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Priests and Prophets in Judea 121 ANOTHER PANEL OF THE BLACK OBELtSK Captive Princes makinfj obeisance to Slialmaneser II of the priestly order or the flagrant sins of the King. Some of them turned their attention to what we should now call " social reform." The rich were " grinding the faces of the poor," the luxurious were consuming the children's bread ; wealthy people made friends with and imitated the splendours and vices of foreigners ; and this was hateful to Jehovah, the God of Abraham, who would certainly punish this land. These fulminations were written down and preserved and studied. They went wherever the Jews went, and wherever they went they spread a new religious spirit. They carried the common man past priest and temple, past court and king and brought him face to face with the Rule of Righteousness. That is their supreme importance in the history of mankind. In the great utterances of Isaiah the prophetic voice rises to a pitch of splendid anticipation and fore- shadows the whole earth united and at peace under one God. Therein the Jewish prophecies culminate. All the Prophets did not speak in this fashion, and the intelligent reader of the prophetic books will find much hate in them, much pre- "judice, and much that will remind him of that evil stuff, the propa- ganda literature of the present time. Nevertheless it is the Hebrew Prophets of the period round and about- the Babylonian captivity, who mark the appearance of a new power in the world, the power of individual moral appeal, of an appeal to the free conscience of mankind against the fetish sacrifices and slavish loyalties that had hitherto bridled and harnessed our race.