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Mariamne; by which, like Ferdinand of Aragon, or our Henry VII., under the same circumstances, he seemed in law to lose his title to the throne. But, above all, his compliance with idolatry, (according to the Jewish interpretation,) in setting up the golden eagle by way of homage to Rome, gave a shock to his authority that never could have been healed. Out of the affair of the golden eagle grew, as we are persuaded, the sect of the Herodians those who justified a compromising spirit of dealing with the Romans. This threw off, as its antipole, a sect furiously opposed to the Romans. That sect, under the management of Judas, (otherwise called Theudas,) expanded greatly; he was a Galilean, and the sect were therefore naturally called Galileans. Into this main sea of Jewish nationality emptied themselves all other less powerful sects that, under any modification, avowed an anti-Roman spirit. The religious sect of the Christians was from the first caught and hurried away into this overmastering vortex. No matter that Christ lost no opportunity of teaching that his kingdom was not of this world. Did he not preach a new salvation to the House of Israel? Where could that lie but through resistance to Rome? His followers resolved to place him at their head as a king; and his crucifixion in those stormy times was certainly much influenced by the belief that, as the object of political attachment, he had become dangerous whether sanctioning that attachment or not.

Out of this sect of Galileans, comprehending all who avowed a Jewish nationality, (and therefore many semiChristians, that is, men who, in a popular sense, and under whatever view, had professed to follow Christ,) arose the sect of Sicarii-that is, out of a vast multitude professing goodwill to the service, these men separated themselves as the men of action, the executive ministers, the self-devoting soldiers. This is no conjecture. It happens that Josephus, who had kept us in the dark about these

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Sicarii in that part of his narrative which most required some clue to their purposes, afterwards forgets him. self, and incidentally betrays [Wars, B. vii. chap. 8, sect. 1] that the Sicarii had originally been an offset from the sect founded by Judas the Galilean; that their general purpose was the same; so that, no doubt, it was a new feature of the time giving a new momentary direction to the efforts of the patriotic which had constituted the distinction and which authorized the denomination. Was Miltiades wrong? Was Tell wrong? Was Wallace wrong? Then, but not else, were the Galileans; and from them the Sicarii probably differed only as the brave doer differs from the just thinker. But the Sicarii, you will say, used unhallowed means. Probably not. We do not know what means they used, except most indistinctly from their base and rancorous enemy. The truth, so far as it can be descried through the dust of ages and the fury of partisanship, appears to be, that, at a moment when law slumbered and police was inefficient, they assumed the duties of resistance to a tyranny which even the Roman apologist admits to have been insufferable. They are not heard of as actors until the time when Gessius Florus, by opening the floodgates to military insolence, had himself given a license to an armed reaction. Where justice was sought in vain, probably the Sicarii showed themselves as ministers of a sudden retribution. When the vilest outrages were offered by foreigners to their women, probably they "visited" for such atrocities. That state of things, which caused the tribunal to slumber, privileged the individual to awake. And in a land whose inspired monuments recorded for everlasting praise the acts of Judith, of Samson, of Judas Maccabæus, these summary avengers, the Sicarii, might reasonably conceive that they held the same heavenly commission under the same earthly oppres sion.

Reviewing the whole of that calami

*"Especially the death of Mariamne."- -There is a remarkable proof extant of the veneration attached in Jewish imagination to the memory of this lady as a MacLong after her death, a pretender (or alleged pretender) to the name and rights of Alexander, one of her two murdered sons, appeared at Rome, and instantly drew to himself the enthusiastic support of all the Jews throughout Italy.

tous period, combining the scattered notices of the men and their acts, and the reflections of both thrown back from the mirrors offered to us by the measures of counteraction adopted at the time, we have little doubt that the Sicarii and the Zealots were both offsets from the same great sect of the Galileans, and that in an imperfect sense, or by tendency, all were Christians; whence partly the re-infusion of the ancient Jewish spirit into their acts and counsels and indomitable resolution.

