The Israelitish nation followed the example of their 'wise' sovereign; and so they went on from bad to worse. It was only through the constant mercy of the Almighty, in remembrance of His reiterated promise, that the rebellious descendants of Abraham did not become merged into the heathens by whom they were surrounded, and altogether lost.

The annihilation of the separate kingdom of the Ten Tribes of Israel, called also that of Joseph or Ephraim, and the captivity of the two remaining Tribes under the rule of the descendants of their king David, of the house of Judah, at length effectually opened the eyes of the Jews to the enormity of their conduct. They returned from Babylon effectually cured of their polytheistic tendencies; and for nearly twenty-four centuries since that period they have never again been guilty of the sin of denying the God of their fathers. But, in spite of this, neither their disposition nor their intellectual faculties-perverted and debased as they had become through the traditions and fables learned in Babylon and the other countries in which they had been dispersed were in a fit state to retain the truth pure and undefiled. Their consciousness, through all their trials and adversities, that they were still the chosen people of their God, that He, like an indulgent father, would never cast them entirely off, instead of teaching them obedience and humble submission to His will, only filled their minds with spiritual pride, and blinded them to the proper understanding of the oracles of the Eternal, of which they were the favoured depositaries. As the chosen of God, they rightly felt their faith in Him to be the only true one, and they were likewise persuaded that, sooner or later, that faith was destined to be extended over all the families of mankind. But at the same time they wrongly interpreted the promises of the Eternal, which they imagined to signify that they were to look for the coming of a temporal chief, a descendant of the illustrious house of David, under whom the kingdom of Israel would be restored in more than its pristine power and splendour, and that this kingdom should swallow up all the other kingdoms of the earth, and should never be overthrown. The lower the for

tunes of the nation fell, the higher rose their expectations of the advent of the promised Saviour; and when at length they were subjugated by the Romans, and their country had virtually become a province of the empire, instead of giving way to despair, they then felt more than ever that the moment of deliverance was at hand, and that the king so long and anxiously looked for must appear. Their faith in this temporal restoration of the kingdom of Israel under a descendant of David was unbounded. The valiant Maccabees had shown the heathen world what Jewish heroes were capable of doing; and daring spirits were not wanting to unfurl the standard of the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, as was instanced in the case of more than one pretender to the throne of David before the appearance of our Lord Jesus, and in the great and final rising of the nation in the beginning of the second century of the Christian era.

The precise nature and character of the expected Saviour, and the manner in which he was to accomplish his mission, were, however, conceived differently at different times and by different individuals. The great mass of the nation, as has been said, looked for the restoration of the temporal kingdom of Israel under a descendant of David; but, in the face of the overwhelming power of the Roman emperors, the feeling was dying out with many that this could ever be accomplished; and the conquest of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple by Titus, the son of the Emperor Vespasian, in a.D. 70, and the subsequent destruction of the city and annihilation of the Jewish nation by Hadrian, fifty years later, consequent on the last great struggle under the pseudo-Messiah, the anti-Christ, Bar Cocaba, at length convinced all but a few enthusiasts, who will always be found hoping against hope, that there could no longer be any reasonable expectation of the restoration of the temporal kingdom of David by human means, and that the Messiah or Anointed King must therefore be endowed with supernatural powers, which he would exercise to aid his people in breaking and throwing off the hated yoke of the foreign occupants of the sacred soil, on whom he and they together would take full vengeance; and he would then

establish himself on his throne in Jerusalem, and there receive the homage of the whole Gentile world. A somewhat similar notion prevails even at the present day, though it is gradually being abandoned as altogether fallacious and hopeless.

There were, however, not a few among the Jews who looked to the Advent of the Messiah for something widely different from the restoration of the temporal kingdom of David, either by natural or by supernatural means. The intelligent spirits, the enlightened interpreters of the promises of the Almighty and the predictions of His prophets, the true watchers of the signs of the times, saw plainly that such an idea was as visionary as it is seen to be at the present time; and they therefore looked- -as the enlightened Jews are now beginning to look-for the spiritual regeneration of God's chosen people, and thus to the establishment of His kingdom on earth,-a kingdom which should comprise not only the Jews but the Gentiles likewise, and should, in fact, be a true and literal fulfilment of the promise to their forefather Abraham, that in his seed should all the nations of the earth be blessed.

