began to make permanent conquests near to the Euphrates. Under these remarkable circumstances, and agitated beyond measure between the oppression of the Roman armies on the one hand, and the belief of an immediate Divine relation on the other, all thoughtful Jews were disturbed in mind. The more conscientious, the more they were agitated. Was it their duty to resist the Romans? God could deliver them, doubtless; but God worked oftentimes by human means. Was it his pleasure that they should resist by arms? Others again replied, "If you do, then you prepare an excuse for the Romans to extirpate your nation." Many, again, turned more to religious hopes: these were they who, in scriptural language, "waited for the consolation of Israel,"that is, they trusted in that Messiah who had been promised, and they yearned for his manifestation. They mourned over Judea; they believed that in a spiritual sense she had rebelled; but she had been afflicted, and perhaps her transgressions might now be blotted out. Of this class was he who took Christ in his arms when an infant in the Temple. Of this class were the two rich men, Joseph and Nicodemus, who united to bury him. But even of this class many there were who took different views of the functions properly belonging to the Messiah; and many that, either through this difference of original views, or from imperfect acquaintance with the life of Jesus, doubted whether he were indeed the promised Messiah. Even John the Baptist doubted this; and his question upon that point, addressed to Christ himself, "Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?" has been generally fancied singularly at war with his own earlier testimony, "Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world." But perhaps it is not. offices of inspired intercourse with the coming changes for Israel were prophetically announced as revolving through a succession of characters-Elias, "that prophet," and the Messiah. The series might even be more complex. And the Baptist, who did not know himself to be Elias, might reasonably be in doubt (and at a time when his career was only beginning) whether Jesus were the Messiah.

The

Now, out of these mixed elements-men in every stage and gradation of belief or spiritual knowledge, but all musing,

pondering, fermenting in their minds; all tempest-shaken, sorrow-haunted, perplexed, hoping, seeking, doubting, trusting -the Apostles would see abundant means for peopling the lower or initiatory ranks of their new Society. Such a craving for light from above probably never existed. The land was on the brink of convulsions, and all men felt it. Even amongst the rulers in Jerusalem had been some who saw the truth of Christ's mission, though selfish terrors had kept back their testimony. From every rank and order of men the meditative would crowd into a society where they would all receive sympathy whatever might be their views, and many would receive light.

This Society, how was it constituted? In the innermost or central class (which, remember, is the masked and secret class) were placed, no doubt, all those, and those only, who were thoroughly Christians. The danger was from Christianity. And this danger was made operative only by associating with the mature and perfect Christian any false brother, any half-Christian, any hypocritical Christian, any wavering Christian. To meet this danger there must be a winnowing and a sifting of all candidates. And, because the danger was awful, involving not one but many, not a human interest but a heavenly interest, therefore these winnowings and siftings must be many, must be repeated, must be soul-searching. Nay, even that will not suffice. Oaths, pledges to God as well as to man, must be exacted. All this suppose done : serpents by experience, in the midst of their dove-like faith, the Apostles acted as wise stewards for God. They surrounded their own central consistory with lines impassable to treachery. Josephus, the blind Jew (blind in heart, we mean, and understanding), reporting a matter of which he had no comprehension, nor could have: even this man, in his utter darkness, telegraphs to us by many signals,-rockets thrown up, which come round, and are visible to us, but unseen by him,-what it is that the Apostles were about. He tells us expressly that a preparatory or trial period of two years was exacted of every candidate before his admission to any order; that, after this probationary attendance is finished, "they are parted into four classes"; and these classes, he tells us, are so severely separated from all intercommunion that merely to

have touched each other was a pollution requiring a solemn purification. Finally, as if all this were nothing, though otherwise disallowing of oaths, yet, in this as in a service of God, oaths which Josephus styles "tremendous" are exacted of each member that he will reveal nothing of what he learns.

Who can fail to see, in these multiplied precautions for guarding what according to Josephus is no secret at all, nor anything approaching to a secret, that here we have a central Christian Society, secret from necessity, cautious to excess from the extremity of the danger, and surrounding themselves in their outer rings by merely Jew pupils, but Jews whose state of mind promised a hopeful soil for the solemn and affecting discoveries which awaited them in the higher stages of their progress. Here is the true solution of this mysterious society, The Essenes, never mentioned in any one record of the Christian generation, and that because it first took its rise in the necessities and subtle dangers of the Epichristian generation. There is more by a good deal to say of these Essenes; but this is enough for explaining their position. And, if any man asks how they came to be traced to so fabulous an antiquity, the account now given easily explains that. Three authors only mention them-Pliny, PhiloJudæus, and Josephus. Pliny builds upon these two last and other Jewish romancers. The two last may be considered as contemporaries. And all that they allege as to the antiquity of the sect flows naturally from the condition and circumstances of the outermost (or purely Jew) circle in the series of the classes. These were occupied exclusively with Judaism. And Judaism had in fact, as we all know, that real antiquity in its people, and its rites, and its symbols, which these uninitiated authors understand and fancy to have been meant of the Essenes as a total sect.

