The ritual which the Prophets seek is that of an upright life. They base all their morality on religious ideas. The great incentive to moral conduct is the recognition that the whole nation and land is the property of Jehovah; any social wrong is wrong against Him. So we find that the earliest attempt to formulate this teaching in a code contains many regulations which are purely humanitarian (Deut. xiv. 29; xix. 2 ff.; xxi. 10-17; xxii. 1-3; xxiv. 6, 10-15). Ritual is turned into ethics. Against the inequalities and injustices of their day the Prophets set their faces, with an utter disregard for consequences: they hurled their accusations at the nation with tremendous energy, in public, before kings, as men went up to worship; fiery denunciation mingling with a patriot's tears; for the time, all unavailing. Yet they have had their harvest, and to-day they are among the voices that call men to social reform. It will be well to endeavour to show, in the briefest possible outline, the historic setting of this mighty message. It was shortly after the opening of the Eighth Century that threatening indications began to gather on the horizon of Northern Israel. The situation called for a Prophet's message. Amos, the herdman of Tekoa, comes like a whirlwind from Judah, utters his message at Bethel and returns. He is the first and in many respects the greatest of that meteoric band who illumine the dark night of Israel's history; later Prophets repeat his words and share his ideas. Hosea, from the Northern Kingdom, follows in his steps, but with a message made the more tender from the fact that the whole drama of Israel's unfaithfulness to her husband Jehovah had been brought home to him in a personal domestic tragedy. The tender heart which led him to forgive his unfaithful wife, wondered if Jehovah would not be equally forgiving, and through this experience he almost penetrates to the thought of God as Love. A few years later, a voice is heard in the villages of Judah proclaiming the message of Amos with the same call to simple reality: Micah pleads for simple life, simple worship, simple justice. With this transference of the prophetic voice to the Southern Kingdom there falls an awful silence on the North. In 722 B.C., Samaria fell before the arms of Assyria, and Israel ceased to exist. For centuries that land was to remain silent and despised, until there should come from Galilee of the Gentiles He of whom all the Prophets spake. One would expect that the awful doom which had overtaken the Northern Kingdom would not have been without effect on Judah. Its only visible effect was the strengthening of her belief in her own inviolability, and the acceptance of the idea that Israel's fall was due to her separation from Judah. If a Prophet could have turned the people's thought in a saner direction, then it would have been accomplished by Isaiah, the most princely and the most literary of all the Prophets. His work was not indeed without effect.