While laying emphasis on this rule, the curator cracked a flea under his robe, but Joseph did not call his attention to his disobedience, but bowed his head and left him to the scruple of conscience which he hoped would awaken in him later.

Before this had time to come to pass, the curator called after him and suggested that he might teach Hebrew to the four proselytes, whose knowledge of that language had seemed to Mathias, their instructor, disgracefully weak.  They were all from Alexandria, like their teacher, and read the Scriptures in Greek; but the Essenes, so said the curator, must read the Scriptures in Hebrew; and the teaching of Hebrew, Mathias said to Joseph, takes me away from my important work, but it may amuse you to teach them.  Our father may accept you as a sufficient teacher:  go to him for examination.

A little talk and a few passages read from the Scriptures satisfied the president that Joseph was the assistant teacher that had been so long desired in the community, and he spoke to Joseph soothingly of Mathias, whose life work was the true interpretation of the Scriptures.  But did the Scriptures need interpretation?  Joseph asked himself, not daring to put questions to the president; and on an early occasion he asked Mathias what the president meant when he spoke of a true interpretation of the Scriptures, and was told that the true meaning of the Scriptures lay below the literal meaning.  There can be no doubt, he said, that the Scriptures must be regarded as allegories; and he explained to Joseph that he devoted all his intellect to discovering and explaining these allegories, a task demanding extraordinary assiduity, for they lay concealed in what seemed to the vulgar eye mere statements of fact:  as if, he added scornfully, God chose the prophets for no better end than a mere relation of facts!  He was willing, however, to concede that his manner of treating the Scriptures was not approved by the entire community, but in view of his learning, the proselytes were admitted to his lectures—­one of the innovations of the prior, who, in spite of all, remained one of his supporters.

To the end of his life Joseph kept in his memory the moment when he sat in the corner of the hall, his eyes fixed upon Mathias’s young and beautiful profile, clear cut, hard and decisive as the profiles of the young gods that decorated the Greek coins which shocked him in Caesarea.  His memory of Mathias was as partial; but he knew the president’s full face, and while pondering on it he remembered that he had never seen him in profile.  Nor was this all that set the two men apart in Joseph’s consciousness.  The prior’s simple and homely language came from the heart, entered the heart and was remembered, whereas Mathias spoke from his brain.  The heart is simple and always the same, but the brain is complex and various; and therefore it was natural that Mathias should hold, as if in fee, a great store of verbal felicities, and that he should translate all shades of thought at once into words.