The history and the literature of the Hebrews would be a perplexing enigma without this hope. Like their faith, it was too pure and spiritual for them to receive, and to the very latest it always appears with something of the defilement of their religious condition clinging to it. During the Exile, however, this hope became purer and stronger, and the imagery in which they embodied it became more evangelical and spiritual than that employed by earlier poets and prophets. The section of the Hebrews that returned to Palestine held it in increased strength, but with the old national taint upon it. Their own restoration and the favour of Persia kindled anew the foolish dreams of their ancestors, and, alas! when Persia disappointed them, and its favour was supplanted by oppression, and the kingdom, instead of rising Phœnix-like out of its ashes, became the battlefield or the gage of foreign nations, there broke out in Palestine the bitterest plague of unbelief and apostasy that had ever assailed the nation. For idolatry, for overlaying or corrupting the worship of Jehovah, their forefathers had often been severely chastised, but no prophet had as yet complained of a temple deserted and an altar defiled by unworthy offerings. And this was because men professed to have discovered in the destruction of their national hopes that after all religion was vain, and there was no profit in serving God. Any one who has intelligently read Malachi, or the sayings of Agur the proverb-collector,[116] or the Book of Ecclesiastes, will see to what a depth of scepticism, if not indeed of atheism, their perverted Messianic hopes had brought the Jews of Palestine. We appreciate the criticism which regards Coheleth, so alien to the healthy and joyous spirit of the Hebrew religion, as the natural outgrowth of this period.[117] When faith in Israel’s imperishable kingdom seemed to be completely wrecked, when ministers of religion led the revolt from it, and unrighteous rulers and corrupt society made life in Palestine, as in Rome in Nero’s day, not worth the living, it is not to be wondered that this one which has survived, but that “many books”[118] should have been written to echo the cry, “All is vanity.” We may listen to it as a note of despair from a pessimist in whose people religion had died, because disappointed political ambition had shown them that “no earthly good” came of serving God; or we may read it as the protest of some healthy-minded Jew against that orthodox asceticism which after the Captivity invaded religion, and led to the rise of Pharisaism and Essenism. In any case, it seems to mark the proper close in Palestine of an age of national perverted faith and hope. The Essenes like the Indian ascetics had hope neither for the nation’s recovery nor for the establishment anywhere of a kingdom of God. The Pharisees, on the contrary, had hope, but it was the old political hope, and in them, though Egyptian and Syrian and Greek and