Nay, so urgent were they, that they were going to make him their king by force, and he concealed himself from the honour.

The evasions he used to avoid their pressing questions upon the subject, are known to all who have read the evangelists; and so timed was he in acknowledging himself as the Messiah, that he did not do so, till Simon Peter told him that he was.

And can any candid man, after all this, wonder at, or condemn, "the blindness," as it is called, of the Jews?
or can he refrain from smiling at the frothy declamations in which divines load that nation with so much unmerited reproach?
These Jews had just reason, we think, to doubt his Messiahship; and they had a right to satisfactory and unambiguous proof of his being so: even the proofs laid down, by their prophets.

And this, it must be now acknowledged, they wanted; and, certainly, the wise and learned of the Jewish nation, might be allowed to have understood their sacred books upon the subject, as well, at least, if not better, than the illiterate apostles, who manifestly put new interpretations upon them, and those, confessedly, not agreeable to the obvious and literal meaning of those books; but contrary to the sense of the Jewish nation.

And for this scepticism they might plead the example of the apostles themselves, who, at first, like other unbelieving Jews, expected a temporal prince; and did disbelieve Jesus to be the Messiah on account of his death, notwithstanding his miracles.