Yet Hosea sees that all the fault does not lie with the common people. Their teachers are to blame, priest and prophet alike, for both _stumble_, and it is true that a people shall be like its priests.[696] _The_ priests _have rejected knowledge and forgotten the Torah_ of their God; they think only of the ritual of sacrifice and the fines by which they fill their mouths. It was, as we have seen, _the_ sin of Israel's religion in the eighth century. To the priests religion was a mass of ceremonies which satisfied the people's superstitions and kept themselves in bread. To the prophets it was an equally sensuous, an equally mercenary ecstasy. But to Hosea religion is above all a thing of the intellect and conscience: it is that _knowing_ which is at once common-sense, plain morality and the recognition by a pure heart of what God has done and is doing in history. Of such a knowledge the priests and prophets are the stewards, and it is because they have ignored their trust that the people have been provided with no antidote to the vices that corrupt their natural intelligence and make them incapable of seeing God. In contrast to such ignorance Hosea describes the essential temper and contents of a true understanding of God. Using the word _knowledge_, in the passive sense characteristic of his language, not so much the acquisition as the impression of facts, an impression which masters not only a man's thoughts but his heart and will, Hosea describes the _knowledge of God_ as feeling, character and conscience. Again and again he makes it parallel to loyalty, repentance, love and service. Again and again he emphasises that it comes from God Himself. It is not something which men can reach by their own endeavours, or by the mere easy turning of their fickle hearts. For it requires God Himself to speak, and discipline to chasten. The only passage in which the knowledge of God is described as the immediate prize of man's own pursuit is that prayer of the people on whose facile religiousness Hosea pours his scorn.[697] _Let us know, let us follow on to know the Lord_, he heard them say, and promise themselves, _As soon as we seek Him we shall find Him_. But God replies that He can make nothing of such ambitions; they will pass away like the morning cloud and the early dew.[698] This discarded prayer, then, is the only passage in the book in which the knowledge of God is described as man's acquisition. Elsewhere, in strict conformity to the temper of the Hebrew word to know, Hosea presents the knowledge of the Most High, not as something man finds out for himself, but something which comes down on him from above.