AMOS VIII.

UNSLAKED THIRST.

" They shall run to and fro to seek the word of Jehovah, but they shall not find it. In that day shall the fair virgins and the young men faint for thirst " (viii. 12, 13).

THIS chapter, like the last, brings Amos before us in a double capacity—as seer and as prophet. To the visions we have already considered, the locusts, the drought, the man beside a wall with a plumb in his hand, is now added a fourth—a basket of summer fruit. The year is further advanced than in the first vision. There it was the spring time, when the locusts appeared to devour the pasture-land: now it is autumn. The summer has come and ripened the fruits, and there, before the eyes of Amos, lies a basket full of them. But in his torn heart it wakes no gracious thoughts. He is the man of one idea—the doom of Israel—and across the autumn landscape he sees destruction written in letters of flaming fire. Everything suggests the impending doom, even this little innocent basket of fruit. It, too, like the man testing the wall with the plumb, is sadly eloquent of the fate of Israel, a vivid symbol of the end. It tells him that the summer is past and the autumn is come, and the year will soon be over. So Israel's autumn, too, has come; she is older and nearer the end than she knows. The fruit is ripe: so is Israel—ripe for destruction. The very name of this summer fruit is full of boding to the sharp ears of Amos, ever ready to detect in words and things a prophecy of Israel's doom. It is difficult to reproduce the word-play in English; the Hebrew word for late summer or autumn fruit has much the same sound as the word for end. But if, with our American friends, we say fall for autumn, we catch some thing of Amos's point. " Fall-fruit," he repeated to himself, as he looked at the basket. Yes, he soliloquised; well named indeed, for the fall has come upon my people Israel, no Name and thing were alike suggestive. The harvest was past, the summer was ended, and they were not saved: nay, not only not saved—they were on the brink of destruction. "The end is come: I have mercifully spared them already, but I will not pass by them any more." And Amos shudders as he sees with his too vivid imagination that day of wrath, that dreadful day, when the happy chorus of praise that rose from the women of the temple choir would be turned into shrieks and howls of misery; while the dead, the victims of war and pestilence, would be lying around thick upon the ground, unhonoured, unburied, fit emblems of their nation, fallen to rise no more.

The seer now turns prophet, and commands his audience, as was his habit (iii. 1, iv. 1, v. 1), with an imperious " listen." Here, as everywhere his interest is in the downtrodden, and fierce words are hurled at those who trample upon the needy and crush the poor. This time we have the good fortune to be shown who the oppressors are and how they do it. They are the wealthy corn in merchants, and they do it by the most disgraceful swindling. But these swindlers are outwardly respectable people, and appear even to make a profession of religion. They have, or at least pretend to have, some regard for the day of worship, the sabbath and the new moon. Their shops are closed on those days, though for all we know this may be only out of deference to a long established tradition or to a strong public opinion: for it is very plain that they have no real love for the Sabbath, and that it has never entered into their minds to use the opportunities it brings as a means of strengthening themselves in their most holy faith, of advancing their knowledge of the things that concern their peace, or of preparing to meet their God. The Sabbath to them was not a joy but a burden, the tedium of which they could hardly disguise. It was an irksome and intolerable interruption to the great work of their lives, which was to make as much money as possible, by fair means or foul—preferably by foul, as that way was speediest. When the holy days came round, they fretted their hearts away and pined for the coming of the new day, when they might open their shops and start their low cheating once more. " Oh! when," they wearily say, " will the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn? and the sabbath, that we may open our sacks and expose our wheat for sale? " Commerce is necessary, but this is commercialism, the small, mean trading spirit, which cares nothing for religion, nothing for art or music, nothing for anything but the endless making of money, and regards every hour as lost that is not devoted to that end. If that were all, it would be contemptible enough, but this passion for money was so keen that it refused to be satisfied in honest ways. Only the unscrupulous could hope to be successful; the honest policy was too slow. Character might be lost, but what of that? What was character to reputation? above all, what was character to money? So they adopted every fraudulent device they could think of for swindling their poor customers out of their dues: they used false balances, they gave short weight, they charged exorbitant prices. And the crowning treachery was this, that the wheat which they disposed of so dishonestly was of the poorest quality, practically worthless. What had been sifted out and would ordinarily be thrown away, they sold, or mixed in large quantities with the wheat proper: so that their swindling affected not only the pockets, but the health and vigour of the people.