PART II.-OF JOSEPHUS GENERALLY

We have sketched rapidly, in the first part of our essay, some outline of a theory with regard to the Essenes, confining ourselves to such hints as are suggested by the accounts

of this sect in Josephus. And we presume that most readers will go along with us so far as to acknowledge some shock, some pause, given to that blind acquiescence in the Bible statement which had hitherto satisfied them. By the Bible statement we mean, of course, nothing which any inspired part of the Bible tells us-on the contrary, one capital reason for rejecting the old notions is, the total silence of the Bible; but we mean that little explanatory note on the Essenes which our Bible translators under James I. have thought fit to adopt, and in reality to adopt from Josephus, with reliance on his authority which closer study would have shown to be unwarranted.1

We do not wonder that Josephus has been misappreciated by Christian readers. It is painful to read any author in a spirit of suspicion; most of all, that author to whom we must often look as our only guide. Upon Josephus we are compelled to rely for the most affecting section of ancient history. Merely as a scene of human passion, the main portion of his Wars transcends, in its theme, all other histories. But, considered also as the agony of a mother church out of whose ashes arose, like a phoenix, that filial faith "which passeth all understanding," the last conflict of Jerusalem and her glorious temple exacts from the devotional conscience as much interest as would otherwise be yielded by our human sympathies. For the circumstances of this struggle we must look to Josephus: him or none we must accept for witness. And in such a case how painful to suppose a hostile heart in every word of his deposition! Who could bear to take the account of a dear friend's last hours and farewell words from one who confessedly hated him?-one word melting us to tears, and the next rousing us to the duty of jealousy and distrust! Hence we do not wonder at the pious fraud which interpolated the well-known passage about our Saviour.2 Let us read any author in those circumstances of time, place, or immediate succession to the

1 For a more precise explanation of this reference, see some subsequent sentences at pp. 236-7.-M.

2 The famous passage in Josephus making honourable mention of Christ occurs in Chap. 3, Book XVIII, of the Antiquities. Its genuineness is still maintained by some.— -M.

cardinal events of our own religion, and we shall find it a mere postulate of the heart, a mere necessity of human feeling, that we should think of him as a Christian; or, if not absolutely that, as every way disposed to be a Christian, and falling short of that perfect light only by such clouds as his hurried life or his personal conflicts might interpose. We do not blame, far from it-we admire those who find it necessary (even at the cost of a little self-delusion) to place themselves in a state of charity with an author treating such subjects, and in whose company they were to travel through some thousands of pages. We also find it painful to read an author and to loathe him. We, too, would be glad to suppose, as a possibility about Josephus, what many adopt as a certainty. But we know too much. Unfortunately, we have read Josephus with too scrutinizing (and, what is more, with too combining) an eye. We know him to be an unprincipled man, and an ignoble man; one whose adhesion to Christianity would have done no honour to our faith-one who most assuredly was not a Christian—one who was not even in any tolerable sense a Jew-one who was an enemy to our faith, a traitor to his own: as an enemy, vicious and ignorant; as a traitor, steeped to the lips in superfluous baseness.

The vigilance with which we have read Josephus has (amongst many other hints) suggested some with regard to the Essenes and to these we shall now make our own readers a party, after stopping to say that thus far, so far as we have gone already, we count on their assent to our theory, were it only from those considerations :-First, the exceeding improbability that a known philosophic sect amongst the Jews, chiefly distinguished from the other two by its moral aspects, could have lurked unknown to the Evangelists; secondly, the exceeding improbability that such a sect, laying the chief burden of its scrupulosity in the matter of oaths, should have bound its members by "tremendous" oaths of secrecy in a case where there was nothing to conceal ; thirdly, the staring contradictoriness between such an avowal on the part of Josephus and his deliberate revelation of what he fancied to be their creed. The objection is too inevitable : either you have taken the oaths or you have not. You have? Then by your own showing you are a perjured