There are three writers who thus use knowledge as the key to the Divine life--in the Old Testament Hosea and the author of Deuteronomy, in the New Testament St. John. We likened Amos to St. John the Baptist: it is not only upon his similar temperament, but far more upon his use of the word knowledge for spiritual purposes, that we may compare Hosea to St. John the Evangelist. Hosea's chief charge against the people is one of stupidity. High and low they are _a people without intelligence_.[687] Once he defines this as want of political wisdom: _Ephraim is a silly dove without heart_, or, as we should say, _without brains_;[688] and again, as insensibility to every ominous fact: _Strangers have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not; yea, grey hairs are scattered upon him, and he knoweth it not_,[689] or, as we should say, _lays it not to heart_. But Israel's most fatal ignorance is of God Himself. This is the sign and the cause of every one of their defects. _There is no troth, nor leal love, nor knowledge of God in the land._[690] _They have not known the LORD._[691] _They have not known Me._ With the causes of this ignorance the prophet has dealt most explicitly in the fourth chapter.[692] They are two: the people's own vice and the negligence of their priests. Habitual vice destroys a people's brains. _Harlotry, wine and new wine take away the heart of My people._[693] Lust, for instance, blinds them to the domestic consequences of their indulgence in the heathen worship, _and so the stupid people come to their end_.[694] Again, their want of political wisdom is due to their impurity, drunkenness and greed to be rich.[695] Let those take heed who among ourselves insist that art is independent of moral conditions--that wit and fancy reach their best and bravest when breaking from any law of decency. They lie: such licence corrupts the natural intelligence of a people, and robs them of insight and imagination.