g to be. The Book of Daniel manifests,
that by the time of Antiochus Epiphanes the Jews had learned each
nation to have its guardian spirit, good or evil; and that the fates
of nations depend on the invisible conflict of these tutelary powers.
In Paul the same idea is strongly brought out. Satan is the prince of
the power of the air; with principalities and powers beneath him; over
all of whom Christ won the victory on his cross. In the Apocalypse
we read the Oriental doctrine of the "_seven angels_ who stand before
God." As the Christian tenet thus rose among the Jews from their
contact with Eastern superstition, and was propagated and expanded
while prophecy was mute, it cannot be ascribed to "divine supernatural
revelation" as the source. The ground of it is dearly seen in infant
speculations on the cause of moral evil and of national calamities.

Thus Christ and the Devil, the two poles of Christendom, had faded
away out of my spiritual vision; there were left the more vividly, God
and Man. Yet I had not finally renounced the _possibility_, that
Jesus might have had a divine mission to stimulate all our spiritual
faculties, and to guarantee to us a future state of existence. The
abstract arguments for the immortality of the soul had always appeared
to me vain trifling; and I was deeply convinced that nothing could
_assure_ us of a future state but a divine communication. In what mode
this might be made, I could not say _a priori_: might not this really
be the great purport of Messiahship? was not this, if any, a worthy
ground for a divine interference? On the contrary, to heal the sick
did not seem at all an adequate motive for a miracle; else, why
not the sick of our own day? Credulity had exaggerated, and had
represented Jesus to have wrought miracles: but that did not wholly
_dis_prove the miracle of resurrection (whether bodily or of whatever
kind), said to have been wrought by God _upon_ him, and of which so
very intense a belief so remarkably propagated itself. Paul indeed
believed it[3] from prophecy; and, as we see this to be a delusion,
resting on Rabbinical interpretations, we may perhaps _account_ thus
for the belief of the early church, without in any way admitting the
fact.--Here, however, I found I had the clue to my only remaining
discussion, the primitive Jewish controversy. Let us step back to an
earlier stage than John's or Paul's or Peter's doctrine. We cannot
doubt that Jesus claimed to be Messia