But also we believe that this very political leaven it was, as dispersed through the body of the Galileans, which led to the projection from the main body of a new order called the Essenes; this political taint, that is to say, combined with the danger of professing a proselytizing Christianity. In that anarchy, which through the latter years of Nero covered Judæa as with the atmosphere of hell, the Christian fathers saw the necessity of separating themselves from these children of violence. They might be right politically-and certainly they began in patriotism-but too often the apprehensive consciences of Christians recoiled from the vengeance in which they ended. By tolerating the belief that they countenanced the Galileans or Sicarii, the primitive Church felt that she would be making herself a party to their actions-often bloody and vindictive, and sometimes questionable on any principles, since private enmities would too easily mingle with public motives, and if right, would be right in an earthly sense. But the persecution which arose at Jerusalem would strengthen these conscientious scruples by others of urgent prudence. A sect that proselytized was at any rate a hazardous sect in Judæa; and a sect that had drawn upon itself persecution must have felt a triple summons to the instant assumption of a disguise.

Upon this warning, we may suppose, arose the secret society of the Essenes ; and its organization was most artful. In fact, the relations of Judaism to Christianity furnished a means of concealment such as could not have otherwise existed without positive deceit. By arranging four concentric circles about one mysterious centreby suffering no advances to be made from the outside to the innermost

ring but through years of probation, through multiplied trials of temper, multiplied obligations upon the conscience to secrecy, the Christian fathers were enabled to lead men onwards insensibly from intense Judaic bigotry to the purest form of Christianity. The outermost circle received those candidates only whose zeal for rigorous Judaism argued a hatred of pagan corruptions, and therefore gave some pledge for religious fervour. In this rank of novices no ray of light broke out from the centre-no suspicion of any alien doctrine dawned upon them: all was Judaic, and the whole Mosaic theology was cultivated alike. This we will call the ultimate rank.

Next, in the penultimate rank, the eye was familiarized with the prophecies respecting the Messiah, and somewhat exclusively pointed to that doctrine, and such other doctrines in the Mosaic scheme as express an imperfection, a tendency, a call for an integration. In the third, or antepenultimate rank, the attention was trained to the general characters of the Messiah, as likely to be realized in some personal manifestation; and a question was raised, as if for investigation, in what degree these characters met and were exemplified in the mysterious person who had so lately engaged the earnest attention of all Palestine. He had assumed the office of Messiah: he had suffered for that assumption at Jerusalem. By what evidences was it ascertained, in a way satisfactory to just men, that he was not the Messiah? Many points, it would be urged as by way of unwilling concession, did certainly correspond between the mysterious person and the prophetic delineation of the idea. Thus far no suspicion has been suffered to reach the disciple, that he is now rapidly ap proaching to a torrent that will suck him into a new faith. Nothing has transpired, which can have shocked the most angry Jewish fanaticism. And yet all is ready for the great transition. But at this point comes the last crisis for the aspirant. Under colour of disputing the claims of Christ, the disciple has been brought acquainted with the whole mystery of the Christian theory. If his heart is good and true, he has manifested by this time such a sense of the radiant beauty which has been gradually unveiled, that he reveals his own trustworthi

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If he retains his scowling bigotry, the consistory at the centre are warned, and trust him no farther. He is excluded from the inner ranks, and is reconciled to the exclusion (or, if not, is turned aside from suspicion) by the impression conveyed to him that these central ranks are merely the governing ranks,-highest in power, but not otherwise distinguished in point of doctrine.

Thus, though all is true from first to last, from centre to circumferencethough nothing is ever taught but the truth-yet, by the simple precaution of graduation, and of not teaching every where the whole truth-in the very midst of truth the most heavenly, were attained all the purposes of deceit the most earthly. The case was as though the colour of blue were a prohibited and a dangerous colour. But upon a suggestion that yellow is a most popular colour, and green tolerated, whilst the two extremes of blue and yellow are both blended and confounded in green, this last is selected for the middle rank; and then breaking it up by insensible degradations into the blue tints towards the interior, and the yellow towards the outermost rings, the case is so managed as to present the full popular yellow at the outside, and the celestial blue at the hidden centre.

