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