The Hebrew Utopia : a Study of Messianic Prophecy. By
W. F. Adeney. (Hodder and Stoughton.)—The subject of this book is the development of the " Christ-idea." The prophecies of the Old Tes- tament are considered, not from the evidential point of view, but as the germs of the highest revelation, and as leading up to the great thought of the ideal Christ. "The study of the evolution of theo- logical truths," says the author, " cannot be less profitable than that of material organisms." This sentence strikes the key-note of the book, which traces the course of Messianic prophecy through the different periods of Jewish history. As the Messianic ideas became more spiritual, they also became more popular, and what had once been the hopes merely of the prophets, were at last the hopes of the people. And so there was diffused among them a general ex- pectation of a blissful age, beside which Plato's model republic or More's Utopia would be cheerless and uninviting. The question for us is,—What relations do Christ and the Christian Church bear to this expectation ? which undoubtedly, among the lower classes, bad become very intense at the time of our Lord's appearance. It bad, however, unhappily, taken a gross, sensuous, and fanatical form. Hence, grotesque pictures of the material prosperity of the Messianic age, such as we have in the so-called Book of Enoch. The Jews could have welcomed Jesus as the Messiah only by entirely revolutionising their current notions. This they would not or could not do, and consequently rejected him. "Had he been the Messiah of popular opinion, they would have crowned him ; because he was not this, they crucified him." With Christians, the fact that Jesus renounced the political role, and gave himself
up to a higher and nobler work, is the plain proof that he can- not be classed with the "pretenders " who adapted themselves to the false Messianic ideas of the time. Had the story of his life, as told us in the Gospels, been a myth, according to a favourite modern theory, the ideas out of which it grew would have been debased and
degraded, rather than exalted, the tendency of myth-growth being invariably a backward one. Our author works out this line of thought somewhat skilfully, and we may say of his book generally that it is a worthy contribution to a deeply interesting subject.
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