ature were more sober,
rational, and monotheistic. The place occupied in the thoughts of
other peoples by the phenomena of nature was held in the thoughts
of the Jews by political phenomena, by ritual, legal, and military
relations. And the poetic action of fancy, the mythological
creativeness and superstitious feeling which other people
exercised on the objects and changes of nature, the Jews exercised
on the phenomena of their own national history. The burning
central point of their polity and belief and imagination was the
conviction of their own national consecration as the exclusive
people of God, meant to conquer, teach, and rule all the infidel
nations; that Jehovah was literally their invisible King,
represented in their chief ruler; that every great triumph or
disaster was a signal Day of the Lord, a special Coming of Jehovah
to reward or punish his people. During their repeated bondages
under the Persians, Syrians, Greeks, Parthians, Romans, their
feeling of the antagonism between themselves and the other people
increased. From the time of the Babylonish captivity the Persian
doctrine of good and evil spirits had infiltrated into their
belief; and they adopted the notion of Angra Mainyus, and
developed it (with certain modifications) into their conception of
Satan. Then, in their faith, the war of Jews and Gentiles spread
into the invisible world, and took up on its opposite sides the
good and the fallen angels. And, finally, the idea of their
Messiah became the centre of a battle and a judgment in which all
the generations of the dead as well as of the living were to have
a part; and which should culminate in the overthrow of evil, the
subjection of the heathen, the assignment of the righteous to a
paradisal reign, and of the wicked to a doom typified by the
submersion of Sodom and Gomorrah in fiery brimstone.

How plainly this doctrine was the result of the same poetic
process of thought with the other schemes already depicted! Only
they were developed on the basis of natural phenomena; this, on
the basis of political phenomena. It is simply the imaginative
universalization of the struggle between Jew and Gentile, and the
carrying of it to its crisis and sequel. And when inexplicable
delays and the accumulation of obstacles made the realization of
the expected result amidst the conditions of the present world
seem ever more and more hopeless, the growing and assimilative
action of faith and fancy expanded