ness and concrete
impressiveness that made it a force among the men of that age. Jesus
was the heavenly Messiah who would return in power and rule according
to righteousness. With him was bound up the hope of immortality and in
his hand was dominion over the evils which beset one's path. A great
world-event was impending; at any moment the last trumpet might sound
and the dead and the living be delivered to judgment. Moreover, Jesus
as the Christ and Lord was even now at work among men, his Spirit was
active to guide and encourage those who had faith in him. In the
congregation at Jerusalem, this belief in Jesus as the Messiah was
closely associated with the past history of the race and did not
involve a break with the Law. The Old Testament was searched to find
prophecies which would throw light upon this apparently new departure
and soon passage after passage was found which would easily lend itself
to the desired interpretation. Under the guidance of these passages
and of the new outlook, the life of the prophet of Nazareth was
re-molded until it lost the greater part of its more human features.

Such an important amendment of the Jewish religion could not keep
itself hidden. The Jews of the dispersion, broadened by their contact
with the political, {86} philosophical and religious movements of the
Roman empire, yet cherishing a sincere faith in the traditions of their
fathers, heard of the new sect which had arisen in Palestine. Their
interest was aroused. Sometimes they felt sympathetic, sometimes they
were antagonistic. Slowly at first and then more rapidly through the
work of Paul, they came in more direct contact with this new movement.
By this time, it had already become Hellenistic in its spirit and
attitude. Around the nucleus of the life of Jesus and his
resurrection, the seething, myriad-shaped ideas of the age attached
themselves. The Palestinian congregation was left behind in its
peaceful conservatism while the movement which it had inaugurated grew
by leaps and bounds and swept outward into the tossing ocean of faiths
and philosophies which extended from India to Gaul. To suppose that it
could remain unchanged in such fellowship is to undervalue the
assimilative tendencies in the social mind. The Greeks and Romans and
Egyptians and Syrians could not think as Jews. They inevitably
interpreted it in terms of their own ideas and problems in order to
comprehend it.

We have already conside