The patience of the Lord with their waywardness and their stubbornness had been the ethical influence on Israel's life at a time when they had probably neither code of law nor system of doctrine. _Thy gentleness_, as an early Psalmist says for his people, _Thy gentleness hath made me great_.[446] Amos is not unaware of this ancient grace of Jehovah. But he speaks of it in a fashion which shows that he feels it to be exhausted and without hope for his generation. _I brought you up out of the land of Egypt, and led you forty years in the wilderness, to possess the land of the Amorites. And I raised up of your sons for prophets and of your young men for Nazirites._[447] But this can now only fill the cup of the nation's sin. _You alone have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore will I visit upon you all your iniquities._[448] Jehovah's ancient Love but strengthens now the justice and the impetus of His Law. We perceive, then, the problem which Amos left to prophecy. It was not to discover Love in the Deity whom he had so absolutely identified with Law. The Love of God needed no discovery among a people with the Deliverance, the Exodus, the Wilderness and the Gift of the Land in their memories. But the problem was to prove in God so great and new a mercy as was capable of matching that Law, which the abuse of His millennial gentleness now only the more fully justified. There was needed a prophet to arise with as keen a conscience of Law as Amos himself, and yet affirm that Love was greater still; to admit that Israel were doomed, and yet promise their redemption by processes as reasonable and as ethical as those by which the doom had been rendered inevitable. The prophet of Conscience had to be followed by the prophet of Repentance. Such an one was found in Hosea, the son of Be'eri, a citizen and probably a priest of Northern Israel, whose very name, _Salvation_, the synonym of Joshua and of Jesus, breathed the larger hope, which it was his glory to bear to his people. Before we see how for this task Hosea was equipped with the love and sympathy which Amos lacked, let us do two things. Let us appreciate the magnitude of the task itself, set to him first of prophets; and let us remind ourselves that, greatly as he achieved it, the task was not one which could be achieved even by him once for all, but that it presents itself to religion again and again in the course of her development.