He shall take His jealousy as complete armour, And shall make the whole creation His weapons for vengeance on His enemies; He shall put on righteousness as a breastplate, And shall take judgement unfeigned as a helmet; He shall take holiness as an invincible shield, And shall sharpen stern wrath for a sword; And the world shall go forth with Him to fight against His insensate foes. Shafts of lightning shall fly with true aim, And from the clouds, as from a well-drawn bow, shall they leap to the mark. And as from an engine of war shall be hurled hailstones full of wrath; The water of the sea shall rage against them, And rivers shall sternly overwhelm them; A mighty blast shall encounter them, And as a tempest shall it winnow them away. So shall lawlessness make all the land desolate, And their evil-doing shall overturn the thrones of princes. These two last lines are strikingly out of harmony with what has preceded, since they deal with this world; such a sudden change of subject is unnatural, the lines cannot originally have stood here. There is, thus, no doctrine of a Messiah or a Messianic Kingdom in the ordinary Jewish sense; the kingdom which is described has God as its ruler, it is an eternal kingdom which only the righteous shall possess; the writer does not make clear whether it is to be set up on this earth, or whether it is to be a spiritual kingdom hereafter. From the way in which he spiritualizes it is presumably to be a kingdom in the world to come; against this it cannot be urged that there are materialistic _traits_ which point to a kingdom to be set up on this earth, for the writer has clearly borrowed and incorporated traditional eschatological material without intending to utilize more than its outward form. To interpret otherwise would, in view of the spirit of the rest of this portion of the book, be to misunderstand the author. (_f_) _The Doctrine of the Future Life._ In Ecclesiasticus the teaching on this subject is substantially that of the normal Old Testament type; one or two quotations will suffice to illustrate this: For what pleasure hath God in all that perish in Hades, In place of those who live and give Him praise? Thanksgiving perisheth from the dead as from one that is not, But he that liveth and is in health praiseth the Lord (xvii. 27, 28). The corruption of the body is looked upon as the end of man: When a man dieth he inheriteth Worm and maggot, lice and creeping things (x. 11); though the annihilation of the spirit as well as the body is evidently not contemplated in view of such words as these: Weep gently for the dead, for he hath found rest (xxii. 11);