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who had a frequent interest in falsehood, in order to screen himself; secondly, as one liable to unintentional falsehood, from the indisposition to trust him.

Having now extracted the poison-fangs from the Jewish Historian, we will take a further notice of his History in relation to the Essenes in our next number.

PART III-THE ESSENES HISTORICALLY

The secret history of Judæa through the two generations preceding the destruction of Jerusalem might yet be illuminated a little better than it has been by Josephus. It would, however, require a separate paper. At present we shall take but a glance or two at that subject, and merely in reference to the Essenes. Nothing shows the crooked conduct of Josephus so much as the utter perplexity, the mere labyrinth of doubts, in which he has involved the capital features of the last Jewish War. Two points only we notice, for their connexion with the Essenes.

First, What was the cause, the outstanding pretext, on either side, for the Jewish insurrectionary war? We know well what were the real impulses to that war; but what was the capital and overt act on either side which forced the . Jewish irritation into a hopeless contest? What was the ostensible ground alleged for the war ?

Josephus durst not have told, had he known. He must have given a Roman, an ex parte, statement at any rate; and let that consideration never be lost sight of in taking his evidence. He might blame a particular Roman, such as Gessius Florus,1 because he found that Romans themselves blamed him. He might vaunt his veracity and his πappyσía in a little corner of the general story; but durst he speak plainly on the broad field of Judæan politics? Not for his life. Or, suppose the Roman magnanimity to have taken off his shackles, what became of his court favour and prefer

1 Gessius Florus, Roman procurator of Judæa, A.D. 64-65.—M.

ment, in case he spoke freely of Roman policy as a system?

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Hence it is that Josephus shuffles so miserably when attempting to assign the cause or causes of the war. different causes he assigns in different places, not one of which is other than itself an effect from higher causes, and a mere symptom of the convulsions working below. For instance, the obstinate withdrawal of the daily sacrifice offered for Cæsar, which is one of the causes alleged, could not have occurred until the real and deep-seated causes of that war had operated on the general temper for some time. It was a public insult to Rome: would have occasioned a demand for explanation; would have been revoked; the immediate author punished; and all would have subsided into a personal affair, had it not been supported by extensive combinations below the surface, which could no longer be suppressed. Into them we are not going to enter. We wish only to fix attention upon the ignorance of Josephus, whether unaffected in this instance, or assumed for the sake of disguising truths unacceptable to Roman ears.

This question of itself has much to do with the origin of the Essenes.

Secondly, Who were those Sicarii or swordsmen of whom Josephus talks so much during the latter years of Jerusalem ? Can any man believe so monstrous a fable as this: viz. that not one, but thousands of men were confederated for purposes of murder; 2dly, of murder not interested in its own success, murder not directed against any known determinate objects, but murder indiscriminate, secret, objectless, what a lawyer might call homicidium vagum; 3dly, that this confederacy should subsist for years, should levy war, should entrench itself in fortresses; 4thly (which is more incomprehensible than all the rest), should talk and harangue in the spirit of sublime martyrdom to some holy interest; 5thly, should breathe the same spirit into women and little children; and, finally, that all, with one accord, rather than submit to foreign conquest, should choose to die in one hour, from the oldest to the youngest? Such a tale, in its outset, in the preliminary confederation, is a tale of ogres and ogresses, not of human creatures trained under a Divine law to a

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profound sense of accountability. Such a tale, in its latter sections, is a tale of martyrs more than human. Such a tale, as a whole, is self-contradictory. A vile purpose makes vile all those that pursue it. Even the East Indian Thugs are not congregated by families. It is much if ten thousand families furnish one Thug. And, as to the results of such a league, is it possible that a zealous purpose of murder, of murder for the sake of murder, should end in nobility of spirit so eminent that nothing in Christian martyrdoms goes beyond the extremity of self-sacrifice which even their enemies have granted to the Sicarii ? "Whose courage," we are quoting from the bitterest of enemies, "whose courage, or shall we call it madness? everybody was amazed at; for, "when all sorts of torments that could be imagined were "applied to their bodies, not one of them would comply so "far as to confess, or seem to confess, that Cæsar was their "lord; as if they received those torments, and the very fury "of the furnace which burned them to ashes, with bodies that 66 were insensible, and with souls that exceedingly rejoiced. "But what most of all astonished the beholders was the courage of the children; for not one of all these children was so far subdued by the torments it endured as to confess "Cæsar for its lord. Such a marvellous thing for endurance "is the tender and delicate body of man, when supported by an unconquerable soul !”

