The religious beliefs imputed to the Messiah we are sketching, are the ordinary beliefs of his age and people. His faith is the faith of the Pharisees. His idea of God is the national idea softened, as it always had been, by a gentle mind. It thinks as his countrymen thought about Providence, fate and freedom, good and evil, destiny, the past and the future of his race. He believes in the resurrection and the judgment, the blessedness that is in store for the faithful Israelite, the misery that awaits the unworthy children of Abraham. His moral classifications are the technical classifications of the enthusiastic patriot, who confounded national with rational principles of judgment. He believes in good and bad angels, in guardian spirits and demoniacal possession. A Pharisee of the narrow literal school he is not. His allegiance to the Mosaic law is spiritual, not slavish; his faith in the perpetuity of the temple worship is unencumbered with formalism; he discriminates between the priestly office and the priestly character, between the form and the essence of sacrifice; yet is he capable of lurid feelings and bitter thoughts towards the Pharisees of another school; he cannot enter into the mind of the Sadducee; and the scribe is a person he cannot respect. On this side his intolerance occasionally breaks forth with inconsiderate heat. He calls his opponents "blind guides," "hypocrites," "whited sepulchres," and threatens them with the wrath of the Eternal. The Messiah's essential conception of his office does not differ materially from that of his countrymen. He is no military leader; he puts no confidence in the sword; he incites to no revolt. But he does not trust to intellectual methods for his success; the success that he anticipates is not such as follows the promulgation of ideas, or the establishment of moral convictions. He looks for demonstrations of power, not human but super-human. The hosts that surround him, and are reckoned on to sustain him, are the hosts of heaven, marshalled under the Lord and prepared to sweep down upon the Lord's foes when the hour of conflict shall strike. He will not draw the sword himself, or allow his followers to gird on weapons of war; but he is more than willing to avail himself of legions irresistible in might. James Martineau has touched this point with a master hand: "The non-resistant principle meant no more in the early church than that the disciples were not to anticipate the hour fast approaching of the Messiah's descent to claim his throne. But when that hour struck there was to be no want of 'physical force' no shrinking from retribution as either unjust or undivine. The 'flaming fire,' the 'sudden destruction,' the 'mighty angels,' the 'tribulation and anguish,' were to form the retinue of Christ, and the pioneers of the kingdom of God. The new reign was to come _with force_, and on nothing else in the last resort was there any