rkings of the laws of God are made
manifest in him: moreover, it is a providential occasion offered
me that I should show the divinity of my mission by giving him
sight.

When Herod heard of the miracles and the fame of Jesus, he said,
This is John the Baptist, whom I beheaded: he is risen from the
dead; and therefore mighty works are wrought by him. This brief
statement plainly shows that the belief in the reappearance of a
departed spirit, in bodily form, to run another career, was extant
in Judea at that period. The Evangelists relate another
circumstance to the same effect. Jesus asked his disciples who the
people thought he was. And they replied, Some think that thou art
John the Baptist, some Elias, and some Jeremiah or some other of
the old prophets, a forerunner of the Messiah. Then Jesus asked,
But who think ye that I am? And Simon Peter said, Thou art the
promised Messiah himself. There was a prophetic tradition among
the Jews, drawn from the words of Malachi, that before the Messiah
was revealed Elias would appear and proclaim his coming.

Therefore, when the disciples of Christ recognised him as the
great Anointed, they were troubled about this prophecy, and said
to their Master, Why do the Scribes say that Elias must first
come? He replies to them, in substance, It is even so: the
prophet's words shall not fail: they are already fulfilled. But
you must interpret the prophecy aright. It does not mean that the
ancient prophet himself, in physical form, shall come upon earth,
but that one with his office, in his spirit and power, shall go
before me. If ye are able to understand the true import of the
promise, it has been realized. John the Baptist is the Elias which
was to come. The New Testament, therefore, has allusions to the
doctrine of transmigration, but gives it no warrant.

The Jewish expectations in regard to the Messiah, the nature of
his kingdom, and the events which they supposed would attend his
coming or transpire during his reign, were the source and
foundation of the phraseology of a great many passages in the
Christian Scriptures and of the sense of not a few. The national
ideas and hopes of the Jews at that time were singularly intense
and extensive. Their influence over the immediate disciples of
Jesus and the authors of the New Testament is often very evident
in the interpretations they put upon his teachings, and in their
own words. Still, their intellectual and spiritual obtuseness t