The free character which distinguished prophetism in the religion of Israel changed, after the return of the people from captivity, especially with the party of the Pharisees, to literalness and formalism. The prophets gave place to the synagogue, the living proclamation of the truth to scriptural erudition, the spirit of freedom to slavish subjection to Scripture and tradition. As the ancient productions of the Indian literature, originally the expression of the popular thought of India, were elevated by the Brahmins into Veda, holy, inspired scripture, so also the religious literature of Israel took on the character of a closed Canon, so that what was once the expression of religious life became now rule of faith. The standpoint of the law which prophetism had already overcome was again strongly maintained, the law enriched with a number of new ordinances, and the essence of religion made to consist partly in dogmatic speculation, partly in a merely outward service, devoid of inner life. The Messianic prediction, or the expectation that the kingdom, divided in Rehoboam's reign, once more united under a prince of the house of David, should be exalted to new bloom and lustre,--which in the older prophets was the natural and historically explicable form in which the ideal of Israel's future presented itself to the seer, but which, under the influence of the changed political conditions, had already been replaced in the later prophecy by the more general conception of a future triumph of the true religion of which Israel was the bringer,--[51]returned, yet not as the ideal of the prophetic spirit, but as a dogma, the product of scriptural interpretation. The pure monotheism, by which formerly a place in the Providence of God had been allotted to everything, even to moral evil,[52] became corrupted, under the influence of Parsism, by the conception of two kingdoms, of God and of the Devil. The angels, originally the messengers of Providence, became under mythological names, Gabriel, Raphael, Michael, &c., so many middle beings who filled the space between the Deity, existing apart from the world, and the world. The lower world (sheol, [Greek: aides]), formerly the general abode of the dead, of bad and good without distinction, was split into two parts, paradise and gehenna, and became a place of recompense, and, along with this, religion, once an end, became the means of warding off a dreaded punishment, or of gaining a future of bliss. The doctrine of immortality, as the continuation of man's moral development, which was formerly unknown in Israel, appeared, as in the later Parsism, in the form of a bodily resurrection of the dead, at first of the righteous only, but afterwards in the form of a general resurrection, by mediation of the Messiah, at whose appearing, which was expected just before the end of the present state of things, the great judgment of the world, of living and dead, was to be held, heaven and earth renewed, and the