The movement of Jesus, then, may be called revolutionary, not in the sense of aiming directly at political revolution, but in the sense of his expecting to found a free, spiritual, and universal religion, which would uproot and remove in time the partial religions, Judaism included. Still he designed to connect himself with the Old Dispensation. He recognized the Divine mission of Moses and the Providential office of the prophets in preparing for him. In the expectations which they fostered there was something true as well as something false. When they depicted a glorious and happy political condition of the Jewish nation under the Messiah as an earthly king, Jesus must have regarded them as being in error. We find him pronouncing John the Baptist the greatest of the prophets of the old order, and declaring that the least in the kingdom of heaven was greater than he; and the reason is shown by the context of the words (Matt. xi.) to be that John as a Jewish prophet regarded the kingdom of God in part as a political kingdom. But the fundamental idea of the Theocracy, that other nations would be united with Israel under the dominion of the One True God, was one in harmony with Jesus' thought.[34] This expectation Jesus regarded it as his mission to realize and fulfil. He had only to separate from the Theocratic predictions of the prophets the partial political element, to bring them into unison with his universal aim. Whatever in the hitherto prevailing ideas and hopes was capable of expansion he absorbed into himself, that it might be given out in a wider and higher form, and live for ever. A case somewhat parallel might be found in the changes wrought by our late war. Those who took a radical view of the issue of the contest were exposed to the charge of being revolutionary and destroying the Constitution. They could reply, "Yes: the issue will be revolutionary. There will be a new state of law, and of the relations of the people in important respects, effected by carrying out fundamental principles. But those principles were the essence of the Constitution; and to carry them out is only fully to accomplish its purpose, by annihilating transient provisions at war with liberty and social justice, and giving scope to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. We hold to the Constitution. We have come not to destroy, but to fulfil." So Jesus Christ came not to destroy all that had gone before, but to fulfil whatever in it was fundamental to the Divine purpose in relation to man. In this feeling of a real connection between his movement and the Hebrew ideas and hopes is to be found the principal explanation of his confining his labors, and those of the apostles when first sent forth, chiefly to Judea and Galilee. Not only must his own work be limited in its local scope,--for he could not go everywhere,--but the historical basis of his movement lay in the Hebrew history. Among the Hebrew people only could he find suitably prepared