seized by Alexander in his conquest of the East, then again to be hoarded or spent by the Syrian and Egyptian kings who descended from Alexander’s generals, and finally to be deposited in the treasuries of the Romans and the Byzantine Greeks.  Whatever ruin warriors may make, whatever temples and palaces they may destroy, they always spare and seize the precious metals, and keep them until they spend them, or are robbed of them in their turn.

Not only was the Holy City a desolation on the return of the Jews, but the rich vineyards and olive-grounds and wheat-fields had run to waste, and there were but few to till and improve them.  The few who returned felt their helpless condition, and were quiet and peaceable.  Moreover, they had learned during their seventy years’ exile to have an intense hatred of everything like idolatry,—­a hatred amounting to fanatical fierceness, such as the Puritan Colonists of New England had toward Catholicism.  In their dreary and humiliating captivity they at length perceived that idolatry was the great cause of all their calamities; that no national prosperity was possible for them, as the chosen people, except by sincere allegiance to Jehovah.  At no period of their history were they more truly religious and loyal to their invisible King than for two hundred years after their return to the land of their ancestors.  The terrible lesson of exile and sorrow was not lost on them.  It is true that they were only a “remnant” of the nation, as Isaiah had predicted, but they believed that they were selected and saved for a great end.  This end they seemed to appreciate now more than ever, and the idea that a great Deliverer was to arise among them, whose reign was to be permanent and glorious, was henceforth devoutly cherished.

A severe morality was practised among these returned exiles, as marked as their faith in God.  They were especially tenacious of the laws and ceremonies that Moses had commanded.  They kept the Sabbath with a strictness unknown to their ancestors.  They preserved the traditions of their fathers, and conformed to them with scrupulous exactness; they even went beyond the requirements of Moses in outward ceremonials.  Thus there gradually arose among them a sect ultimately known as the Pharisees, whose leading peculiarity was a slavish and fanatical observance of all the technicalities of the law, both Mosaic and traditional; a sect exceedingly narrow, but popular and powerful.  They multiplied fasts and ritualistic observances as the superstitious monks of the Middle Ages did after them; they extended the payment of tithes (tenths) to the most minute and unimportant things, like the herbs which grew in their gardens; they began the Sabbath on Friday evening, and kept it so rigorously that no one was permitted to walk beyond one thousand steps from his own door.