The writers about this period take especial pains to limit the conception of the Messiah within the boundaries of the average patriotic ideal. They make him declare to the twelve disciples, as he sends them forth, that before they shall have carried their message to the cities of Israel the Son of Man would announce himself. On a later occasion he is made to say: "There are some here who will not taste of death till they see the Son of Man coming in his glory." Declarations like these are pointedly inconsistent with an intellectual or moral idea of the kingdom. The notion of progress, instruction, regenerating influence, gradual elevation through the power of character, is precluded. The kingdom is to come in time, suddenly, unexpectedly, by a shock of supernatural agency, at the instant the Lord wills; the Son of Man himself knows not when, for it is not dependent on his activity as a reformer, his success as a teacher, or his influence as a person, but on the decree of Jehovah. The attempt on the popular feeling in Jerusalem, strangely called the triumphal entrance of the Messiah into the holy city, is unintelligible except as a political demonstration; whether projected by the Christ or by his followers, or by the Christ urged by the importunate expectations of his followers, whether undertaken hopefully or in desperation, it nowhere appears that it was made in any moral or spiritual interest. All the incidents of the narrative point to a political end, the public assertion of the Christ's Messianic claim. The ass, used instead of the chariot or the horse by royalty on state occasions, and especially alluded to by the prophet Zechariah in connexion with the coming of Zion's King; the palm branches and hosannahs, emblems of sacred majesty; the cries of the attendant throng loudly proclaiming the Messiah; the Galileaan composition of the crowd, marking the revolutionary temper of it; the blank reception of the pageant by the citizens who were too wary to commit themselves to the chances of collision with the Roman authorities; the complete failure of the demonstration in the heart of conservative Judæa; the bearing of the Christ himself as of one conscious of a sublime but perilous mission; all these things find ready explanation by the popular conception of the Messiah, as a national deliverer, but are unintelligible on any other theory. The unspiritual character of the Messiah's attitude is made yet more apparent as the history draws to a close. The violent purging of the temple can only by great vigor of interpretation be made to bear any save a national complexion. It was the assertion of Jehovah's right to his own domain; an indignant, passionate assertion; the declaration of a zealot whose zeal overrode considerations of wisdom.