It must be remembered that all the prophets, so termed, lived during a time of approaching national dissolution, and date from the death of Jonah, 761 B.C., to the death of Nehemiah, 430. These political preachers, agitators, and fault-finders were altogether some twenty in number. And when national life ceased, these prophets ceased. Men of this particular type and character were no longer needed. They had outlived their usefulness. Their national greatness was rapidly disintegrating--short-lived it was. Luxury, licentiousness, and crime; rapacity, internal disorder, factional strife, lack of order and discipline, made them the prey of neighboring nations, that finally proved their destruction. It was not a question of God or Jehovah or idols; it was a question of organization, discipline, and a higher civilization, that wiped the Jews out as a nation. They struggled as long as they could maintain their existence as a nation. They were overpowered and subdued. It is not, therefore, surprising that these men appealed to their patriotism--their moral sense, of which they had but little--and made every endeavor to reform them. The national pride, love of country and patriotism, fired their imagination. They talked, wrote, and scolded in the name of the visionary God in fashion among them, employing the phraseology then in use, giving vent to their feelings, their passions, their lamentations, their dreams, their visions, the product of an over-excited nervous system, mixing poesy, philosophy, and facts indiscriminately; producing a heterogeneous, fantastic creation of the brain, part true, but false as a whole, dovetailed together as the fancy of the moment suggested. These rambling fireworks of the imagination have little meaning and less sense, except that they portray their feelings, emotions, and practical impressions for the time being. Eliminate the facts out of their writings, and you obtain a residue of wild, incoherent ravings of an over-excited, over-heated brain. We hear nothing of any great mental disturbance or loss of equilibrium, until we reach a new crisis. For nearly four hundred years not a vision, not an angel, not a prophet, is heard of.