Such was the constitution of the Essenes; in which, however, the reader must not overlook one fact, that, because the danger of Christianity as a religious profession was confined, during the epichristian age, to Judæa, therefore the order of the Essenes was confined to that region; and that in the extra-Syrian churches, the Christians of Palestine were known simply as the Brethren of Jerusalem, of Sepphoris, &c., without further designation or disguise. Let us now see, having stated the particular circumstances in which this disguise of a secret society called Essenes arose, what further arguments can be traced for identifying these Essenes with the Christians of Palestine.

We have already pursued the Essenes and the Christians through ten features of agreement. Now let us pursue them through a few others. And let the logic of the parallel be kept steadily in view: above, we show some characteristic reputed to be true of the Essenes; below, we show that this same characteristic is known

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from other sources to be true of the Christians.

No. I.-The Essenes, according to Josephus, were in the habit of prophesying.-The only prophets known in the days of the Apostles, and recognised as such by the Christian writers, Agabus for instance, and others, were Christians of the Christian brotherhood in Judæa.

"And it is but seldom," says Josephus, "they miss in their predic tions."-Josephus could not but have been acquainted with this prophecy of Agabus-too practical, too near, too urgent, too local, not to have rung throughout Judæa; before the event, as a warning; after it, as a great providential miracle. He must therefore have considered Agabus as one of those people whom he means by the term Essenes. Now we know him for a Christian. Ergo, here is a case of identity made out between a Christian, owned for such by the Apostles, and one of the Essenes.

No. II. The Essenes particularly applied themselves to the study of medicine. This is very remarkable in a sect like the Essenes, who, from their rigorous habits of abstinence, must of all men have had the least personal call for medicine: but not at all remarkable if the Essenes are identified with the Christians. For,

1. Out of so small a number as four Evangelists, one was a physicianwhich shows at least the fact that me dicine was cultivated amongst the Christians. But,

2. The reason of this will appear immediately in the example left by Christ, and in the motives to that example.

As to the example, at least nine in ten of Christ's miracles were medical miracles-miracles applied to derangements of the human system.

As to the motives which governed our Saviour in this particular choice, it would be truly ridiculous and worthy of a modern utilitarian, to suppose that Christ would have suf fered his time to be occupied, and the great vision of his contemplations to be interrupted, by an employment so trifling (trifling surely by comparison with his transcendant purposes) as the healing of a few hundreds, more or less, in one small district through one brief triennium. This heal office was adopted, not chiefly for

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minds; chiefly, however, as the indispensable means, in an eastern land, of advertising his approach far and wide, and thus convoking the people by myriads to his instructions. From Barbary to Hindostan - from the setting to the rising sun-it is notorious that no travelling character is so certainly a safe one as that of ha kim or physician. As he advances on his route, the news fly before him; disease is evoked as by the rod of Amram's son; the beds of sick people, in every rank, are ranged along the road-sides; and the beneficent dispenser of health or of relief moves through the prayers of hope on the one side, and of gratitude on the other. Well may the character be a protection; for not only is every invalid in the land his friend from the first, but every one who loves or pities an invalid. In fact, the character is too favourable, because it soon becomes burdensome; so that of late, in Affghanistan, Bokhara, &c., Englishmen have declined its aid-for inevitably it impedes a man's progress; and it exposes him to two classes of applications, one embarrassing from the extravagance of its expectations, (as that a man should understand doubtful or elaborate symptoms at a glance,) the other degrading to an Englishman's feelings, by calling upon him for aphrodisiacs or other modes of collusion with Oriental sensuality. This medical character the Apostles and their delegates adopted, using it both as the trumpet of summons to some central rendezvous, and also as the very best means of opening the heart to religious influences the heart softened already by suffering, turned inwards by solitary musing; or melted, perhaps, by relief from anguish, into fervent gratitude. This, upon consideration, we believe to have been the secret key to the Apostolic meaning in sending abroad the report that they 'cultivated medicine. They became what so many of us Englishmen have

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become in Oriental countries, hakims; and as with us, that character was assumed as a disguise for ulterior purposes that could not have been otherwise obtained *_our_purposes were liberal, theirs divine. Therefore we conclude our argument No. II. by saying, that this medical feature in the Essenes is not only found in the Christians, but is found radicated in the very constitution of that body, as a proselytizing order, who could not dispense with some excuse or other for assembling the people in crowds.

