_Canaan!_ So the prophet nicknames his mercenary generation.[627] _With false balances in his hand, he loves to defraud. For Ephraim said_, Ah but _I have grown rich, I have won myself wealth._[628] _None of my gains can touch me with guilt which is sin._[629] _But I, Jehovah thy God from the land of Egypt--I could make thee dwell in tents again, as in the days of the Assembly_ in Horeb--I could destroy all this commercial civilisation of thine, and reduce thee to thine ancient level of nomadic life--_and I spake to the prophets: it was I who multiplied vision, and by the hand of the prophets gave parables. If Gilead_ be for _idolatry, then shall it become vanity!_ If _in Gilgal_--Stone-Circle--_they sacrifice bullocks,_[630] _stone-heaps shall their altars become among the furrows of the field._ One does not see the connection of these verses with the preceding. But now the discourse oscillates once more to the national father, and the parallel between his own and his people's experience. _And Jacob fled to the land_[631] _of Aram, and Israel served for a wife, and for a wife he herded_ sheep. _And by a prophet Jehovah brought Israel up from Egypt, and by a prophet he was shepherded. And Ephraim hath given bitter provocation; but his blood-guiltiness shall be upon him, and his Lord shall return it to him._ I cannot trace the argument here. 2. THE LAST JUDGMENT. HOSEA xiii.-xiv. 1. The crisis draws on. On the one hand Israel's sin, accumulating, bulks ripe for judgment. On the other the times grow more fatal, or the prophet more than ever feels them so. He will gather once again the old truths on the old lines--the great past when Jehovah was God alone, the descent to the idols and the mushroom monarchs of to-day, the people, who once had been strong, sapped by luxury, forgetful, stupid, not to be roused. The discourse has every mark of being Hosea's latest. There is clearness and definiteness beyond anything since chap. iv. There are ease and lightness of treatment, a playful sarcasm, as if the themes were now familiar both to the prophet and his audience. But, chiefly, there is the passion--so suitable to last words--of how different it all might have been, if to this crisis Israel had come with store of strength instead of guilt. How these years, with their opening into the great history of the world, might have meant a birth for the nation, which instead was lying upon them like a miscarried child in the mouth of the womb! It was a fatality God Himself could not help in. Only death and hell remained. Let them, then, have their way! Samaria must expiate her guilt in the worst horrors of war. Instead of with one definite historical event, this last effort of Hosea opens more naturally with a summary of all Ephraim's previous history. The tribe had been the first in Israel till they took to idols.