The domestic life of the prophet Hosea furnishes perhaps the best illustration of the condition and dark possibilities of womanhood in Israel during this era of religious lapse and of consequent moral decay. When religion sanctions prostitution at the altar, profligacy is not unnatural. Hosea had married one Gomer, daughter of Diblaim. Soon she forgets her marriage vows and gives herself to a life of shame. Hosea, not then a prophet, more than once tried to reclaim the erring wife of his love; but she again falls into evil ways. His home is destroyed; and as he thinks of the meaning of this fatal blow to his domestic happiness, he can but see in it a divine call to go forth to correct a condition of society which could foster such vice and make such sorrows possible. The whole meaning of his ministry, as he starts out with his children as object lessons of his and the people's great humiliation, is but an enlarged reproduction of his own bitter experience. That the god and his land were related as husband and wife, was a very familiar conception in Israel, as well as with the nations round about. Even Isaiah proclaimed that the land of the Hebrew should be called Beulah, that is, "married," a land wedded to Jehovah, in pure and abiding love. But it remained for the worship of Baal, which means both "lord" and "husband," to fasten upon Israel the basest practices between the sexes, as a part of the worship of the god to whom the land was married. Hosea sees in his own poignant grief an epitome of Israel's relation of apostasy from Jehovah. She should have been a wife of purity, keeping her covenant vows with her Lord, but instead, she had gone away to consort with other gods and was playing the harlot against her first love. Repeated efforts had failed to reclaim her, and now she is given up to horrible vice as she sacrifices her virtue at the altar of Baal. It is a fearful arraignment, hot with his own experiences and saturated with tears. The words of Hosea are themselves the best representation of society of the day, as we speak under the figure of his own bitter grief: "Plead with your mother, plead, for she is not my wife and I am not her husband. Let her therefore put away her whoredoms out of her sight and her adulteries from between her breasts." This is the earnest plea for a purified Israel and a redeemed womanhood.