But this dream of a future
restoration was in no wise ennobled, as far as we can see, with any
desire for a moral restoration. They believed that a person would
appear some day or other to deliver them. Even they were happily
preserved by their sacred books from the notion that deliverance was to
be found for them, or for any man, in an abstraction or notion ending in
-ation or -ality. In justice to them it must be said, that they were
too wise to believe that personal qualities, such as power, will, love,
righteousness, could reside in any but in a person, or be manifested
except by a person. And among the earlier of them the belief may have
been, that the ancient unseen Teacher of their race would be their
deliverer: but as they lost the thought of Him, the expected Deliverer
became a mere human being: or rather not a human being; for as they
lost their moral sense, they lost in the very deepest meaning their
humanity, and forgot what man was like till they learned to look only
for a conqueror; a manifestation of power, and not of goodness; a
destroyer of the hated heathen, who was to establish them as the tyrant
race of the whole earth. On that fearful day on which, for a moment,
they cast away even that last dream, and cried, "We have no king but
Caesar," they spoke the secret of their hearts.
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