from the husbandmen and vinedressers on the hillsides.[146] Or, at closer quarters, we see and hear the bustle of the great festivals and fairs--the _solemn assemblies_, the reeking holocausts, the _noise of songs and viols_;[147] the brutish religious zeal kindling into drunkenness and lust on the very steps of the altar;[148] the embezzlement of pledges by the priests, the covetous restlessness of the traders, their false measures, their entanglement of the poor in debt;[149] the careless luxury of the rich, their _banquets_, _buckets of wine_, _ivory couches_, pretentious, preposterous music.[150] These things are described as by an eyewitness. Amos was not a citizen of the Northern Kingdom, to which he almost exclusively refers; but it was because he went up and down in it, using those eyes which the desert air had sharpened, that he so thoroughly learned the wickedness of its people, the corruption of Israel's life in every rank and class of society.[151] But the convictions which he applied to this life Amos learned at home. They came to him over the desert, and without further material signal than was flashed to Tekoa from the towers of Jerusalem. This is placed beyond doubt by the figures in which he describes his call from Jehovah. Contrast his story, so far as he reveals it, with that of another. Some twenty years later, Isaiah of Jerusalem saw the Lord in the Temple, high and lifted up, and all the inaugural vision of this greatest of the prophets was conceived in the figures of the Temple--the altar, the smoke, the burning coals. But to his predecessor _among the shepherds of Tekoa_, although revelation also starts from Jerusalem, it reaches him, not in the sacraments of her sanctuary, but across the bare pastures, and as it were in the roar of a lion. _Jehovah from Zion roareth, and uttereth His voice from Jerusalem._[152] We read of no formal process of consecration for this first of the prophets. Through his clear desert air, the word of God breaks upon him without medium or sacrament. And the native vigilance of the man is startled, is convinced by it, beyond all argument or question. _The lion hath roared, who shall not fear? Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?_