it is only by laws and traditions that we may know ourselves—­whence we have come and whither we are going.  He attributed to these laws and traditions the love of the Jewish race for their God, and their desire to love God, and to form their lives in obedience to what they believed to be God’s will.  Without these rites and observances their love of God would not have survived.  It was not by exaggeration of these laws but by the scepticism of the Sadducees that the Temple was polluted.  If the priests degraded religion and made a vile thing of it, there were others that ennobled the Temple by their piety.

And as these thoughts passed through Joseph’s mind, his eyes went to the simple folk who never asked themselves whether they were Sadducees or Pharisees, but were content to pray around the Temple that the Lord would not take them away till they witnessed the triumph of Israel, never asking if the promised resurrection would be obtained in this world—­if not in each individual case, by the race itself—­or whether they would all be lifted by angels out of their graves and carried away by them into a happy immortality.

The simple folk on whom Joseph’s eyes rested favourably, prayed, untroubled by difficult questions:  they were content to love God; and, captured by their simple unquestioning faith, which he felt to be the only spiritual value in this world, he was glad to turn away from both Sadducees and Pharisees and mix with them.  Sometimes, and to his great regret, he brought about involuntarily the very religious disputations that it was his object to quit for ever when he withdrew himself from the society of the Pharisees.  A chance word was enough to set some of them by the ears, asking each other whether the soul may or can descend again into the corruptible body; and it was one day when this question was being disputed that a disputant, pressing forward, announced his belief that the soul, being alone immortal, does not attempt to regain the temple of the body.  A doctrine which astonished Joseph, so simple did it seem and so reasonable; and as he stood wondering why he had not thought of it himself, his eyes telling his perplexity, he was awakened from his dream, and his awakening was caused by the word “Essene.”  He asked for a meaning to be put upon it, to the great astonishment of the people, who were not aware that the fame of this third sect of the Jews was not yet spread into Galilee.  There were many willing to instruct him, and almost the first thing he learnt about them was that they were not viewed with favour in Jerusalem, for they did not send animals to the Temple for sacrifice, deeming blood-letting a crime.  A still more fundamental tenet of this sect was its denial of private property:  all they had, belonged to one brother as much as to another, and they lived in various places, avoiding cities, and setting up villages of their own accord; notably one on the eastern bank of the Jordan, from whence recruiting missionaries