and its dogmatic system passed almost entire into the
earliest Christian Church, with the momentous addition that Jesus was
the Messiah. A few words on the Pharisaic teaching which St. Paul must
have imbibed from Gamaliel are indispensable even in an article which
deals with Paul, and not with Paulinism.

The distinctive feature of the Jewish religion is not, as is often
supposed, its monotheism, Hebrew religion in its golden age was
monolatry rather than monotheism; and when Jahveh became more strictly
'the only God,' the cult of intermediate beings came in, and restored a
quasi-polytheism. The distinctive feature in Jewish faith is its
historical and teleological character. The God of the Jew is not natural
law. If the idea of necessary causation ever forced itself upon his
mind, he at once gave it the form of predestination. The whole of
history is an unfolding of the divine purpose; and so history as a whole
has for the Jew an importance which it never had for a Greek thinker,
nor for the Hellenised Jew Philo. The Hebrew idea of God is dynamic and
ethical; it is therefore rooted in the idea of Time. The Pharisaic
school modified this prophetic teaching in two ways. It became more
spiritual; anthropomorphisms were removed, and the transcendence of God
above the world was more strictly maintained. On the other hand, the
religious relationship became in their hands narrower and more external.
The notion of a covenant was defined more rigorously; the Law was
practically exalted above God, so that the Rabbis even represent the
Deity as studying the Law. With this legalism went a spirit of intense
exclusiveness and narrow ecclesiasticism. As God was raised above direct
contact with men, the old animistic belief in angels and demons, which
had lasted on in the popular mind by the side of the worship of Jahveh,
was extended in a new way. A celestial hierarchy was invented, with
names, and an infernal hierarchy too; the malevolent ghosts of animism
became fallen angels. Satan, who in Job is the crown-prosecutor, one of
God's retinue, becomes God's adversary; and the angels, formerly
manifestations of God Himself, are now quite separated from Him. A
supramundane physics or cosmology was evolved at the same time. Above
Zion, the centre of the earth, rise seven heavens, in the highest of
which the Deity has His throne. The underworld is now first divided into
Paradise and Gehenna. The doctrine of the fall of man, through his
pa