ESCHATOLOGY

the doctrine of the last things; has gone through important changes in Jewish and Christian theology. The roots of the Christian doctrine lie in the Old Testament. At first there is very little that is eschatological; by degrees the idea is developed of the ‘day of the Lord,’ especially in Amos and Isaiah. Thus the conceptions of the ‘coming of God,’ judgment, and future bli and an eternal kingdom, appear. In the two cent’s before Christ this tendency, to get hes with the moral difficulty of imagining this life to be the best of all, and the growing Me ianic expectation, led to the gro of a large apocryphal and rapes sing lit. Hence it was into a world already teeming with eschatological ideas that Christianity came. The first generation of Christians lived in the immediate expectation of the coming of their Lord. This hope was disappointed, and Christian ideas of heaven and hell developed gradually.