in the clouds[1]—­a supernatural being, invested with human form, charged to rule the world, and to preside over the golden age.  Perhaps the Sosiosh of Persia, the great prophet who was to come, charged with preparing the reign of Ormuzd, gave some features to this new ideal.[2] The unknown author of the Book of Daniel had, in any case, a decisive influence on the religious event which was about to transform the world.  He supplied the mise-en-scene, and the technical terms of the new belief in the Messiah; and we might apply to him what Jesus said of John the Baptist:  Before him, the prophets; after him, the kingdom of God.

[Footnote 1:  Chap. vii. 13, and following.]

[Footnote 2:  Vendidad, chap. xix. 18, 19; Minokhired, a passage published in the “Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenlaendischen Gesellschaft,” chap. i. 263; Boundehesch, chap. xxxi.  The want of certain chronology for the Zend and Pehlvis texts leaves much doubt hovering over the relations between the Jewish and Persian beliefs.]

It must not, however, be supposed that this profoundly religious and soul-stirring movement had particular dogmas for its primary impulse, as was the case in all the conflicts which have disturbed the bosom of Christianity.  The Jew of this epoch was as little theological as possible.  He did not speculate upon the essence of the Divinity; the beliefs about angels, about the destinies of man, about the Divine personality, of which the first germs might already be perceived, were quite optional—­they were meditations, to which each one surrendered himself according to the turn of his mind, but of which a great number of men had never heard.  They were the most orthodox even, who did not share in these particular imaginations, and who adhered to the simplicity of the Mosaic law.  No dogmatic power analogous to that which orthodox Christianity has given to the Church then existed.  It was only at the beginning of the third century, when Christianity had fallen into the hands of reasoning races, mad with dialectics and metaphysics, that that fever for definitions commenced which made the history of the Church but the history of one immense controversy.  There were disputes also among the Jews—­excited schools brought opposite solutions to almost all the questions which were agitated; but in these contests, of which the Talmud has preserved the principal details, there is not a single word of speculative theology.  To observe and maintain the law, because the law was just, and because, when well observed, it gave happiness—­such was Judaism.  No credo, no theoretical symbol.  One of the disciples of the boldest Arabian philosophy, Moses Maimonides, was able to become the oracle of the synagogue, because he was well versed in the canonical law.