The Shekina, and all visible Divine appearances, having long been discontinued, the Jews seem not to have expected any recurrence of the like, or of analogous interpositions. Their religion consisted in a formal observance of rites and traditions, and a blind reliance on their being descendants of Abraham; and in the Messiah, whom they desired and expected, they looked only for a human chieftain, a temporal deliverer from the Roman yoke. Their notions of the Divine Being, the invisible Deity, do not appear to have differed essentially from those common to their descendants ever since. They appear, indeed, to have degenerated so far from the ancients, as to have retained no ideas of a distinction of Persons in the Godhead. When they spoke of God as their Father, they had reference only to the invisible Deity as their Creator. They were alike destitute of the faith of Abraham and of all correct knowledge of Jehovah, the promised Seed, the Messenger, the personal Word. The common people were as sheep without a shepherd, and their teachers as blind leaders of the blind. "We all, says Trypho, expect a Messiah to be born, that will be man _of man_." Brown's Justin Martyr, section 49. Evidences to almost any extent might be easily adduced to show that the Jews of our Saviour's time had generally, as a people, lost or perverted by their traditions the knowledge which their ancient predecessors possessed, were blind to the meaning of their own Scriptures, and were plunged in gross and inveterate errors.