The Book of Hosea opens with chapters out of the prophet's experience with his unfaithful wife, in which he sees a counterpart and symbol of God's experience with Israel. This discovery of this significance in the tragedy of his life is what made him a prophet. He saw then that it was for this he had been led to marry a woman who turned out a gross adulteress. When he drove her from his house, when later he bought her out of the servitude into which she had sunk, and by seclusion and a discipline at once firm and kind tried to win her back by love to virtue, that, too, was an apologue of God's dealing with his people (see specially Hos. i. 2-9; iii. 1-5). He is the first, apparently, to use the metaphor adultery, or fornication, for religious defection. The oracle, ii. 2-23, translates it into its historical terms and discloses Hosea's construction of the religious history of Israel. The root of Israel's apostasy was the belief that the gods of the soil of Canaan, the baals, gave the corn and the wine and the oil which in reality its own God, Jehovah, bestowed. Therefore he will take away all these, which she deems the gift of the baals, the wages of her prostitution, and will lead the people into the desert of exile. But he will be with them there to comfort and encourage, and Israel will return to its first love as in the early days when it was alone with God in the desert of the exodus. Then the old relation will be restored, never to be broken, and the gifts in the new betrothal are uprightness and justice and charity and kindness of heart and faithfulness and the knowledge of God (Hosea's word for religion). That will be the golden age! (See Hos. ii. 18-23.) When the Jew says his _Shema_ or the Christian his Great Commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might," it is Hosea's great thought he is repeating. Hosea interprets God's dealing with his people by his faith in God's inextinguishable love. Outraged love may smite harder than offended righteousness, but its blows are remedial, not retributive or expiatory; its aim not to satisfy justice, but to recover the erring. The exile, which for Amos is the final vindication of God's righteousness in the death of the sinful nation, is for Hosea a chastisement which leads to repentance and restoration. He is therefore the author of that ideal of a golden age of godliness and uprightness and happiness, beyond the impending judgment or the present oppression, which is one of the leading motives of the so-called messianic prophecy.