It is very significant that the men who do these wicked things sit loose to the obligations of the Sabbath day. Religion is a restraining as well as an inspiring force. Their barefaced disregard of the decencies of trade is largely the result of their indifference to religion; having no fear of God, they have no regard for man. The Sabbath-hating and the swindling go well together. It is no accident that those who do not love the Sabbath cheat on Monday: they rob God and their own souls one day, and their neighbour the next. To be irreligious is to be anti-social; to be religious, in the sense demanded by Hebrew prophecy, is to be social; and conversely, in order to be social, to care for the welfare of others as deeply as for one's own, it is necessary to be religious. Men cannot with any propriety call themselves brothers until they acknowledge a common Father. " Return unto Me " (iv. 6)—that is the fundamental gospel of Amos, from which his social gospel flows.

But those commercial magnates who hated the Sabbath day and industriously defied the fundamental principles of business morality, had no intention of giving either God or His poor their rightful place. With their false balances and short weights and high prices and trashy goods, they were not a whit better than common criminals. For the trust that raises prices to artificial levels, or the man that asks a price for which he has not given the equivalent in weight and quality, is appropriating money which is not his own,—in plain words, is a thief; and the man who sells adulterated food is, to all intents, a murderer; if he has not actually taken life, he has at least imperilled it, by lowering the health and reducing the vitality of the consumer. These men forget, as a financier has recently said, that a nation "travels on its morality." If it has no morality, it stands still and rots, or it travels towards the Abyss.

Now the God whom Amos worships cannot look unmoved upon such cynical commercial indecency, such cold-blooded defiance of the laws that ought to regulate trade and commerce. " Surely," He swears with a solemn oath, " I will never, never forget any of the things that they have done." He pronounces upon the country woe after woe, almost more terrible, if possible, than anything that has gone before—and all because of the commercial dishonesty by which it is cursed. Surely no one who knows the religion of the prophets could accuse them of being otherworldly, in any depreciatory sense of that term. Otherworldly they were, if you like, in the sense that they were the implacable foes of the existing materialistic order of society, which ordained that

"They should take who have the power,

And they should keep who can ";

and in the sense that they were the unwearying champions of that diviner order, according to which men would do justly and love mercy and walk humbly with their God. Otherworldly they were, in the sense that they sought to permeate human society with the principles of that heavenly order which we daily pray may be realized within it—"as in heaven, so on earth." But not with the remotest justification could it be said that they were otherworldly in the sense that their religion exhausted itself in mystic yearnings for some world beyond, or that they cared nothing for the world that now is, with its perplexing social and political, national and international, problems, but set their hopes and their affections in the life beyond the grave. For this world they cared everything, upon this world they believed that the ideal society would, in God's good time, emerge. That is why they speak and work with such fierce, unwearying energy for the purification of the national life. Those who do not understand what they were aiming at have accused them of being unpractical dreamers, who show no power to translate their general demands into concrete formulae or specific legislation. But, in truth, no reformers were ever more practical than they. They enacted no laws, but they went deeper than all legislation, to the human heart, and sought to effect their reformation there. They said, " Hate the evil, and love the good." Take care of the heart and the laws will take care of themselves; for the laws will then be made by men who love one another, and society will be broad-based upon the royal law of love. Legislation will still be necessary; but it is no part of the prophet's business to legislate. Amos offered no proposals for the stricter regulation of the corn market, suggested no programme for the abolition of swindling or the protection of the poor: he sought to smite the conscience, for even the heathen conscience, on his view, well knew the difference between right and wrong.

