This, then, is how God gave Israel knowledge of Himself. _First_ it broke upon the Individual, the Nation's Father. And to him it had not come by miracle, but just in the same fashion as it has broken upon men from then until now. He woke to find God no tradition, but an experience. Amid the strife with others of which life for all so largely consists, Jacob became aware that God also has to be reckoned with, and that, hard as is the struggle for bread and love and justice with one's brethren and fellow-men, with the Esaus and with the Labans, a more inevitable wrestle awaits the soul when it is left alone in the darkness with the Unseen. Oh, this is our sympathy with those early patriarchs, not that they saw the sea dry up before them or the bush ablaze with God, but that upon some lonely battle-field of the heart they also endured those moments of agony, which imply a more real Foe than we ever met in flesh and blood, and which leave upon us marks deeper than the waste of toil or the rivalry of the world can inflict. So the Father of the Nation came to _find_ God at Bethel, and there, adds Hosea, where the Nation still worship, God _spake with us_[714] in the person of our Father. The _second_ stage of the knowledge of God was when the Nation awoke to His leading, and _through a prophet_, Moses, were _brought up out of Egypt_. Here again no miracle is adduced by Hosea, but with full heart he appeals to the grace and the tenderness of the whole story. To him it is a wonderful romance. Passing by all the empires of earth, the Almighty chose for Himself this people that was no people, this tribe that were the slaves of Egypt. And the choice was of love only: _When Israel was young I came to love him, and out of Egypt I called My son._ It was the adoption of a little slave-boy, adoption by the heart; and the fatherly figure continues, _I taught Ephraim to walk, taking him upon Mine arms_. It is just the same charm, seen from another point of view, when Hosea hears God say that He had _found Israel like grapes in the wilderness, like the firstfruits on an early fig-tree I saw your fathers_.