the previous Jewish and Rabbinical notions, by the hardening of
metaphors into dogmas and the universalizing of local peculiarities,
is confessedly an obscure process, in many of its particulars
extremely difficult to trace. But that it did thus grow up,
no impartial scholar, who has mastered what is now known
on the subject, can doubt. A world of new knowledge and light has
been thrown on this whole field during the last thirty five years
by Gfrorer, Baur, Ewald, Hoffmann, Hilgenfeld, Dilmann, Ceriani,
Volkmar, and other students of kindred power and spirit.
Researches and discussions in this department are still pushed
with the greatest zeal; and it is confidently believed that in a
few years the views adopted in the present writing will be
established beyond all cavil from any fair minded critic. Then all
the steps will have been clearly defined in the development of
that doctrine of the great Day of the Lord, which, beginning with
a poetic picture of a Jewish overthrow of the Gentiles, through
the inspiring power of Jehovah, before the walls of Jerusalem,
ended with a literal belief in the setting up, by the Messiah, of
a tribunal in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, the assemblage there of
all the living and the dead for judgment, the installation of the
immortalized righteous in Paradise, and the submerging of the
wicked under the Vale of Hinnom in a rainstorm of blazing
brimstone.

And now what must we think in regard to the truth or falsehood of
the outward, forensic, military, and ritual part of the doctrine
of historic and literary development we have imperfectly followed.
Is it not perfectly clear, that the growth of the doctrine in
question has been but a natural action of the imagination on the
materials furnished it; adding congruous particulars, one after
another, until the view was complete, and therefore could extend
no further? And is it not equally obvious, that it can lay no sort
of claim to logical validity? The superstitious and arbitrary
character of its intrinsic constituents, its irreconcilableness
with science and philosophy, disprove, to all who dare honestly
face the facts, every plea set up for it as an inspired revelation
of truth. It is a mixture of poetry and speculation, credible
enough in an early and uncritical age, but a hopeless stumbling
block to the educated reason of the present day. Every one who
brings a free intelligence to the subject will find it impossible
not to recognize the s