Roman had trodden the nation under foot, and though the Maccabees had suffered and poured out their blood in vain, it seemed to grow stronger and stronger. Ready to believe any impostor, and to rise at the faintest call, their fanaticism more than once betrayed the people into ineffectual and most sanguinary revolts; but it had one result that was not wholly evil, for they drew after them the multitudes to the desert, when the thunder of the Baptist’s cry reached Jerusalem, “The kingdom of God is at hand.”[119] So was it in Palestine; but among the Diaspora all over the Empire the hope of Messiah assumed a purer and more catholic form. Everywhere it was strong, but the broader horizons by which they were surrounded saved them from the delusions which intoxicated the Palestinian Jew. In classical literature there are tokens that it had filtered into Gentile minds. It was undoubtedly vague and shadowy even at its brightest, but in the Sibyl and Pollio its fulfilment signified something more important than a successful revolution in Palestine. It meant mighty changes impending that would bring good to all the world, the augury of a star that would soon glimmer in the eastern horizon, and grow and brighten till it would be seen to be not a light for Asia only, but the Sun of Righteousness with healing in His beams for every nation under heaven. We have thus been following two lines of religious movement, perfectly independent of each other, far apart geographically, still further apart in the beliefs which inspired them. We have seen how the melody of joy and health which the Indians brought with them from our common primeval home ended in a sigh of despair. Individual existence, at first so full of wonder and delight, lost soon its freshness and glory, and came to be felt to be such a burden that emancipation from it by absorption into the Absolute was hailed as a boon. The human mind, leaving its childhood behind it, and advancing to question itself and the universe, after a season of movement and sense of freedom and power, somehow lost or missed the way. Oppressed in the toils of the jungle, and wandering ever further from practical life as it proceeded, it lay down vanquished, longing only to be at rest and in quiet as infants that never saw the light.