For ourselves, Haggai’s appeal to the barren seasons and poverty of the people as proof of God’s anger with their selfishness must raise questions. But we have already seen, not only that natural calamities were by the ancient world interpreted as the penal instruments of the Deity, but that all through history they have had a wonderful influence on the spirits of men, forcing them to search their own hearts and to believe that Providence is conducted for other ends than those of our physical prosperity. “Have not those who have believed as Amos believed ever been the strong spirits of our race, making the very disasters which crushed them to the earth the tokens that God has great views about them?”[675] Haggai, therefore, takes no sordid view of Providence when he interprets the seasons, from which his countrymen had suffered, as God’s anger upon their selfishness and delay in building His House. The straight appeal to the conscience of the Jews had an immediate effect. Within three weeks they began work on the Temple. _And Zerubbabel, son of She’altî’el, and Jehoshua‘, son of Jehoṣadaḳ, the high priest, and all the rest of the people, hearkened to the voice of Jehovah their God, and to the words of Haggai the prophet, as Jehovah their God had sent him; and the people feared before the face of Jehovah. [And Haggai, the messenger of Jehovah, in Jehovah’s mission to the people, spake, saying, I am with you—oracle of Jehovah.][676] And Jehovah stirred the spirit of Zerubbabel, son of She’altî’el, Satrap of Judah, and the spirit of Jehoshua‘, son of Jehoṣadaḳ, the high priest, and the spirit of all the rest of the people; and they went and did work in the House of Jehovah of Hosts, their God, on the twenty-fourth day of the sixth month, in the second year of Darius the king._[677] Note how the narrative emphasises that the new energy was, as it could not but be from Haggai’s unflattering words, a purely spiritual result. It was the _spirit_ of Zerubbabel, and the _spirit_ of Jehoshua, and the _spirit_ of all the rest of the people, which was stirred—their conscience and radical force of character. Not in vain had the people suffered their great disillusion under Cyrus, if now their history was to start again from sources so inward and so pure. 2. COURAGE, ZERUBBABEL! COURAGE, JEHOSHUA AND ALL THE PEOPLE! (Chap. ii. 1-9).