tional guardian, the angel Michael, being more powerful and
nearer to the throne than any other one. In the calamities that
fell on them, they recognized the vengeance of Jehovah for the
violation of his commands. In their victories, their deliverances,
their great blessings, especially in their rescue from Egypt, and
in the many miracles which they believed to have accompanied that
great passage, they saw the signal superiority of their God over
every other god, and the proofs of his particular providence over
them in distinct preference to all other peoples. He had, as they
piously believed, made a special covenant with Abraham, and set
apart his posterity as a sacred family, exclusively intrusted with
the divine law, and commissioned to subdue and govern all the
other families of the earth. When this proud and intensely
cherished faith was baffled of fulfillment, they never dreamed of
abandoning it.

They only supposed its triumphant execution postponed, as a
penalty for their sins, and looked forward with redoubled ardor to
a better time when their hopes should break into fruition, their
exile be ended, their captivity appear as a dream, Jerusalem be
the central gem of the world, and the anointed ruler wield his
sceptre over all mankind.

But misfortunes and woes were heaped on them. Their city was
sacked, their temple desecrated, their people dragged into foreign
slavery, forbidden to celebrate the rites of their religion,
slaughtered by wholesale. Many times, during the two centuries
before and the first century after Christ, did they suffer these
terrible sorrows. Their hatred and scorn of their heathen
persecutors; their faith in their own incomparable destiny; their
expectation of the speedy appearance of an anointed deliverer,
raised up by Jehovah to avenge them and vindicate their trust, all
became the more fervent and profound the longer the delay. Under
these circumstances grew up the Jewish doctrine of the Messiah, as
it is seen in that Apocalyptic literature represented by the Book
of Daniel, the Sibylline Oracles, the Book of Enoch, the
Assumption of Moses, the Fourth Book of Esdras, and similar
documents.

The Jews were remarkably free from that habit of mind which led
almost all the other nations to personify the most startling
phenomena of nature as living beings, which created fetiches of
stocks and stones and animals; saw a god in every wind, season,
star, and cloud. The Semitic mind and liter