As the national ruin of the surviving kingdom of Israel drew nearer, the prophets had to fight more fiercely on behalf of their religion. The people must have been as angry with Jahveh as he was said to be with them. The prophets met their anger with more savage denunciations of their wickedness, and more severe predictions of calamity. The division between prophets and people became then most strongly marked, and the struggle between them resembled a civil war. The life of Jeremiah, the most national of all the prophets, was one long battle. The evil doings of his countrymen he held to be the cause of all Israel’s misfortunes, and he hated them with a bitter hatred. This hatred they fully reciprocated; he was imprisoned and almost put to death. When the chief prophet of the religion of Jahveh received such treatment at the hands of the people, the religion itself must have been in terrible danger. If this period had been prolonged, perhaps Judaism would have preceded the kingdom of Judah in its fall. But the destruction of the national polity of Israel came in time to save the national religion. When Judæa was merely a province of a great empire, the nationality of the Jews could survive only in the religion of which Jahveh was the head. The very manner in which the change took place was exceptionally favourable to Judaism. The captivity, the carrying away of the best families of the Jews into an inland district of the empire, was admirably calculated to destroy Jahveh’s rivals. The nucleus of the nation, placed in such close contact with foreign religions, by patriotism alone would have been made sincere worshippers of Jahveh. Far away from the local idolatries of Judæa, the exiles accepted the pure religion of the prophets. The most imaginative and the most spiritual of the greater prophets, Ezekiel and the second Isaiah, sprang from their ranks. And thus at last the prophetic became the popular religion, and Jahveh as God reigned over Israel. When the exiles returned to Judæa, they carried with them a pure and moral monotheism. The remainder of the people readily adopted their principles. Judaism from this time was the sole religion of the Jews, the expression of their national patriotism. Consolidated now finally into the rigid system of the law, with a multitude of minute observances that kept it constantly before their eyes, it was placed beyond reach of attack. Henceforth all Jahveh’s people worshipped Jahveh only, professed obedience to his precepts, and knew him as the one true God.[32]