is probable enough; but this only goes to show, that that narrative is a legend imported from farther East; since it is certain that the subsequent Hebrew literature has no trace of such an Ahriman.  The Book of Tobit and its demon show how wise in these matters the exiles in Nineveh were beginning to be.  The Book of Daniel manifests, that by the time of Antiochus Epiphanes the Jews had learned each nation to have its guardian spirit, good or evil; and that the fates of nations depend on the invisible conflict of these tutelary powers.  In Paul the same idea is strongly brought out.  Satan is the prince of the power of the air; with principalities and powers beneath him; over all of whom Christ won the victory on his cross.  In the Apocalypse we read the Oriental doctrine of the “seven angels who stand before God.”  As the Christian tenet thus rose among the Jews from their contact with Eastern superstition, and was propagated and expanded while prophecy was mute, it cannot be ascribed to “divine supernatural revelation” as the source.  The ground of it is dearly seen in infant speculations on the cause of moral evil and of national calamities.

Thus Christ and the Devil, the two poles of Christendom, had faded away out of my spiritual vision; there were left the more vividly, God and Man.  Yet I had not finally renounced the possibility, that Jesus might have had a divine mission to stimulate all our spiritual faculties, and to guarantee to us a future state of existence.  The abstract arguments for the immortality of the soul had always appeared to me vain trifling; and I was deeply convinced that nothing could assure us of a future state but a divine communication.  In what mode this might be made, I could not say a priori:  might not this really be the great purport of Messiahship? was not this, if any, a worthy ground for a divine interference?  On the contrary, to heal the sick did not seem at all an adequate motive for a miracle; else, why not the sick of our own day?  Credulity had exaggerated, and had represented Jesus to have wrought miracles:  but that did not wholly disprove the miracle of resurrection (whether bodily or of whatever kind), said to have been wrought by God upon him, and of which so very intense a belief so remarkably propagated itself.  Paul indeed believed it[3] from prophecy; and, as we see this to be a delusion, resting on Rabbinical interpretations, we may perhaps account thus for the belief of the early church, without in any way admitting the fact.—­Here, however, I found I had the clue to my only remaining discussion, the primitive Jewish controversy.  Let us step back to an earlier stage than John’s or Paul’s or Peter’s doctrine.  We cannot doubt that Jesus claimed to be Messiah:  what then was Messiah to be? and, did Jesus (though misrepresented by his disciples) truly fulfil his own claims?