Any attempt to infringe its precepts, or to question its authority, excited their utmost horror. To set up any other object of worship than that which it recognized, to teach any other faith than that which rested on this foundation, was blasphemy in their eyes. The happiness, nay, the very existence, of the nation was bound up with its strict observance. This may have been a delusion, but it was one for which the existing generation was not responsible. It had been handed down from their ancestors, and had reached them with all the sanctity of venerable age. If it were a delusion, it was one which the compilers of the Pentateuch; which Josiah, with his reforming measures; which Ezra, with his purifying zeal; which the prophets and priests of olden times who had fought and labored for the religion of Jevovah, had mainly fostered. They had succeeded but too well in impressing upon the mind of the nation the profound conviction that, in order to ensure the favor of God, they must maintain every iota of the revealed truth they had received, and that his anger would surely follow if they suffered it to be in the smallest degree corrupted or treated with neglect.
Nevertheless the utmost efforts of the people to guard the purity of the faith had been rewarded hitherto with little but misery. Their exemption from troubles did not last long after the rebuilding of the temple. A prey now to the Seleucidæ, now to the Ptolemies, their native land the scene of incessant warfare, they enjoyed under the Asmonean kings but a brief period of independence and good government. Their polity received a rude shock from the capture of Jerusalem by Pompey; maintained but a shadow of freedom under the tyranny of Herod; and fell at last—some time before the public appearance of Christ—under the direct administration of the unsympathetic Romans. A more intolerable fate could hardly be imagined. The Romans had no tenderness for their feelings, no commiseration for their scruples, no comprehension of their peculiar practices. Hence constant collision between the governors and the governed. It is needless to enter in detail upon the miserable struggles between those who were strong in the material force and those who were strong in the force of conscience. Suffice it to say, that provocation on provocation was inflicted on the Jews, until at length the inevitable rebellion came,
