remark pleased Hanan, who smiled over it, expressing a muttered hope that the Sanhedrin would not take upon itself the task of discussing the merits and qualifications of those whom he should deem worthy to present for election.  The great man purred out these sentences, Joseph’s remark having reminded him of his exalted position.  But thinking his remark had nettled Hanan, Joseph said:  you see I have only just come to Jerusalem; and this remark continued the flattery, and with an impulsive movement Hanan took Joseph’s hands and spoke to him about his father in terms that made Joseph feel very proud of Dan, and also of being in Jerusalem, which had already begun to seem to him more wonderful than he had imagined it to be:  and he had imagined it very wonderful indeed.  But there was a certain native shrewdness in Joseph; and after leaving the High Priest’s place he had not taken many steps before he began to see through Hanan’s plans:  which no doubt are laid with the view to impress me with the magnificence of Jerusalem and its priesthood.  He walked a few yards farther, and remembered that there are always dissensions among the Jews, and that the son of a rich man (one of first-rate importance in Galilee) would be a valuable acquisition to the priestly caste.

But though he saw through Hanan’s designs, he was still the dupe of Hanan, who was a clever man and a learned man; his importance loomed up very large, and Joseph could not be without a hero, true or false; so it could not be otherwise than that Hanan and Kaiaphas and the Sadducees, whom Joseph met in the Sanhedrin and whose houses he frequented, commanded his admiration for several months and would have held it for many months more, had it not been that he happened to be a genuinely religious man, concerned much more with an intimate sense of God than with the slaying of bullocks and rams.

He had accepted the sacrifices as part of a ritual which should not be questioned and which he had never questioned:  yet, without discussion, without argument, they fell in his estimation without pain, as naturally as a leaf falls.  A friend quoted to him a certain well-known passage in Isaiah, and not the whole of it:  only a few words; and from that moment the Temple, the priests and the sacrifices became every day more distasteful to him than they were the day before, setting him pondering on the mind of the man who lives upon religion while laughing in his beard at his dupe; he contrasted him with the fellow that drives in his beast for slaughter and pays his yearly dole; he remembered how he loved the prophets instinctively though the priests always seemed a little alien, even before he knew them.  Yet he never imagined them to be as far from true religion (which is the love of God) as he found them; for they did not try to conceal their scepticism from him:  knowing him to be a friend of the High Priest, it had seemed to them that they might indulge their wit as they pleased, and once he had even to reprove some