hero.

By the assimilative action of faith and imagination, this idea of
a divinely accredited Messiah developed, and grew ever richer and
more complete. It began simply with the expectation of a holy
leader and ruler who should subdue the heathen and establish the
favored people of Jehovah in peerless purity, power, and happiness
in the land of Judea. Little by little the rewards of the
righteous and the punishments of the wicked were extended beyond
those living on the earth, and took in the dead. The prophet
Ezekiel depicted the promised restoration of the Jews from their
captivity at Babylon to Jerusalem under the poetic image of a
revivification of a heap of dead bones. This metaphor slowly
assumed the form of a literal dogma, which grew from its beginning
as an exceptional belief in the resurrection of a chosen few,
stated in the book of Daniel and the second book of Maccabees, to
the belief in the universal resurrection of the dead, avowed by
Paul as the common Pharisaic belief. The belief, too, in regard to
the scene of the Messianic triumph, the penalties to be inflicted
on the enemies of Jehovah, and the kind and number of those
enemies, underwent the same process of development and growth. The
world was conceived as a sort of three story house connected with
passage ways; heaven above the firmament, the earth between, and a
penal region below. The imagery of fire and brimstone associated
in the Hebrew mind with Sodom and Gomorrah, and the fearful
imagery of idolatory, filth, and flames in the detested valley of
Hinnom where the refuse of Jerusalem was carried to be burned, had
been transferred by the popular imagination to the subterranean
place of departed souls. The story in the book of Genesis about
the sons of God forming an alliance with the daughters of men, and
begetting a wicked brood of giants, had been wrought into the
belief in a race of fallen angels, foes of God and men, whose
dwelling place was the upper air. Above these wicked spirits in
high places, but below the heaven of Jehovah, was the paradise
whither Enoch and Elijah were supposed to have been translated,
and whence they would come again in the last days. The Jewish
apocryphal book of Enoch which was written probably about a
century and a half before the birth of Christ, and is explicitly
quoted in the Epistle of Jude contains a minute account of the
final judgment, including in its scope this whole scenery and all
these agents, and