EDUCATION: JEWISH INFLUENCE 15 should take account of the morbid delusions of men and administer its healing medicine in forms which appeared scarcely distinguishable from that of the poison. A certain counterpoise, however, to the deadening unspirituality of legalism was offered by the Jewish Messianic expectation, which may be not unjustly described as the soul of the Jewish religion, inasmuch as all the courage and enthusiasm which remained to that unhappy people, under the double misery of the Roman political, and the Pharisaic legal, tyranny, had concentrated itself in Messianic hopes and dreams. Of a Messianic system of doctrine in any strict sense it is, however, impossible to speak, since there was never any Jewish dogma regarding the Messiah, nor any systematised and officially sanctioned doctrine of the Messiah in the sense that there was later a Church doctrine of Christ; but vague conceptions of very various origin and content, which, indeed, partly con- tradicted each other, were current in different circles without coming into conflict with one another. The one fixed point which formed the centre of the Messianic conception was that God would victoriously and magnificently assert His kingship over His People, and through them over other nations, by means of miraculous deeds of power. But opinion wavered even on the question whether this restoration of the theocracy would be directly effected by God Himself, or through the agency of the Messiah as the instru- ment and representative of God. According to the apocalypse of Daniel, the theocracy realises itself in a “kingdom of the saints ”—that is, of pious Jews, with- out a Messianic king, for the form “like unto a son of a