Speak to the Essenes; tell them of my conversion?  Paul repeated.  Why not? he asked himself, since he was here and could not leave till nightfall.  Festus had given him leave to go to Jericho to preach while waiting for the ship that was to take him to Rome, and he had found in Jericho the intolerance that had dragged him out of the Temple at Jerusalem; circumcision of the flesh but no circumcision of the spirit....  But here!  He had been led to the Essenes by God, and all that had seemed dark the night before now seemed clear to him.  There was no longer any doubt in his mind that the Lord wished his chosen people to hear the truth before his servant Paul left Palestine for ever.  He had been led by the Lord among these rocks, perhaps to find twelve disciples, who would leave their rocks when they heard the truth of the death and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth and would carry the joyful tidings to the ends of the earth.

CHAP.  XXXIII.

The Essenes, ten in number, were seated in an embrasure.  A reader had been chosen (an elder) to read the Scriptures, and the attention of the community was now engaged in judgment of his attempt to reconcile two passages, one taken from Numbers in which it is said that God is not as man, with another passage taken from Deuteronomy in which God is said to be as man.  He had just finished telling the brethren that these two passages were not in contradiction, the second being introduced for the instruction of the multitude and not because the nature of man is as God’s nature, and, on second thoughts, he added:  nor must it be forgotten that the Book of Deuteronomy was written when we were a wandering tribe come out of the desert of Arabia, without towns or cities, without a Temple, without an Ark—­ours having fallen into the hands of the Philistines.  He continued his gloss till Mathias held up his hand and asked Hazael’s permission to speak:  the words that had been quoted from Deuteronomy, those in which the Scriptures speak of God as if he were a man, attributing to him the acts and motives of man, were addressed, as our reader has pointed out, to men who had hardly advanced beyond the intelligence of childhood, whose minds were still simple and unable to receive any idea of God except the primitive notion that God is a greater man.  Now the reason for my interruption is this:  I should like to point out that for those who have passed beyond this stage, whose intelligence is not limited to their imagination, and whose will is not governed by selfish fears and hopes, there is another lesson in the words:  we can rise to the consciousness of God as an absolute Being, of whom we know only that he is, and not what he is, and this is what is meant when God is spoken of by the name I am that I am.