Religious ecstasy is always dangerous to the moral and intellectual interests of religion. The largest prophetic figures of the period, though they feel the ecstasy, attain their greatness by rising superior to it. Elijah's raptures are impressive; but nobler are his defence of Naboth and his denunciation of Ahab. And so Elisha's inducement of the prophetic mood by music is the least attractive element in his career: his greatness lies in his combination of the care of souls with political insight and vigilance for the national interests. Doubtless there were many of the sons of the prophets who with smaller abilities cultivated a religion as rational and moral. But for the herd ecstasy would be everything. It was so easily induced or imitated that much of it cannot have been genuine. Even where the feeling was at first sincere we can understand how readily it became morbid; how fatally it might fall into sympathy with that drunkenness from wine and that sexual passion which Israel saw already cultivated as worship by the surrounding Canaanites. We must feel these dangers of ecstasy if we would understand why Amos cut himself off from the Nebi'îm, and why Hosea laid such emphasis on the moral and intellectual sides of religion: _My people perish for lack of knowledge_. Hosea indeed considered the degeneracy of ecstasy as a judgment: _the prophet is a fool, the man of the spirit is mad--for the multitude of thine iniquity_.[51] A later age derided the ecstatics, and took one of the forms of the verb _to prophesy_ as equivalent to the verb _to be mad_.[52]