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friends are seeking for "better bread than is made of wheat." Since, really, when you subpœna a witness out of the great deeps of time divided from yourself by fifty-five generations, you are obliged to humour him, and to show him special indulgence; else he grows crusty" on your hands, and keeps back even that which by gentler solicitation might have been won from him.

Meantime, I have re-touched the evidence a little, so that he who was restive formerly may now be tractable; and have attempted to coax the witnesses in a way which is but fair, as no more than balancing and corresponding to those gross tamperings practised (we may be sure) by the Jew courtier. Mr. Joe, we may rely upon it, when packing the jury, did his best: I may have an equal right to do my worst. It happens that my theory and Mr. Joe's are involved alternatively in each other. If you reject Joe's-a thing that I suppose inevitable-this throws you by rebound upon mine: if you are inclined to reject mine—a case that is supportable by human fortitude-then you find yourself pitched violently into Mr. Joe's: a case that is not supportable by any fortitude, armed with any philosophy. In taking leave, I add, as an extra argument against the possibility that Essenism could have been contemporary with the birth of Christianity, this ugly objection :-We may suppose that a Jew, in maintaining the historic truth of Essenism, would endeavour to evade the arguments so naturally emerging from the internal relations of this secret sect to those of the avowed sect called Christians, and at the same time to ignore the vast improbability that two sects wearing features so sisterly should have sailed past each other silently, and exchanging no salutes, no questions of reciprocal interest, no mutual recognitions, no interchange of gratulation in the midst of departing storms, or of solemn valediction amongst perilous mists that were slowly gathering. The Jew might argue, in explanation, that the Essenes, under the form of ascetic moralists, would from this single element of their system derive a prejudice against the founder of Christianity, as one who in his own person had deemed it advisable, for the attainment of social influence in the Judæa of that day, and for the readier propagation of truth, to adopt a more

liberal and genial mode of living. For the stern ascetic may win reverence, but never wins confidence, so that the heart of his hearer is still for him under a mask. My argument being that the Essenes could not have been contemporary with the great moral teacher (in fact, the revolutionary teacher) of their own century, without seeking Him or His seeking them—we may suppose the Jew taking his stand plausibly enough on a primal alienation of the Essenes, through incongruities of social habits, such (let us suppose by way of illustration) as would naturally repel Quakers or Moravians in our own day from any great moral teacher wearing a brilliant exterior and familiar with courts and princes. Such an estrangement would be matter of regret to all the wise and liberal even of those two sects, but it would be natural; and it would sufficiently explain the non-intercourse objected, without any call for resorting to the plea of anachronism, as the true bar of separation.

Answer:-It is true that any deep schism in social habits would tend to divide the two parties-the great moral teacher on the one side from the great monastic fraternity on the other, that stood aloof from the world, and the temptations of the world. Pro tanto such a schism would pull in that direction; though I am of opinion that the least magnanimous of dissenting bodies would allow a transcendent weight (adequate to the crushing of any conceivable resistance) to the conspicuous originality and searching pathos of Christ's moral doctrine. Four great cases, or memorable cartoons, in the series of Christ's doctrinal "shows" (to. borrow the Eleusinian term), in 1839-40, powerfully affected the Mahometan Affghan Sirdars: viz., 1, the model of prayer which he first and last among all teachers left as a guiding legacy to infinite generations; 2, the model of purity which he raised aloft in the little infant suddenly made the centre of his moral system as the normal form of innocence and simplicity of heart; 3, the Sermon on the Mount, which, by one sudden illumination, opened a new world in man's secret heart; 4, the translation of moral tests from the old and gross one of palpable acts to thoughts and the most aerial of purposes, as laid down in the passage, "He that looketh upon a woman," &c. These four revelations of the Christian

Founder, being once reported to the pretended monastic body, must have caught the affections, and have prompted an insurmountable craving for personal intercourse with such a "Prophet ",-i.e. in the Hebrew sense of Prophet, such a revealer out of darkness. In Afghanistan, amongst blind, prejudiced, sometimes fanatical, Mahometans, these extraordinary moral revelations had power deeply to shake and move could they have had less in Judæa? But, finally, suppose they had, and that an ascetic brotherhood refused all intercourse with a teacher not ascetic, so much the more zealously would they have courted such intercourse with a teacher memorably and in an ultimate degree ascetic. Such a teacher was John the Baptist. Here then stands the case: in an age which Josephus would have us believe to have been the flourishing age of the Essenes there arise two great revolutionary powers, who are also great teachers and legislators in the world of ethics: the first, by a short space of time, was the Baptist; the second was Christ. The one was uniquely ascetic, declining not only the luxuries, but the slenderest physical appliances against the wrath of the elements, or the changes of the seasons. The other described himself as one who came eating and drinking, in conformity to the common usages of men. With neither of these great authorities is there any record of the Essenes having had the most trivial intercourse. Is that reconcilable with their alleged existence on a large scale in an age of deep agitation and fervent inquiry?

