Yet the guilt is not that of the whole people, but of their religious guides. _Let none find fault and none upbraid, for My people are but as their priestlings._[499] _O Priest, thou hast stumbled to-day: and stumble to-night shall the prophet with thee._ One order of the nation's ministers goes staggering after the other! _And I will destroy thy Mother_, presumably the Nation herself. _Perished are My people for lack of knowledge._ But how? By the sin of their teachers. _Because thou_, O Priest, _hast rejected knowledge, I reject thee from being priest to Me; and as thou hast forgotten the Torah of thy God, I forget thy children_[500]--_I on My side. As many as they be, so many have sinned against Me._ Every jack-priest of them is culpable. _They have turned_[501] _their glory into shame. They feed on the sin of My people, and to the guilt of these lift up their appetite!_ The more the people sin, the more merrily thrive the priests by fines and sin-offerings. They live upon the vice of the day, and have a vested interest in its crimes. English Langland said the same thing of the friars of his time. The contention is obvious. The priests have given themselves wholly to the ritual; they have forgotten that their office is an intellectual and moral one. We shall return to this when treating of Hosea's doctrine of knowledge and its responsibilities. Priesthood, let us only remember, priesthood is an intellectual trust. _Thus it comes to be--like people like priest_: they also have fallen under the ritual, doing from lust what the priests do from greed. _But I will visit upon them their ways, and their deeds will I requite to them. For they_--those _shall eat and not be satisfied_, these _shall play the harlot and have no increase, because they have left off heeding Jehovah_. This absorption in ritual at the expense of the moral and intellectual elements of religion has insensibly led them over into idolatry, with all its unchaste and drunken services. _Harlotry, wine and new wine take away the brains!_[502] The result is seen in the stupidity with which they consult their stocks for guidance. _My people! of its bit of wood it asketh counsel, and its staff telleth to it_ the oracle! _For a spirit of harlotry hath led them astray, and they have played the harlot from their God. Upon the headlands of the hills they sacrifice, and on the heights offer incense, under oak or poplar or terebinth, for the shade of them is pleasant._ On _headlands_, not summits, for here no trees grow; and the altar was generally built under a tree and near water on some promontory, from which the flight of birds or of clouds might be watched. _Wherefore_--because of this your frequenting of the heathen shrines--_your daughters play the harlot and your daughters-in-law commit adultery. I will not come with punishment upon your daughters because they play the harlot, nor upon your daughters-in-law because they commit adultery._ Why? For