...  Did not the Apostles hear our Lord? and what was their impression from what they heard?  Is it not certain that the Apostles did not gather this truth from His teaching? (Tract 85, p. 63.)

He said, “Preach the Gospel to every creature,” These words need have only meant “Bring all men to Christianity through Judaism.”  Make them Jews, that they may enjoy Christ’s privileges, which are lodged in Judaism; teach them those rites and ceremonies, circumcision and the like, which hitherto have been dead ordinances, and now are living:  and so the Apostles seem to have understood them (ibid. p. 65).

So far as Nazarenism differentiated itself from contemporary orthodox Judaism, it seems to have tended towards a revival of the ethical and religious spirit of the prophetic age, accompanied by the belief in Jesus as the Messiah, and by various accretions which had grown round Judaism subsequently to the exile.  To these belong the doctrines of the Resurrection, of the Last Judgment, of Heaven and Hell; of the hierarchy of good angels; of Satan and the hierarchy of evil spirits.  And there is very strong ground for believing that all these doctrines, at least in the shapes in which they were held by the post-exilic Jews, were derived from Persian and Babylonian[69] sources, and are essentially of heathen origin.

How far Jesus positively sanctioned all these indrainings of circumjacent Paganism into Judaism; how far any one has a right to declare that the refusal to accept one or other of these doctrines, as ascertained verities, comes to the same thing as contradicting Jesus, it appears to me not easy to say.  But it is hardly less difficult to conceive that he could have distinctly negatived any of them; and, more especially, that demonology which has been accepted by the Christian Churches, in every age and under all their mutual antagonisms.  But I repeat my conviction that, whether Jesus sanctioned the demonology of his time and nation or not, it is doomed.  The future of Christianity, as a dogmatic system and apart from the old Israelitish ethics which it has appropriated and developed, lies in the answer which mankind will eventually give to the question, whether they are prepared to believe such stories as the Gadarene and the pneumatological hypotheses which go with it, or not.  My belief is they will decline to do anything of the sort, whenever and wherever their minds have been disciplined by science.  And that discipline must, and will, at once follow and lead the footsteps of advancing civilisation.

The preceding pages were written before I became acquainted with the contents of the May number of the Nineteenth Century, wherein I discover many things which are decidedly not to my advantage.  It would appear that “evasion” is my chief resource, “incapacity for strict argument” and “rottenness of ratiocination” my main mental characteristics, and that it is “barely credible” that a statement which I profess to make of my own knowledge is true.  All which things I notice, merely to illustrate the great truth, forced on me by long experience, that it is only from those who enjoy the blessing of a firm hold of the Christian faith that such manifestations of meekness, patience, and charity are to be expected.