The uncertainty of the text, however, does not weaken the impression of its ghastly realism: the unclean and haunted house; the kinsman and the body-burner afraid to search through the infected rooms, and calling in muffled voice to the single survivor crouching in some far corner of them, _Are there any more with thee?_ his reply, _None_--himself the next! Yet these details are not the most weird. Over all hangs a terror darker than the pestilence. _Shall there be evil in a city and Jehovah not have done it?_ Such, as we have heard from Amos, was the settled faith of the age. But in times of woe it was held with an awful and a craven superstition. The whole of life was believed to be overhung with loose accumulations of Divine anger. And as in some fatal hollow in the high Alps, where any noise may bring down the impending masses of snow, and the fearful traveller hurries along in silence, so the men of that superstitious age feared, when an evil like the plague was imminent, even to utter the Deity's name, lest it should loosen some avalanche of His wrath. _And he said, Hush! for_, adds the comment, one _must not make mention of the name of Jehovah_. This reveals another side of the popular religion which Amos has been attacking. We have seen it as the sheer superstition of routine; but we now know that it was a routine broken by panic. The God who in times of peace was propitiated by regular supplies of savoury sacrifice and flattery, is conceived, when His wrath is roused and imminent, as kept quiet only by the silence of its miserable objects. The false peace of ritual is tempered by panic. FOOTNOTES: [268] See above, pp. 82 ff. and pp. 89 ff. [269] With the LXX. באשור for באשדוד. [270] שד (ver. 10). [271] Singular as in LXX., and not plural as in the M.T. and English versions. [272] Juvenal, _Satires_, I. [273] _Vision of Piers Plowman._ Burgages=tenements. [274] Or _The Enemy, and that right round the Land!_