that would continue the order of the Essenes, we spoke but little against the fine linen that these women brought and the perfumes they exhaled, whereby our ruin was consummated.  Joazabdus, our president, himself fell into the temptation of woman’s beauty and was led into sinful acquiescence of a display of the images she had brought with her; for without a display of them on either side of the bridal bed she would not permit his embraces.  She was of our religion in all else, having abjured her gods and goddesses at every other moment of the day and night; but licence of her body she could not grant except under the eyes of Astarte, and Joazabdus, being a weak man, allowed the images to remain.  As soon as the news of these images spread, we went in deputation to our president to beg him to cast out the images from our midst, but he answered us:  but one image remains—­that of Astarte:  none looks upon it but she, and if I cast out the image that she reverences she will go hence and with the fruit of my body within her body, and a saint may be lost to us.  But we answered him that even as Jacob set up parti-coloured rods before the conceiving ewes that they might bear parti-coloured lambs, so to gaze in the marriage-bed upon the image of Astarte would surely stamp upon the children that might come the image of that demon.  But he was not to be moved, whereupon we withdrew, saying to one another:  we shall not move him out of his wickedness; and that was why we went to his brother Daddeus and asked him to accept the headship of the community in his brother’s place.  And seeing that he was unwilling to set himself against his brother, we said:  our God comes before all things, and here we have heathen goddesses in our midst; and the end of it was that Cozby, that was the Chaldean woman’s name, put poison into Daddeus’ food, thinking to establish her rule thereby, but as soon as the death of Daddeus became known many left the cenoby polluted in their eyes by heathenism and murder.

So it always falls out, Hazael cried, wine and women have lost the world many saints.  Wine deceives the minds of those that drink it, and it exalts men above themselves, and leads them into acts that in any other moment they would shrink from, leaving them more stupid than the animals.  Nor is the temptation of women less violent than that of wine.  Women’s beauty is even more potent, for once a man perceives it he becomes as if blind to all other things; his reason deserts him, he broods upon it by day, and falls at last, as our brother has told us, into unseasonable pleasures, like Solomon himself, about whom many things are related, but not so far as I know that he became so intoxicated with women’s various beauty that he found his pleasure at last in his own humiliation.  If Solomon did not, others have; for there is a story of a king that allowed his love of a certain queen to take so great a hold upon him that he asked her to come up the steps of his throne to strike him on