as an ideal monarch; they
called him a "man after God's own heart," and the imagination of poet
and prophet loved to dwell upon his winsome personality. They thought
of him as in a special way the king chosen by God, and the Israel of
his time as a true kingdom of God, a kingdom of righteousness, peace,
and plenty under the favour of the Most High. The real Israel of
David's day was far different from this, but compared with the days
that followed it was indeed a time of unexampled greatness. A similar
tendency to idealise the past is observable in nearly every nation
which has entered upon a period of suffering or misfortune, as we can
see from the legends about King Olaf and Frederick Barbarossa. But
Israel always looked upon herself as in a special way a theocratic
kingdom, a chosen of God. At its best this idea was a fine one, one,
it led to the thought of a special spiritual vocation for the sake of
the other nations of the earth; at its worst it meant the assertion of
national privilege and contempt for everything which was not Jewish.
After the great captivity in Babylon the Jews were never without a
foreign master, and the northern kingdom of Israel disappeared from
history. But in quite a remarkable way Jewish poets and preachers
united to keep alive the popular belief that God would yet "restore the
kingdom to Israel." Hence there grew up a firmly held conviction that
God would sometime raise up a prince born of David's line who with
supernatural help, and with a strong hand, would drive out the invader
and establish a kingdom which should outshine even that of David
himself. This was the root idea of the kingdom of God, as we meet it
in the New Testament, and as it is described in some of the most
beautiful passages of the Old.

+The Messiah of Jewish expectation.+--As time went on this idea was
deepened and clarified and became more and more associated in popular
expectation with the advent of the Messianic deliverer whose work it
should be to inaugurate it. At the time when Jesus was born this
expectation had become very keen. Everyone was thinking of it, from
Pharisees and Scribes downward. At the moment the foreign master was
the Roman, whose rule, though milder than that of the Ptolemies, was
quite severe enough; the people were impoverished and unhappy. What
they were looking for was a Messiah, a transcendent but quite human
personality of royal descent, who should expel the Roman eagles an