in proportion to his pretensions and to their own wild hopes would be the rage of the populace if their Messiah disappointed them, which, if quite true and honest, he could scarcely fail to do. In all their dire need Jesus of Nazareth was never recognised as Messiah by the Jews. His title came to him in the Greek form. Christ means Messiah, or anointed; but it means it in Greek, and not in Hebrew. Jesus of Nazareth never got any real hold upon his own people. His followers in his lifetime were few, and of an unimportant and illiterate sort. The Jews of the time took little notice of his existence and his doings. He lived and worked just as many other Jewish teachers then lived and worked. He went about from place to place, healing, helping, and exhorting, and rousing in the hearts of those who heeded a sense of better things. But many of the Essenes preached and tended the sick, and the virtues of humility and charity, and contempt of worldliness, were virtues common to all honest Pharisees. It was chiefly in Galilee, among the heathen and among such Jews as had wilfully or heedlessly gone astray, that Jesus attracted attention. The bulk of the nation were not so much hostile as indifferent. Yet, though the sympathies of Jesus were avowedly with the ‘lost sheep of the house of Israel,’ the wholesale and indiscriminate denunciations reported in the New Testament as made by him against the Pharisees are the inventions of a later time, when Christians had begun to take up a hostile attitude towards their mother religion. There were, doubtless, shams and hypocrites among the Pharisees, who well deserved to be denounced; but also we know there was a whole class of them――they must have been pretty numerous to be classified――who ‘did the will of their Father which is in heaven, _because they loved Him_’ (Jerusalem Talmud, Berachoth, ix. 5). Jesus himself probably never denounced Pharisees nor Judaism. But of Jesus himself very little that is trustworthy is known. It was not till long after his death, perhaps fifty years, that even the first of his biographies, which are contained in the various books of the New Testament, came to be written.