beasts, trees of life, splendid cities, war and bloodshed
filled the fancy,[97] and threatened to obscure the simple and yet, at
bottom, much more affecting maxims about the judgment which is certain
to every individual soul, and drew the confessors of the Gospel into a
restless activity, into politics, and abhorrence of the State. It was an
evil inheritance which the Christians took over from the Jews,[98] an
inheritance which makes it impossible to reproduce with certainty the
eschatological sayings of Jesus. Things directly foreign were mixed up
with them, and, what was most serious, delineations of the hopes of the
future could easily lead to the undervaluing of the most important gifts
and duties of the Gospel.[99]

3. A wealth of mythologies and poetic ideas was naturalised and
legitimised[100] in the Christian communities, chiefly by the reception
of the Apocalyptic literature, but also by the reception of artificial
exegesis and Haggada. Most important for the following period were the
speculations about Messiah, which were partly borrowed from expositions
of the Old Testament and from the Apocalypses, partly formed
independently, according to methods the justice of which no one
contested, and the application of which seemed to give a firm basis to
religious faith.

Some of the Jewish Apocalyptists had already attributed pre-existence to
the expected Messiah, as to other precious things in the Old Testament
history and worship, and, without any thought of denying his human
nature, placed him as already existing before his appearing in a series
of angelic beings.[101] This took place in accordance with an
established method of speculation, so far as an attempt was made thereby
to express the special value of an empiric object, by distinguishing
between the essence and the inadequate form of appearance, hypostatising
the essence, and exalting it above time and space. But when a later
appearance was conceived as the aim of a series of preparations, it was
frequently hypostatised and placed above these preparations even in
time. The supposed aim was, in a kind of real existence, placed, as
first cause, before the means which were destined to realise it on
earth.[102]

Some of the first confessors of the Gospel, though not all the writers
of the New Testament, in accordance with the same method, went beyond
the declarations which Jesus himself had made about his person, and
endeavoured to conceive its value and ab