But genealogies for or against Messiahship seemed to me a mean argument; and the fact of the prophets demanding a carnal descent in Messiah struck me as a worse objection than that Jesus had not got it,--if this could be ever proved.

The Messiah of Micah, however, was not Jesus; for he was to deliver Israel from _the Assyrians_, and his whole description is literally warlike.

Micah, writing when the name of Sennacherib was terrible, conceived of a powerful monarch on the throne of David who was to subdue him: but as this prophecy was not verified, the imaginary object of it was looked for as "Messiah," even after the disappearance of the formidable Assyrian power.

This undeniable vanity of Micah's prophecy extends itself also to that in the 9th chapter of his contemporary Isaiah,--if indeed that splendid passage did not really point at the child Hezekiah.

Waiving this doubt, it is at any rate clear that the marvellous child on the throne of David was to break the yoke of the oppressive Assyrian; and none of the circumstantials are at all appropriate to the historical Jesus.
In the 37th of Ezekiel the (new) David is to gather Judah and Israel "from the heathen whither they be gone" and to "make them one nation _in the land, on the mountains of Israel_:" and Jehovah adds, that they shall "dwell in the land _which I gave unto Jacob my servant, wherein your fathers dwelt_: and they shall dwell therein, they and their children and their children's children for ever: and my servant David shall be their prince for ever." It is trifling to pretend that _the land promised to Jacob, and in which the old Jews dwelt_, was a spiritual, and not the literal Palestine; and therefore it is impossible to make out that Jesus has fulfilled any part of this representation.