In the estimation of countless millions of believers, who are daily and hourly increasing in numbers, the hope and expectation of Israel was realized in the generation before the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple, and indeed, in anticipation of that event, in the person of our Lord, Jesus of Nazareth, who is usually spoken of as Jesus Christ, and whom Christians of all denominations, and, it must be added, Mohammedans likewise, concur in revering as the predicted Messiah, or Anointed King of Israel, however much they may differ as to his other attributes.

The most satisfactory evidence of what were the opinions of the Jews themselves respecting the character and attributes of the Messiah must surely be the declarations of his earliest disciples, who, being Jews, would not have acknowledged Jesus as such had they not believed him to fulfil the conditions of prophecy, and consequently the expectations of themselves and their countrymen. Now several of such declarations are recorded in

the Acts of the Apostles as having been made by Peter and by Stephen*. For these it will be sufficient to refer to the passages where they occur. What will be here dwelt on is the testimony of the Jew Saul of Tarsus, better known as the Christian Apostle Paul, who describes himself as an Israelite of the seed of Abraham, of the Tribe of Benjamin; a Hebrew of the Hebrews; a Jew circumcised on the eighth day; brought up at Jerusalem at the feet of Gamaliel the Aged, who was the grandson of the great Hillel the Orthodox, and himself one of the most famous Rabbis of the Jewish Sanhedrin; he (Paul) being taught according to the manner of the Law, and further, 'as touching the Law a Pharisee and the son of a Pharisee, and as touching the righteousness which is in the Law, blameless': that is to say, an orthodox Jew both in theory and in practice, who, before his conversion to the belief in Jesus as the Messiah, beyond measure persecuted the Congregation-badly translated 'Church' -of God, and wasted it, and profited in the Jews' religion above many his equals in his own nation, being more zealous of the traditions of his fathers; one, in fact, whose writings prove him to have been a most learned Scribe or Doctor of the Law, and who must, if any one could, have thoroughly understood the nature and character of the Hope of Israel, as taught in the orthodox school of his master, Rabbi Gamaliel.

Now it is in these terms that this learned and pious Jewish Scribe is recorded as having expressed himself in the synagogue of his nation at Antioch, at the request of its rulers, after the reading of the Law and the Prophets on the Sabbath-day :'Shema Israel-Men of Israel, and ye that fear God, give audience. The God of this people of Israel chose our fathers, and exalted the people when they dwelt as strangers in the land of Egypt, and with a high arm brought He them out of it. And about the time of forty years suffered He their manners in the wilderness. And when He had destroyed seven nations in the land of Canaan, He divided their land to them by lot. And *Acts ii. 22-36; iii. 12–26; iv. 8-12; vii. 2, 53.

† See Rom. xi. 1; Phil. iii. 5–6; Acts xxii. 3; xxiii. 6.

after that He gave unto them judges about the space of four hundred and fifty years, until Samuel the prophet. And afterward they desired a king; and God gave unto them Saul, the son of Kish, a man of the tribe of Benjamin, by the space of forty years. And when He had removed him, He raised up unto them David to be their king; to whom also He gave testimony, and said, I have found David, the son of Jesse, a man after mine own heart, which shall fulfil all my will. Of this man's seed hath God, according to His promise, raised unto Israel a Saviour, Jesus' *.

Further, in the commencement of his First Epistle to the Romans, the same Paul speaks of Jesus the Messiah, our Lord, who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God, with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead'. And again in his Epistle to the Galatians, he says:— When the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, made under the Law, to redeem them that were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying Abba, Father. Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God, through the Messiah'‡.

Many more texts might be, and, indeed, in the sequel will be, cited; but those here given suffice for the present to show the opinion entertained by this learned and pious disciple of Gamaliel of the character and attributes of the expected Messiah, and his belief in their application to Jesus of Nazareth.

Paul was, however, one of those enlightened Jews who looked for the spiritual regeneration of his nation through the coming of the Messiah, and not for the restoration of the temporal kingdom of David, on which so many of the first disciples of Jesus built their hopes. For, as he himself declared to the Corinthians, 'When the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom, we preach a crucified Messiah, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, *Acts xiii. 16-23. † Rom. i. 3-4. Gal. iv. 4-7.