The general result of reading the literature belonging to this period is to create the impression that recent scholarship has gone much further than is {23} justifiable in the attempt to systematise Jewish thought on eschatology. It has succumbed too readily to the temptation to find system where there is none, to base a chronological development of thought on the discovery, and finally to emend the texts in its light, and sometimes in its aid. It seems extremely doubtful whether there was any "generally recognised" Jewish teaching on this subject. The belief that God would deliver his people, and that his sovereignty would be recognised throughout the world, was no doubt part of the belief of every pious Jew, but the details were vague and there was no systematic teaching on them. If we turn to the gospels we find that the Kingdom of God is sometimes looked for in the future, sometimes regarded as a present reality. Scholarship in the last fifteen years has passed through a period in which the presence of these two elements has been somewhat hotly debated. The beginning of the discussion was probably the publication of Johannes Weiss' monograph[11] on the preaching of Jesus as to the Kingdom of God, in which he emphasised the future aspect of the Kingdom. The question was, however, presented with greater perspective as to its position in the history of criticism by A. Schweitzer in a book which he called _Von Reimarus zu Wrede_. This was translated into English,[12] a fate denied to Weiss, with the result that in England and America the whole {24} problem was associated with Schweitzer's name. The position adopted by these writers was that the teaching of Jesus was mainly eschatological, that is to say, it looked forward to the coming of the end of the world. In the enthusiasm of the rediscovery of this point of view--by no means unknown to our ancestors, and universal in the early Church--Schweitzer and others went rather further than the evidence permitted, and endeavoured to explain eschatologically passages not susceptible of that meaning, but that does not excuse the foolish acrimony with which the less learned, especially among liberal Protestants, assailed them, nor the attempt to cut out from the text of the gospels all eschatological reference.