There is a pathetic and somewhat mysterious story of an unnamed man of God who delivered the word of Jehovah to Jeroboam at the altar at Bethel, and who, refusing the accustomed hospitality due to a prophet, afterwards accepted the invitation of the old prophet of Bethel, and paid the penalty with his death. We have here a story, the moral of which may be obscure enough, but which certainly illustrates the growing conflict between the two prophetic ideals. Here is a prophet who travels from his own land to rebuke the sin of a King to his face, afterwards yielding to the blandishments of one of the official prophets. The new Prophetism, tempted from its superior position by the old, fell; yet not many years were to elapse before these two orders, in the persons of Amos and Amaziah, were again to face one another at this same spot, and this time the new Prophetism was to maintain its integrity (1 Kings viii.; Amos vii. 10-17). Before we pass on to the _major_ transition prophets, it will be well to consider here the effect which the foundation of the Monarchy had on the development of the religion of Israel. Of the inauguration of the Monarchy we possess two accounts; one extremely unfavourable, written doubtless after Judah's experience of some of her notorious Kings, and in the light of a somewhat ideal conception of the Theocratic government that was supposed to have flourished before the time of Saul (1 Sam. x. 17-24); the other account, in which Samuel himself at the revelation of Jehovah initiates the movement towards the Monarchy (1 Sam. ix. 15-x. 1) by anointing Saul, is the one that is placed earlier by the critics. The Monarchy was an inevitable stage in the social development of a settled people, and it was the policy of Samuel to make the Monarchy the organ of the Theocracy. For all this Saul does not seem to have had any influence on religion, or to have ever realised the needs of his times, and under the sense of failure he became a prey to fear and depressing influences which eventually wrecked his reason.