1 That John the Baptist was a moral teacher, as well as a herald of coming changes, may be inferred from the fact (noticed by the Evangelists) that the military body applied to him for moral instruction; which appeal must have grown out of the general invitation to do so involved in the ordinary course of his ministrations, and in the terms of his public preaching. In what sense he was to be held the harbinger of Christ, over and above his avowed mission for announcing the fast approaching advent of the Messiah, I have elsewhere suggested, in a short comment on the word μeтavola; which word, as I contend, cannot properly be translated repentance; for it would have been pure cant to suppose that age, or any age, as more under a summons to repentance than any other assignable. I understand by μetavola a revolution of thought—a great intellectual change-in the accepting a new centre for all moral truth from Christ; which centre it was that subsequently caused all the offence of Christianity to the Roman People.

POSTSCRIPT1

THE other historic person on whom I shall probably be charged with assault and battery is Josephus. And the impartial reader, who knows but slightly or not at all what it is that this felon has been doing, is likely enough to think that I have shown a levity and hastiness of resentment not warranted by the notorieties of his life. It is remarkable that few of us know the possible strength of our patriotic sympathies, and how much it is that we could do and could hazard for our own dear, noble country, if danger or calamity should besiege her. Seen always under calm and gentle sunshine, this natal land of ours forms an object that would be thoroughly transfigured to our hearts, and would wear a new life, if once she were thrown into impassioned circumstances of calamity, not by visitations of Providence, but by human wrongs and conspiracies. Vendidit hic auro patriam

1 It shows the strength of De Quincey's passion for the subject of the Essenes, and of his antipathy to Josephus, that, not content with his long supplement to the Essenes portion of his paper on Secret Societies, he inserted into the preface of the volume of his Collected Writings in which that paper was reprinted (1858) this further invective against Josephus. It comes now necessarily as a "Postscript"; and, to explain the wording of the first sentence, it is to be understood that "the other historic person" similarly assaulted in the same preface was Pompey. The paper on Cicero having been included in the same volume of the Collected Writings which contained that on Secret Societies, De Quincey had begun his preface to the volume with that reiteration of his dislike to Pompey which has its natural place now as a "Postscript" to the Cicero paper (ante, Vol. VI. pp. 222-4), and had then indulged in this more vehement parting kick at Josephus.-M.

is the dreadful category which Virgil has prepared in the infernal regions for traitors such as this Jew; for I suppose it can make but slight difference in any man's estimate that the Jew did not receive the bribe first and then perpetrate the treason, but trusted to Roman good faith at three months after date. But this Jew did worse. Many have been the willing betrayers of their country who would have spurned with fury an invitation to join in a gorgeous festival of exultation celebrating the final overthrow of their motherland, and the bloody ruin of their kindred, through all their tribes and households. There is many an intelligent little girl, not more than seven years old, who, in such circumstances, and knowing that the purpose of the festival was to drag the last memorials of her people-its honours, trophies, sanctities through the pollution of triumph, would indignantly refuse to give the sanction of so much as a momentary gaze upon a spectacle abominable in all Hebrew eyes. And, if, in such a case, she could descend to an emotion so humiliating as curiosity, she would feel a silent reproach fretting her heart so often as she beheld upon a Roman medal that symbolic memorial of her desolated home-so beautiful and so pathetic-Judæa figured as a woman veiled, weeping under her palm-tree: Rachel weeping for her children. But this Josephus, this hound-hound of hounds, and very dog of very dog-did worse: he sat as a congratulating guest, offering homage and adoring cringes, simpering and kotooing, whilst the triumphal pageant for Judæa ravaged, and for Jerusalem burned, filled the hours of a long summer's day, as it unfolded its pomps before him. Nay, this Jew achieved a deeper degradation even than this. But for him, when it was asked of the conquerors, Where is the conquered race? what has become of them? it must have been answered, "All slain, or captives." And that result is a mode of military triumph, even for the conquered. But through the presence of Josephus, a solitary man of rank, all this was transformed. A Jewish grandee, sitting on terms of amity amongst the victors, and countersigning their pretensions, had the inevitable effect of disavowing all his humbler countrymen from heroes they became mutineers; and in an instant of time the fiery struggle of the ancient El Koda

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