Such are these three or four short oracles of Amos. They are probably among his earliest--the first peremptory challenges of prophecy to that great stronghold which before forty years she is to see thrown down in obedience to her word. As yet, however, there seems to be nothing to justify the menaces of Amos. Fair and stable rises the structure of Israel's life. A nation, who know themselves elect, who in politics are prosperous and in religion proof to every doubt, build high their palaces, see the skies above them unclouded, and bask in their pride, heaven's favourites without a fear. This man, solitary and sudden from his desert, springs upon them in the name of God and their poor. Straighter word never came from Deity: _Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?_ The insight of it, the justice of it, are alike convincing. Yet at first it appears as if it were sped on the personal and very human passion of its herald. For Amos not only uses the desert's cruelties--the lion's to the sheep--to figure God's impending judgment upon His people, but he enforces the latter with all a desert-bred man's horror of cities and civilisation. It is their costly furniture, their lavish and complex building, on which he sees the storm break. We seem to hear again that frequent phrase of the previous section: _the fire shall devour the palaces thereof_. The palaces, he says, are simply storehouses of oppression; the palaces will be plundered. Here, as throughout his book,[283] couches and diwans draw forth the scorn of a man accustomed to the simple furniture of the tent. But observe his especial hatred of houses. Four times in one verse he smites them: _winter-house on summer-house and the ivory houses shall perish--yea, houses manifold, saith the Lord_. So in another oracle of the same section: _Houses of ashlar ye have built, and ye shall not inhabit them; vineyards of delight have ye planted, and ye shall not drink of their wine_.[284] And in another: _I loathe the pride of Jacob, and his palaces I hate; and I will give up a city and all that is in it.... For, lo, the Lord is about to command, and He will smite the great house into ruins and the small house into splinters._[285] No wonder that such a prophet found war with its breached walls insufficient, and welcomed, as the full ally of his word, the earthquake itself.[286]