But in the eyes of those whose words had weight in the restoration the old community, as it had existed formerly, was not in good repute.  They could not but allow Jehovah’s sentence of condemnation to be just which He had spoken by the mouth of His servants and through the voice of history.  The utterances of the prophets, that fortresses and horses and men of war, that kings and princes, cannot help, were called to mind and turned into practical principles:  the sole rule of Jehovah was to be carried out in earnest.  Circumstances favoured the design, and this was the great point.  As matters then were, the reconstitution of an actual state was not to be thought of, the foreign rule would not admit of it (Ezra iv. 19 seq.).  What plan was to be taken, what materials to be used for such a building as the times allowed?  The prophetic ideas would not serve as building stones; they were not sufficiently practical.  Then appeared the importance of institutions, of traditional forms, for the conservation even of the spiritual side of the religion.

The Jewish royal temple had early overshadowed the other sanctuaries, and in the course of the seventh century they were extinct or verging on extinction.  Under the shelter of the monarchy the priests of Jerusalem had grown great and had at last attained, as against their professional brethren elsewhere, a position of exclusive legitimacy.  The weaker the state grew, the deeper it sank from the fall of Josiah onwards, the higher became the prestige of the temple in the eyes of the people, and the greater and the more independent grew the power of its numerous priesthood; how much more do we feel it in Jeremiah’s time than in that of Isaiah!  This advance of the priesthood indicates unmistakably the rise into prominence of the cultus in the seventh century, a rise rather helped than hindered by the long reign of Manasseh, evil as is the reputation of that reign.  It shows itself not only in the introduction of more luxurious materials, incense, for example, but even more in the importance given to great and striking services, e.g., the sacrifice of children, and the expiatory offering.  Even after the abolition of the horrid atrocities of Manasseh’s time, the bloody earnestness remained behind with which the performance of divine service was gone about.

So closely was the cultus of Jerusalem interwoven with the consciousness of the Jewish people, and so strongly had the priesthood established their order, that after the collapse of the kingdom the elements still survived here for the new formation of a “congregation” answering to the circumstances and needs of the time.  Around the ruined sanctuary the community once more lifted up its head (1Kings viii.; Haggai i. seq.; Zechariah i. seq.).  The usages and ordinances were, though everywhere changes in detail, yet not created afresh.  Whatever creating there was lay in this, that these usages were bound together in a system and made the instruments of restoring an organisation of “the remnant.”