This is the evil--the ease with which wrong is done in the country! _It lies to the power of their hands: they covet and seize._ And what is it that they get so easily--not merely field and house, so much land and stone and lime: it is human life, with all that makes up personal independence, and the security of home and of the family. That these should be at the mercy of the passion or the caprice of one man--this is what stirs the prophet's indignation. We shall presently see how the tyranny of wealth was aided by the bribed and unjust judges of the country; and how, growing reckless, the rich betook themselves, as the lords of the feudal system in Europe continually did, to the basest of assaults upon the persons of peaceful men and women. But meantime Micah feels that by themselves the economic wrongs explain and justify the doom impending on the nation. When this doom falls, by the Divine irony of God it shall take the form of a conquest of the land by the heathen, and the disposal of these great estates to the foreigner. The prophet speaks:-- _Therefore thus saith Jehovah:_ _Behold, I am planning evil against this race,_ _From which ye shall not withdraw your necks,_ _Nor walk upright;_ _For an evil time it is!_[844] _In that day shall they raise a taunt-song against you,_ _And wail out the wailing_ ("_It is done_");[845] _and say,_ _"We be utterly undone:_ _My people's estate is measured off!_[846] _How they take it away from me!_[847] _To the rebel our fields are allotted."_ _So thou shalt have none to cast the line by lot_ _In the congregation of Jehovah._ No restoration at time of Jubilee for lands taken away in this fashion! There will be no congregation of Jehovah left! At this point the prophet's pessimist discourse, that must have galled the rich, is interrupted by their clamour to him to stop. The rich speak:-- _Prate not, they prate, let none prate of such things!_ _Revilings will never cease!_ _O thou that speakest_ thus _to the house of Jacob,_[848] _Is the spirit of Jehovah cut short?_ _Or are such His doings?_ _Shall not His words mean well with him that walketh uprightly?_ So the rich, in their immoral confidence that Jehovah was neither weakened nor could permit such a disaster to fall on His own people, tell the prophet that his sentence of doom on the nation, and especially on themselves, is absurd, impossible. They cry the eternal cry of Respectability: "God can mean no harm to the like of us! His words are good to them that walk uprightly--and we are conscious of being such. What you, prophet, have charged us with are nothing but natural transactions." The Lord Himself has His answer ready. Upright indeed! They have been unprovoked plunderers! God speaks:--