But meantime the point is that Amos is no mystic, indifferent to the life about him. As we saw, he was thoroughly familiar with the international situation: we now see that he is equally familiar with the transactions of the markets and the shady practices of the merchant princes. He addresses himself fearlessly to the corn-dealers, as he had addressed himself to the high priest and the worshippers at Bethel, proclaiming his old gospel, which can never be out of date, that social injustice is the way to national ruin. " Shall not the land tremble for this? " The very earth will reel in response to the unblushing iniquity that is done upon it. The prophet is here thinking of an earthquake—again no empty threat, for in his time there had been one so destructive as to remain vivid in the national memory for centuries—which would cause the land to rise and fall, and cover it with devastation, and plunge the people into universal mourning. This calamity would be followed by another—the darkening of the earth in broad noonday. This threat rests also, no doubt, upon an actual experience of an eclipse of the sun, a phenomenon which smote the ancient heart with superstitious terror. Amos describes with great power the effects of this supernatural darkness. Feasts would be turned into mourning, songs into lamentation, and everywhere there would be sorrow as bitter as for the loss of an only child.

But the resources of the God of hosts are infinite, and His power to punish is not yet exhausted. There next falls upon the unhappy land a drought so fierce that even the young men and the comely maidens faint for very thirst; and if they faint, in the strength and vigour of their youth, what will become of the weak—the very young and the very old? One cannot bear to think of the horrors of such a day.

But a more terrible thing is still to happen. Smitten thus by blow upon blow, the miserable people at last awaken to a sense of their infinite need of God. Their world has collapsed, society is a chaos, their pride has been humbled to the dust, their power has been broken to pieces, their money has been of no avail to stem the tide of destruction; they have now to face the ultimate realities, which in the heyday of their prosperity they so conveniently ignored; and now they would give anything—if they had anything to give—to know what the God whom they have so long neglected would have them to do. They would do anything and go anywhere to hear a true word of the Lord. That will be a more terrible famine than the famine for bread—the day when the soul learns how lean it is, but cannot find its way to the Bread and the Water of Life. " Behold, I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord." Very vivid is Amos's picture of those desperate men, disillusioned at last, staggering across the land, across the world, in search of a message which they are doomed never to find. And why? Because they stifled the voices of the prophets who told them the truth. They said to the servants of God who struck home to their consciences, who

"Read each wound, each weakness clear,

And struck their finger on the place,

And said, 'Thou ailest here, and here!' "

—they said to these men "Prophesy not" (ii. 12). They had spurned Amos himself, and contemptuously told him to take himself away—himself and his message—to those who would welcome it (vii. 12). So now that the prophets have been ignored, dismissed, persecuted, slain, there is no one to whom they can go; and that is famine and thirst indeed. How essentially true all this is, albeit expressed in ancient form—that those who deliberately and persistently reject some messenger or truth or blessing of God, may find some day to their infinite sorrow that it is beyond their reach, though they seek it carefully with tears.

If the prophet has failed them, much more surely shall the priest. Indeed it is he and the external superficial religion which he represents, that has largely contributed to the ruin of the people. The foolish devotees in the popular places of worship, where God is so gravely misunderstood and dishonoured, hope to be saved by their professions of fidelity. But those who rejected the prophets shall not be saved by the priests. " They shall fall, never to rise again."

No fate seems to Amos too terrible for the cheat and the swindler. Earthquake, darkness, famine, thirst, abandonment, despair—such is the destiny reserved for the man or the nation that has no code of business honour, or that, for filthy gain, sets the eternal laws of commercial morality at defiance. "They shall fall and never rise again." Has this warning, uttered so long ago by Amos, been yet really laid to heart? Are there not still multitudes who imagine that, having cheated men, they can cheat God also?