closely anticipating both the doctrinal and
verbal details of the same subject as recorded in the New
Testament itself. There is not, with one exception, a single
essential feature of the now current Christian belief, in regard
to the day of judgment at the end of the world, which is not
distinctly brought out in the same form in the book of Enoch,
written certainly more than a hundred years before a line of the
Gospels was composed. The exception referred to relates to the
person of the Messiah. In the book of Enoch he is indeed called
the Son of man, but is wrapt in mysterious obscurity, undefined
and unnamed: in the Christian documents and faith he is, of
course, identified with Jesus of Nazareth, and, at a later period,
identified also with God.

The growth of the Messianic personality in distinctness,
prominence, importance, and completeness of associated grouping,
is not only historically traceable, but was also perfectly
natural. At first the prophecy of the triumphant re establishment
of the Jews was conceived as the result of the favoring power of
Jehovah, not in a personal manifestation, but providentially
displayed. Thus Joel represents Jehovah as saying, in his promise
to vindicate Jerusalem, "Let the heathen be wakened, and come up
to the valley of Jehoshaphat; for there will I sit to judge all
the heathen round about." It cannot be denied that this was purely
metaphorical. But in all imagery of a kingdom, of war, of
judgment, the idea of the king, the leader, the judge, would
naturally be the strongest point of imaginative action, the center
of crystalizing association around which congruous particulars
would be drawn until the picture was complete. So it actually
happened. Perhaps the most striking example of this is seen in the
growth of the notion of the great Adversary who precedes and
fights against the Messiah. The book of Daniel, written just after
Antiochus Epiphanes had oppressed the Jews with such frightful
cruelties and profaned their temple with such abominable
desecrations, impersonated in him the whole head and front of the
impious hostility which the promised deliverer would have to
subdue in vindicating the rights and hopes of the chosen people.
"The figure of Antiochus Epiphanes," Martineau has happily said,
"placed in immediate antecedence and antithesis to that of the
Messiah, as the predicted crisis moved forward, was carried with
it, and spread its portentous shadow over the expect