the life of savage beasts, dwelling in the hollows of the rocks, whence he came like a thunderbolt, to make and unmake kings, had become, by successive transformations, a sort of superhuman being, sometimes visible, sometimes invisible, and as one who had not tasted death.  It was generally believed that Elias would return and restore Israel.[1] The austere life which he had led, the terrible remembrances he had left behind him—­the impression of which is still powerful in the East[2]—­the sombre image which, even in our own time, causes trembling and death—­all this mythology, full of vengeance and terror, vividly struck the mind of the people, and stamped as with a birth-mark all the creations of the popular mind.  Whoever aspired to act powerfully upon the people, must imitate Elias; and, as solitary life had been the essential characteristic of this prophet, they were accustomed to conceive “the man of God” as a hermit.  They imagined that all the holy personages had had their days of penitence, of solitude, and of austerity.[3] The retreat to the desert thus became the condition and the prelude of high destinies.

[Footnote 1:  Malachi iv. 5, 6; (iii. 23, 24, according to the Vulg.); Ecclesiasticus xlviii. 10; Matt. xvi. 14, xvii. 10, and following; Mark vi. 15, viii. 28, ix. 10, and following; Luke ix. 8, 19; John i. 21, 25.]

[Footnote 2:  The ferocious Abdallah, pacha of St. Jean d’Acre, nearly died from fright at seeing him in a dream, standing erect on his mountain.  In the pictures of the Christian churches, he is surrounded with decapitated heads.  The Mussulmans dread him.]

[Footnote 3:  Isaiah ii. 9-11.]

No doubt this thought of imitation had occupied John’s mind.[1] The anchorite life, so opposed to the spirit of the ancient Jewish people, and with which the vows, such as those of the Nazirs and the Rechabites, had no relation, pervaded all parts of Judea.  The Essenes or Therapeutae were grouped near the birthplace of John, on the eastern shores of the Dead Sea.[2] It was imagined that the chiefs of sects ought to be recluses, having rules and institutions of their own, like the founders of religious orders.  The teachers of the young were also at times species of anchorites,[3] somewhat resembling the gourous[4] of Brahminism.  In fact, might there not in this be a remote influence of the mounis of India?  Perhaps some of those wandering Buddhist monks who overran the world, as the first Franciscans did in later times, preaching by their actions and converting people who knew not their language, might have turned their steps toward Judea, as they certainly did toward Syria and Babylon?[5] On this point we have no certainty.  Babylon had become for some time a true focus of Buddhism.  Boudasp (Bodhisattva) was reputed a wise Chaldean, and the founder of Sabeism. Sabeism was, as its etymology indicates,[6] baptism—­that is to say, the religion of many baptisms—­the