_I hate, I loathe your feasts, and I will not smell the savour of your gatherings to sacrifice._ For with pagan folly they still believed that the smoke of their burnt-offerings went up to heaven and flattered the nostrils of Deity. How ingrained was this belief may be judged by us from the fact that the terms of it had to be adopted by the apostles of a spiritual religion, if they would make themselves understood, and are now the metaphors of the sacrifices of the Christian heart.[318] _Though ye bring to Me burnt-offerings and your meal-offerings I will not be pleased, or your thank-offerings of fatted calves, I will not look at them. Let cease from Me the noise of thy songs; to the playing of thy viols I will not listen. But let justice roll on like water, and righteousness like an unfailing stream._ Then follows the remarkable appeal from the habits of this age to those of the times of Israel's simplicity. _Was it flesh- or meal-offerings that ye brought Me in the wilderness, forty years, O house of Israel?_[319] That is to say, at the very time when God made Israel His people, and led them safely to the promised land--the time when of all others He did most for them--He was not moved to such love and deliverance by the propitiatory bribes, which this generation imagine to be so availing and indispensable. Nay, those still shall not avail, for exile from the land shall now as surely come in spite of them, as the possession of the land in old times came without them. This at least seems to be the drift of the very obscure verse which follows, and is the unmistakable statement of the close of the oracle. _But ye shall lift up ... your king and ... your god, images which you have made for yourselves;_[320] _and I will carry you away into exile far beyond Damascus, saith Jehovah--God of Hosts is His Name!_[321] So this chapter closes like the previous, with the marshalling of God's armies. But as there His hosts were the movements of Nature and the Great Stars, so here they are the nations of the world. By His rule of both He is the God of Hosts. 3. "AT EASE IN ZION." AMOS vi. The evil of the national worship was the false political confidence which it engendered. Leaving the ritual alone, Amos now proceeds to assault this confidence. We are taken from the public worship of the people to the private banquets of the rich, but again only in order to have their security and extravagance contrasted with the pestilence, the war and the captivity, that are rapidly approaching.