[Footnote 40: Réville, Review of Renan's Life of Jesus.] These are the principal reasons which determine me to believe that Jesus did not expect to return visibly to raise the dead, judge the world, and be the head of an external Theocratic kingdom on the renewed earth. What, then, shall be said of the language which appears to express that opinion? "Ye shall drink the wine new with me in my Father's kingdom." "Ye shall sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel," &c. Two considerations are to be kept in sight in establishing the views and expectations of Jesus: first, that he used this language--so far as he used it--in a figurative sense, to represent spiritual and providential facts as he conceived them; second, that the evangelists may have sometimes given to his language a precision and a connection which did not belong to it, as delivered. That he could not have employed this language as it is reported to us, in its literal and proper sense, is to my mind a necessary conviction in the premises. This would suppose that he entertained two orders of conceptions, which were opposed to one another, with a clear profound conviction, and gave them as revelations of God: one his spiritual and rational beliefs; the other his Apocalyptic beliefs. This supposition is the vice of Renan's seventeenth chapter. The language of the Apocalyptic beliefs Jesus might use to some extent as a vehicle for conveying the spiritual and rational to others; and the most explicit language in which he conveyed his spiritual beliefs, so far as it was retained in their feebler minds, might be forced into harmony with their traditional opinions. But that in Jesus' mind, so original, so manifestly filled with fresh thought on every theme of Providence and man, these spiritual apprehensions of a kingdom or communion of God which should act under and within the state, renovating human life and society; of a Messiah who by such a kingdom should fulfil the missionary function of Israel to the race of man; of a resurrection which should be the uninterrupted continuance of the blessed life, or an immediate renewal of the sense of wasted opportunity and law violated on earth; of a judgment both immediate and continual of every soul despising the truth revealed to it; of a retribution to civil societies according to Divine law,--should arise as original conceptions, be held with firm decisive grasp, be of the essence of his instruction, and so pronounced in him that our most advanced modern thought is but the distant echo of his profound and distinct enunciations; and that at the same time he should hold those Apocalyptic traditions, of a visible coming, of a Theocratic throne before whose splendor that of Cæsar would fade away, of a simultaneous resurrection and judgment,--hold them in unimpaired conviction, as truths to be solemnly insisted upon as a part of his revelation,--this, it seems to me, comes as near a psychological contradiction as we can well conceive.