Fearlessly, with bold strokes, and in vivid pictures, he described the terrible conditions as he knew them:
"Hear, I pray you, ye chiefs of Jacob,
And ye judges of the house of Israel!
You surely ought to know what is just!
Yet, you hate good and love evil;
You who devour the flesh of my people,
Flay their skin from off of them,
And break their bones!"
It was possible for Judah to be saved, if the governing classes, the judiciary, the great landowners and the wealthy merchants dealt justly and righteously with the common people, the poor, the peasant and the wage earner:
"For this will I lament and wail;
I will go stripped and naked;
I will make a wailing like the jackals,
And a lamentation like the ostriches."
Micah did more than merely preach and wail. Down in the Shefelah he set himself to help his fellow-peasants and to correct the injustices practiced upon them, wherever he could.
But the western foothills were not the whole of Judah; and the origin and source of the demoralizing wickedness lay not in the farm sections, but in the capital; and as to the capital, "her wounds are incurable." The cause of the downfall of Samaria and Israel
"Is come even to Judah;
It reacheth unto the gate of my people,
Even unto Jerusalem."
Therefore Micah, less hopeful than Isaiah, who was biding his time for a change of heart in the rulers and chiefs of the country, said of the coming of the day of reckoning:
"Then shall they cry unto the Lord, but He will not answer them:
Yea, He will hide His face from them at that time,
According as they have wrought evil in their doings."