entiments as keenly as to-day's prophet has them. When
we read their wonderful discourses, we are thrilled by the depth and
intensity of their ethical life. But we are too apt to forget that the
social situation in Palestine was the stimulus to their denunciations.
They were noble enough to feel that conditions were intolerable, and it
was not a far step to believe that Yahweh would not tolerate them. A
noble man has always a noble god. That is the reason why the god of
Amos is noble. The theological view reverses the true causal relation.
Morality is always human morality, expressive of human nature and human
conditions. Man may assign his ideals to some superhuman source
because he is convinced that this source has selected him as its
interpreter; but the fact that he has thought and judged in this moral
way is indubitable, while his theory that Yahweh is speaking through
him is merely an expression of the religious view of the world common
to the time. When we stop a moment to think, we realize that Amos and
Hosea were certain to put their views under the sanction of their
national god. Not to have done so would have been far stranger
psychologically than the ideals which they championed.

Did the prophetic claim that social justice was {173} sanctioned by
Yahweh help its advance? Probably. I see no reason to doubt that it
did somewhat--how much it is impossible to say. So far as the claim
was accepted by the nation, it would assist the forces working for
reform. But religious sanctions are far more powerful when they are
explicit and detailed, as the history of Christianity has shown. And
we must remember that the prophetic claims were not always accepted.
Religion is usually conservative and more or less conventional. The
ritual element plays a considerable part in religious morality. It is
as hard to change the people's ideas of God as it is to change their
conceptions of justice and goodness. For this reason, I am not
convinced that the religious sanction was of much advantage in the
evolution of morality. The old has even more of the use of the
sanction than has the new. Moral forces need to be vigorously based
upon human nature and human relations if they are to dominate society
and control the ethical standards which public opinion demands. The
presence of religious sanctions simply beclouds the real factors at
work. Morality can never, in the long run, be something pressed upon
man from ou