_Are ye not unto Me, O children of Israel--'tis the oracle of Jehovah--just like the children of Kushites?_ mere black folk and far away! _Did I not bring up Israel from Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and Aram from Ḳir?_ Mark again the universal Providence which Amos proclaims: it is the due concomitant of his universal morality. Once for all the religion of Israel breaks from the characteristic Semitic belief that gave a god to every people, and limited both his power and his interests to that people's territory and fortunes. And if we remember how everything spiritual in the religion of Israel, everything in its significance for mankind, was rendered possible only because at this date it broke from and abjured the particularism in which it had been born, we shall feel some of the Titanic force of the prophet, in whom that break was achieved with an absoluteness which leaves nothing to be desired. But let us also emphasise, that it was by no mere method of the intellect or observation of history that Amos was led to assert the unity of the Divine Providence. The inspiration in this was a moral one: Jehovah was ruler and guide of all the families of mankind, because He was exalted in righteousness; and the field in which that righteousness was proved and made manifest was the life and the fate of Israel. Therefore to this Amos now turns. _Lo, the eyes of the Lord Jehovah are on the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from the face of the ground._ In other words, Jehovah's sovereignty over the world was not proved by Israel's conquest of the latter, but by His unflinching application of the principles of righteousness, at whatever cost, to Israel herself. Up to this point, then, the voice of Amos is unmistakable, uttering the doctrine, so original to him, that in the judgment of God Israel shall not be specially favoured, and the sentence, we have heard so often from him, of her removal from her land. Remember, Amos has not yet said a word in mitigation of the sentence: up to this point of his book it has been presented as inexorable and final. But now to a statement of it as absolute as any that has gone before, there is suddenly added a qualification: _nevertheless I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob--'tis the oracle of Jehovah_. And then there is added a new picture of exile changed from doom to discipline, a process of sifting by which only the evil in Israel, _all the sinners of My people_, shall perish, but not a grain of the good. _For, lo, I am giving command, and I will toss the house of Israel among all the nations, like_ something _that is tossed in a sieve, but not a pebble_[356] _shall fall to earth. By the sword shall die all the sinners of My people, they who say, The calamity shall not reach nor anticipate us._[357]