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No, no, reader; there is villainy at work in this whole story about the Sicarii. We are duped, we are cheated, we are mocked. Felony, conscious murder, never in this world led to such results as these. Conscience it was that must have acted here. No power short of that ever sustained frail women and children in such fiery trials. A conscience, it may have been, erring in its principles; but those principles must have been Divine. Resting on any confidence less than that, the resolution of women and children so tried must have given way. Here, too evidently, we have the genuine temper of the Maccabees, struggling and suffering in the same spirit and with the same ultimate hopes.

After what has been exposed with regard to Josephus, we presume that his testimony against the Sicarii will go for little. That man may readily be supposed to have borne

Him, therefore, or any
But, as all is still dark

false witness against his brethren who is proved to have borne false witness against God. thing that he can say, we set aside. about the Sicarii, we shall endeavour to trace their real position in the Jewish War. For merely to prove that they have been calumniated does not remove the cloud that rests upon their history. That, indeed, cannot be removed now in a manner quite satisfactory; but we see enough to indicate the purity of their intentions. And, with respect to their enemy Josephus, let us remember one fact, which merely the want of a personal interest in the question has permitted to lie so long in the shade: viz. that three distinct causes made it really impossible for that man to speak the truth. First, his own partisanship: having adopted one faction, he was bound to regard all others as wrong and hostile: secondly, his captivity and interest: in what regarded the merits of the cause a Roman prisoner durst not have spoken the truth. These causes of distortion or falsehood in giving that history would apply even to honest men, unless with their honesty they combined a spirit of martyrdom. But there was a third cause peculiar to the position of Josephus, viz. conscious guilt and shame. He could not admit others to have been right but in words that would have confounded himself. If they were not mad, he was a poltroon; if they had done their duty as patriots, then was he a traitor; if they were not frantic, then was Josephus an apostate. This was a logic which required no subtle dialectician to point and enforce; simply the narrative, if kept steady to the fact and faithful, must silently suggest that conclusion to everybody. And for that reason, had there been no other, it was not steady; for that reason it was not faithful. Now, let us turn to the Sicarii. Who were they?

Thirdly, It is a step towards the answer if we may ask previously, Who were the Galileans? Many people read Josephus under the impression that, of course, this term designates merely the inhabitants of the two Galilees. We, by diligent collation of passages, have convinced ourselves that it does not; it means a particular faction in Jewish politics. And, which is a fact already noticed by Eusebius, it often includes many of the new Christian sect. But this requires an explanation.

Strange it seems to us that men should overlook so obvious a truth as that in every age Christianity must have counted amongst its nominal adherents the erring believer, the partial believer, the wavering believer, equally with the true, the spiritual, the entire, and the steadfast believer. What sort of believers were those who would have taken Christ and forcibly made him a king? Erroneous believers, it must be admitted; but still in some points, partially and obscurely, they must have been powerfully impressed by the truth which they had heard from Christ. Many of these might fall away when that personal impression was withdrawn ; but many must have survived all causes of depression. SemiChristians there must always have been in great numbers. Those who were such in a merely religious view we believe to have been called Nazarenes; those in whom the political aspects at first universally ascribed to Christianity happened to predominate were known by the more general name of Galileans. This name expressed in its foremost element opposition to the Romans; in its secondary element, Christianity. And its rise may be traced thus :

Whoever would thoroughly investigate the very complex condition of Palestine in our Saviour's days must go back to Herod the Great.1 This man, by his peculiar policy and his power, stood between the Jews and the Romans as a sort of Janus or indifferent mediator. Any measure which Roman ignorance would have inflicted, unmodified, on the rawest condition of Jewish bigotry, he contrived to have tempered and qualified. For his own interest, and not with any more generous purpose, he screened from the Romans various ebullitions of Jewish refractoriness; and from the Jews he screened all accurate knowledge of the probable Roman intentions. But, after his death, and precisely during the course of our Saviour's life, these intentions transpired: reciprocal knowledge and menaces were exchanged; and the elements of insurrection began to mould themselves silently, but not steadily; for the agitation was great and increasing as the crisis seemed to approach. Herod the Great, as a vigorous prince, and very rich, might possibly have main

1 Herod the Great was king of the Jews from B.C. 40 to B. c. 4. -M.

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