As to the spiritual background, for the present let us postpone the heathen world and consider the Jews, who represented in some ways the world’s highest at this period.  Modern scholarship is shedding fresh light on the literature and ideas that were prevalent between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New.  But what uncertainty about God!  Why some people should think that it was easier to believe in God in those days than now, I do not see.  Far less was known of God; the record of his doings was not so long as it is for us, and it was not so well known.  No one could understand what God meant, if he was quite clear himself.  Look at what he did with the nation.  He chose Israel, he established the kingdom of David.  They did not get on very well, and at last were carried away into Captivity in Babylon.  So much he did for his people; and when he brought them back again to the Promised Land, it was to a very trying and difficult situation; and worse still followed after Nehemiah’s day.  Alexander the Great’s conquest of the East left a Macedonian dynasty ruling those regions, and one of their great kings, Antiochus Epiphanes, tried to stamp out the religion of Jehovah altogether.  The Book of Daniel is a record of that persecution about 166 B.C.  The Maccabeean brothers delivered Israel, and rescued the religion of Jehovah; and a kingdom of a sort was established with them; but the grandsons of the liberators became tyrants.  What did God mean?  Out of all the promises to Israel, to the House of David, this is what comes.  Herod follows—­a foreign king and an Edomite; and the Romans are over all, suzerains and rulers.

In despair of the present men began to forecast the future.  A time will surely come, they said, when God will give an anointed one, the Messiah; he will set all Israel free, will make Israel rule the world instead of the Romans; he will gather together the scattered of Israel from the four winds, reunite and assemble God’s people in triumph in Palestine.  And then, when the prophet paused, a plain man spoke:  “I don’t care if he does.  My father all his life looked forward to that.  What does it matter now, if God redeems his people, or if he does not?  My father is dead.”  The answer was, why should your father not come with the redeemed Israel?  But what evidence is there for that?  Does God care for people beyond the grave?  Is there personal immortality?—­that became the anxious question.[18]

But is this kingdom of the Messiah to be an earthly or a heavenly kingdom?  Will it be in Jerusalem or in heaven?  Are you quite sure that there is any distinction in the other world between good and bad, between Jew and Gentile?  Some people thought the kingdom would be in Jerusalem; others said it would be in heaven, and added that the Jews will look down and see the Gentiles in hell—­something worth seeing at last.  But, after all, it was still guesswork—­ “perhaps” was the last word.