did not begin soon enough to prevent this; it is even probable that the party afterwards represented by the Pharisees, the party which was most hostile to any suggestion of admitting nonJewish religious ideas, was dominated by Greek conceptions to a far greater extent than it was aware of. Thus the original patriotic expectation concerning the coming of a gifted human leader to free the nation from its bondage, gradually became mixed up with purely philosophical speculations about the Logos, through whom, according to a certain type of Greek thought, God was supposed to have created the world. The fusion between this idea and Jewish religion was made in Alexandria, not in Palestine, and its principal author was Philo-a cultivated Alexandrian Jew, who was born a few years before Jesus. But it is not to be supposed that Palestine could have altogether escaped the influence of ideas which were in the air for a long time before Philo wove them into his system of thought, and were the necessary fruit of the daily intercourse of Jew and Greek. A glance at Philo's teaching ought, therefore, to show us something of what Jews in general were thinking about the status of the Messiah at the time when Christianity came into being.

Philo taught that God was so infinitely exalted above the world that it was impossible to think of Him as coming into contact The Logos with it, and impossible to predicate idea. anything with certainty concerning Him. We

can know nothing about Him, and it is futile to ascribe any excellence to Him, for our finite notions of excellence can have no meaning as applied to God. He is the absolute, the inconceivable; we cannot attempt to describe Him without falling into absurdity. To speak of Him in terms of human conceptions of the true, the beautiful, and the good, leads nowhere, and achieves nothing. Philo's starting-point is thus very similar to that of Herbert Spencer. From this position of nescience Philo goes on to speak of God as acting upon the sensible world through intermediate beings. At the head of these he places the Logos. He thinks of the Logos as the being or principle through whom the world is created and sustained. He is a kind of second God, but not identical with the absolute God; he is the firstborn of every creature. All through the history of mankind the Logos has been revealing God; He is the source of everything that is God-like in human nature, the heavenly Man. Now, although Philo elaborated this idea, he did not invent it, he borrowed it from the Stoics, and the general conception of the relations of God and the world which it implied was borrowed from Plato. From this kind of philosophising it was but a step to the identification of the Messiah of Jewish national hopes with the Logos of Greek thought, and we now know that this identification was being attempted in Jewish popular religion before there was any Christianity at all. People were

talking about the Man from heaven, meaning the Messiah, and at the same time thinking of Him as invested with most of the attributes of the Greek Logos as interpreted by Philo and his followers. Philo only put into shape what was already being vaguely thought and said by many of his contemporaries of his own race and time.

But it was not only Greek influence which was at work in Jewish popular religion at this time; there were Oriental influences Persian at work too, especially Persian. Con- dualism. sidering that the Jewish exiles in Babylon some centuries before had owed their deliverance to Persia this is not surprising. But Persian

religion rested upon an even more absolute dualism than the Greek philosophy which formed the substratum of Philo's system of thought. According to Persian notions the universe was sharply divided between the two opposing powers of light and darkness, good and evil, Ormuzd and Ahriman, or God and Satan. The ordinary present-day idea of Satan with which people frighten children in Christian lands is derived directly from this oldtime influence of Persian dualism on Jewish religion. In still earlier Jewish religion Satan was not considered to be an evil spirit; he was one of the angelic servants of God, the accuser of men, but not the enemy of good. But as soon as Persian dualism laid hold of the Jewish imagination the character of Satan

underwent a metamorphosis; henceforth he was thought of as the captain of the host of evil in opposition to the holy will of God. All nature and all human history were now looked upon as the scene of this conflict, a conflict to which of course there could only be one issue, namely, the catastrophic triumph of good. For the present, so it was thought, Satan had the best of it; all the earthly kingdoms were in his mighty grip, and even God's people were in bondage to him and were suffering accordingly. God was being kept out of His proper dominion over the souls and bodies of men because of this usurpation; Satan was "the prince of this world." In the end, however, God would resume His sovereignty with a strong hand, and the kingdom of Satan would be overthrown. The ideas absorbed by Judaism from this source are thus not unimportant for the consideration of our subject; it will be seen at once that they have a considerable bearing upon popular ideas concerning the establishment of the Kingdom of God. But the result of the operation of such ideas was the development of a bewildering number of fantastic theories concerning the person of the Messiah and the way in which he was to appear. According to some He was, as we have seen, the Logos through whom the cosmos itself was created and sustained. Others regarded Him as a divine Man existing before the creation, and due to descend into the world in the fulness of time, and put an end to Satan's

rule. Others, again, still continued to think of Him as an earthly conqueror of the seed of David whom God would gird for the task of fighting against and overthrowing all the world-powers which were supposed to represent the dominion of Satan. It should not be overlooked, however, that the inheritors of the promise as thus construed were supposed to be the children of Abraham; outsiders could only benefit through them, if at all. It thus became easy to think of the "world" as synonymous with the kingdom of Satan, and of all the kingdoms of the world. as being more or less his instruments and under his obedience. With such a general conception as this the thorough-going Jewish patriot trained under Pharisaic methods could find but little room in his heart for charity towards the Gentiles. Gentiles did not count; they were outside the covenant; they were classed in a lump as the servants of Satan. A good Pharisee could have said of himself and his party, just as some of the Christians did later on, “We know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in the evil one" (1 John v. 19).

of later

This view of the world as being essentially opposed to God, and a synonym for all the evil tendencies in human nature, led na- Pessimism turally to a view of human history Jewish which was as false as it was depress- thought. ing, namely, that mankind had begun well and ended miserably. In much of the rabbinical lore of the period immediately preceding the birth