turned the central sanctuary of Jerusalem, in the words of Isaiah, the noblest hater of that corrupt caste, into a ‘den of robbers.’