allowed to take some part in the coming retribution.  Thus there arose—­it is remarkable how late and how slowly—­the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, that the kingdom of God might not be of service only to those who happened to be alive at the judgment.  Yet at first this doctrine was only used to explain particularly striking cases.  The Book of Daniel says nothing of a general resurrection, but speaks in fact only of a resurrection of the martyrs and a punishment of the wicked after death.  With all this the resurrection is not the entrance to a life above the earth but to a second earthly life, to a world in which it is no longer the heathen but the Jews who bear rule and take the lead.  Of a general judgment at the last day, or of heaven and hell in the Christian sense, the Jews know nothing, though these ideas might so easily have suggested themselves to them.

It is not easy to find points of view from which to pronounce on the character of Judaism.  It is a system, but a practical system, which can scarcely be set forth in relation to one leading thought, as it is an irregular product of history.  It lives on the stores of the past, but is not simply the total of what had been previously acquired; it is full of new impulses, and has an entirely different physiognomy from that of Hebrew antiquity, so much so that it is hard even to catch a likeness.  Judaism is everywhere historically comprehensible, and yet it is a mass of antinomies.  We are struck with the free flight of thought and the deep inwardness of feeling which are found in some passages in the Wisdom and in the Psalms; but, on the other hand, we meet with a pedantic asceticism which is far from lovely, and with pious wishes the greediness of which is ill-concealed; and these unedifying features are the dominant ones of the system.  Monotheism is worked out to its furthest consequences, and at the same time is enlisted in the service of the narrowest selfishness; Israel participates in the sovereignty of the One God.  The Creator of heaven and earth becomes the manager of a petty scheme of salvation; the living God descends from His throne to make way for the law.  The law thrusts itself in everywhere; it commands and blocks up the access to heaven; it regulates and sets limits to the understanding of the divine working on earth.  As far as it can, it takes the soul out of religion and spoils morality.  It demands a service of God, which, though revealed, may yet with truth be called a self-chosen and unnatural one, the sense and use of which are apparent neither to the understanding nor the heart.  The labour is done for the sake of the exercise; it does no one any good, and rejoices neither God nor man.  It has no inner aim after which it spontaneously strives and which it hopes to attain by itself, but only an outward one, namely, the reward attached to it, which might as well be attached to other and possibly even more curious conditions.  The ideal is a negative