y many nations felt it quite as strongly as the
Israelites, who from early time awaited a mighty king, the Messiah, the
Anointed, of whom the Targums say: "In his days shall peace be
multiplied;" "He shall execute the judgment of truth and justice on the
earth;" "He shall rule over all kingdoms."

The early forms of this conception, such as here referred to, looked
forward to an earthly kingdom, identified with that of the past when
this was vigorous in the national mythology. Material success and the
utmost physical comfort were to characterize it. It was usually to be a
national apotheosis, and was not generally supposed to include the human
race, though traces of this wider view might easily be quoted from
Avestan, Roman, and Israelitic sources. Those who were to enjoy it were
not the dead, but those who shall be living.

As the myth grew, it coalesced with that of the Epochs of Nature, and
assumed grander proportions. The deliverer was to come at the close of
this epoch, at the end of the world; he was to embrace the whole human
kind in his kingdom; even those who died before his coming, if they had
obeyed his mandates, should rise to join the happy throng; instead of a
mere earthly king, he should be a supernatural visitant, even God
himself; and instead of temporal pleasures only, others of a spiritual
character were to be conferred. There are reasons to believe that even
in this developed form the myth was familiar to the most enlightened
worshippers of ancient Egypt; but it was not till some time after the
doctrines of Christianity had been cast into mythical moulds by the
oriental fancy, that it was introduced in its completed form to modern
thought. Although expressly repudiated by Jesus of Nazareth himself, and
applied in maxim and parable as a universal symbol of intelligence to
the religious growth of the individual and race, his followers reverted
to the coarser and literal meaning, and ever since teach to a greater or
less extent the chiliastic or millennial dogma, often mathematically
computing, in direct defiance of his words, the exact date that event is
to be expected.

If we ask the psychological construction of this myth, and the ever
present conditions of man's life which have rendered him always ready to
create it and loath to renounce it, we trace the former distinctly to
his sense of the purposive nature of the laws of thought, and the latter
to the wide difference between desire and fulfilmen