Yahweh appears to plead with His people for their sins, but the sinners are no longer a careless and oppressive aristocracy buoyed up by deceptive assurances of Yahweh's help, by prophecies of wine and strong drink; they are bowed down by a religion of terror, wearied with attempts to propitiate an angry God by countless offerings, and even by the sacrifice of the first-born.
At a later period he talked of "dying of rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole"; for some time, however, he was buoyed up by feeble hopes of a restoration to England.
Anaximenes, a pupil of Anaximander, was the first to reject the view that the earth was a circular plane, but held it to be an oblong rectangle, buoyed up in the midst of the heavens by the compressed air upon which it rested.
