But it must also be acknowledged, that in the state of oppression in which the Jewish people were groaning, and after all the glorious promises which the Eternal had so often made them, they must have longed for the coming of a Messiah, and looked towards it as the period of their happy deliverance; and that they are therefore to an extent excusable for not having recognized a deliverer in the person of the Lord Jesus, since it is in man's nature to care more for the body than for the spirit, and to be more sensible to present wants than flattered by advantages "to come," and for that very reason, always uncertain. It must indeed be believed that Abraham, and after him a very small number of patriarchs and prophets, were capable of forming an idea of the nature of the spiritual reign of the Messiah; but these ideas would necessarily be limited to the narrow circle of the inspired, and it is not astonishing that, being unknown to the multitude, these notions were so far altered that, when the Saviour appeared in Judæa, the people, their doctors, and even their princes, expected a monarch--a conqueror--who, by the rapidity of his conquests was to subdue the whole world. And how could these flattering ideas be reconciled with the abject and apparently miserable condition of Jesus Christ? So, feeling scandalized by His announcing Himself as the Messiah, they persecuted Him, rejected Him, and put Him to the most ignominious death. Having since then found nothing tending to the fulfilment of their oracles, and being unwilling to renounce them, they indulge in all sorts of ideas, each one more chimerical than the one preceding. Thus, when they beheld the triumphs of the Christian religion, and found that most of their ancient oracles might be explained spiritually, and applied to Jesus Christ, they thought proper, against the opinion of their fathers, to deny that the passages which we allege against them are to be understood of the Messiah, thus torturing our Holy Scriptures to their own loss. Some of them maintain that their oracles have been misunderstood; that it is in vain to long for the coming of a Messiah, since He has already come in the person of Ezechias. Such was the opinion of the famous Hillel. Others more lax, or politely yielding to times and circumstances, assert that the belief in the coming of a Messiah is not a fundamental article of faith, and that the denying of this dogma either does not injure the integrity of the law, or injures it but slightly. Thus the Jew Albo said to the pope, that "to deny the coming of the Messiah was only to cut off a branch of the tree without touching the root." The celebrated rabbi, Solomon Jarchi or Raschi, who lived at the commencement of the twelfth century, says, in his "_Talmudes,_" that the ancient Hebrews believed the Messiah to have been born on the day of the last destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman armies. This is indeed calling in the physician when the man is dead.