Thus Christ and the Devil, the two poles of Christendom, had faded away out of my spiritual vision; there were left the more vividly, God and Man. Yet I had not finally renounced the _possibility_, that Jesus might have had a divine mission to stimulate all our spiritual faculties, and to guarantee to us a future state of existence. The abstract arguments for the immortality of the soul had always appeared to me vain trifling; and I was deeply convinced that nothing could _assure_ us of a future state but a divine communication. In what mode this might be made, I could not say _à priori_: might not this really be the great purport of Messiahship? was not this, if any, a worthy ground for a divine interference? On the contrary, to heal the sick did not seem at all an adequate motive for a miracle; else, why not the sick of our own day? Credulity had exaggerated, and had represented Jesus to have wrought miracles: but that did not wholly _dis_prove the miracle of resurrection (whether bodily or of whatever kind), said to have been wrought by God _upon_ him, and of which so very intense a belief so remarkably propagated itself. Paul indeed believed it[3] from prophecy; and, as we see this to be a delusion, resting on Rabbinical interpretations, we may perhaps _account_ thus for the belief of the early church, without in any way admitting the fact.--Here, however, I found I had the clue to my only remaining discussion, the primitive Jewish controversy. Let us step back to an earlier stage than John's or Paul's or Peter's doctrine. We cannot doubt that Jesus claimed to be Messiah: what then was Messiah to be? and, did Jesus (though misrepresented by his disciples) truly fulfil his own claims?