“Israel, who originally followed righteousness because he felt that it tended to life, might and did naturally come at last to follow it because it would enable him to stand before the Son of Man at His coming, and to share in the triumph of the Saints of the Most High.”  This, says Arnold, was Extra-belief, “Aberglaube,” belief beyond what is certain and veritable. “Extra-belief is the poetry of life.”  The Messianic ideas were the poetry of life to Israel in the age when Jesus Christ came.  When He came, Israel was looking for a Messiah; and, when He began to preach, the better conscience of Judaism recognized in His teaching a new aspect of religion which it had desired.  National Righteousness had been the idea of the older Judaism.  Personal righteousness was the idea of the New Teaching.  “Jesus took the individual Israelite by himself apart, made him listen for the voice of his conscience, and said to him in effect:  ’If every one would mend one, we should have a new world.’” A Teacher so winning, so acceptable, so in unison with Israel’s higher aspirations must surely be the Messiah whom earlier generations had expected; and so, in virtue of the purity and nobility of His teaching, Jesus Christ attained His unique position.  He became, in popular acceptance, the Great, the Unique Man, in some sense the Son of God, Prophet and Teacher of the new and nobler morality.  So there grew up “a personal devotion to Jesus Christ, who brought the doctrine to His disciples and made a passage for it into their hearts.”  And almost immediately after “Aberglaube” regathered; and devotion to Jesus took the form of an Extra-belief of some future advent in splendour and terror, the destruction of His enemies, and the triumphs of His followers.  And this process of development, begun while Christ was still on earth, extended with great rapidity after His death.  “As time went on, and Christianity spread wider and wider among the multitude, and with less and less of control from the personal influence of Jesus, Christianity developed more and more its side of miracle and legend; until to believe Jesus to be the Son of God meant to believe other points of the legend—­His preternatural conception and birth, His miracles, His bodily resurrection, His ascent into heaven, and His future triumphant return to judgment.  And these and like matters are what popular religion drew forth from the records of Jesus as the essentials of belief.”

From this account, strangely inadequate indeed, but not positively offensive, of the origin and development of Christianity, he passes on to the attempts made by current theology to prove the truth of Christianity from Prophecy and Miracle.  With regard to prophecy, he has little difficulty in showing that predictions have often miscarried, and that passages in the Old Testament have been interpreted as relating to Christ, which probably had no such reference.  Thus the first disciples clearly expected the Second Advent