The next example which Amos gave at Bethel of his permitted insight into God's purpose was a great drought. _Thus the Lord Jehovah made me to see: and, behold, the Lord Jehovah was calling fire into the quarrel._[193] There was, then, already a quarrel between Jehovah and His people--another sign that the prophet's moral conviction of Israel's sin preceded the rise of the events in which he recognised its punishment. _And_ the fire _devoured the Great Deep, yea, it was about to devour the land_.[194] Severe drought in Palestine might well be described as fire, even when it was not accompanied by the flame and smoke of those forest and prairie fires which Joel describes as its consequences.[195] But to have the full fear of such a drought, we should need to feel beneath us the curious world which the men of those days felt. To them the earth rested in a great deep, from whose stores all her springs and fountains burst. When these failed it meant that the unfathomed floods below were burnt up. But how fierce the flame that could effect this! And how certainly able to devour next the solid land which rested above the deep--the very _Portion_[196] assigned by God to His people. Again Amos interceded: _Lord Jehovah, I pray Thee forbear: how shall Jacob rise? for he is little._ And for the second time Jacob was reprieved. _Jehovah repented for this: It also shall not come to pass, said the Lord Jehovah._ We have treated these visions, not as the imagination or prospect of possible disasters,[197] but as insight into the meaning of actual plagues. Such a treatment is justified, not only by the invariable habit of Amos to deal with real facts, but also by the occurrence of these same plagues among the series by which, as we are told, God had already sought to move the people to repentance.[198] The general question of sympathy between such purely physical disasters and the moral evil of a people we may postpone to another chapter, confining ourselves here to the part played in the events by the prophet himself.