No. III. The Essenes think that oil is a defilement. So says Josephus, as one who stood in the outermost rank of the order-admitted to a knowledge of some distinctions, but never to the secret meaning upon which those distinctions turned. Now with respect to this new characteristic, what is our logical duty? It is our duty to show that the Essenes, supposing them to be the latent Christians, had a special motive for rejecting oil; whereas on any other assumption they had no such motive. And next, we will show that this special motive has sustained itself in the traditionary usages of a remote posterity.

First of all, then, how came the Jews ever to use oil at all for the purpose of anointing their persons s? It was adopted as a Grecian luxury, from their Grecian fellow-townsmen in cities without number, under the SyroMacedonian kings. Not only in Syria. proper, but in many other territories adjacent to Judæa, there were cities like the two Cæsareas, the maritime and the inland, which were divided between Greeks and Jews; from which equality of rights came feuds and dreadful calamities in the end, but previously a strong contagion of Grecian habits. Hence, in part, it arose that the Jews in our Saviour's time were far from being that simple people which they had been whilst insulated in gloomy seclusion, or whilst associated only with monotonous Oriental neighbours. Amongst other luxuries which they had caught from their Grecian neighbours were those of the

*"That could not have been otherwise obtained.”—One thing is entirely overlooked. Neither in Syria, nor any part of Asia Minor, of Achaia, &c., could the Apostles have called a general meeting of the people without instant liability to arrest as public disturbers. But the character of physicians furnished a privileged case, which operated as a summons, instant, certain, safe, uniformly intelligible to others, and without effort of their own.

bath and the palæstra. But, in Jerusalem, as the heart of Judea,** and the citadel of Jewish principle, some front of resistance was still opposed to these exotic habits. The language was one aid to this resistance; for elsewhere the Greek was gaining ground, whilst here the corrupted Hebrew prevailed. But a stronger repulsion to foreigners was the eternal gloom of the public manners. No games in Jerusalem -no theatre-no hippodrome; for all these you must go down to the sea-side, where Cæsarea, though built by a Jew, and half-peopled by Jews, was the Roman metropolis of Palestine, and with every sort of Roman luxury. To this stern Jerusalem standard all Jews conformed in the proportion of their patriotism; to Græcize or not to Græcize had become a test of patriotic feeling; and thus far the Essenes had the same general reasons as the Christians (supposing them two distinct orders of men) for setting their faces against the luxurious manners of the age. But if the Essenes were Christians, then we infer that they had a much stronger and a special motive to all kinds of abstinence, from the memorable charge of Christ to his evangelizing disciples; for which charge there was a double motive:-1st, To raise an ideal of abstinence; 2d, To release the disciple from all worldly cares, and concentrate his thoughts upon his duty. Now, the Essenes, if Christians, stood precisely in that situation of evangelizers.

Even thus far, therefore, the Essenes, as Christians, would have higher motives to abstinence than simply as a sect of Jews; yet still against oil, merely as a mode of luxury, their reasons were no stronger than against any luxury in any other shape. But a Christian of that day had a far more special restraint with regard to the familiar use of oil-not as a luxury, but as a consecrated symbol, he regarded it with awe-oil was to him under a perpetual interdict. The very name Christos, the anointed, gave in

one instant an inaugurating solemnity, a baptismal value, to the act of anointing. Christians bearing in their very name (though then, by the supposition, " a secret name") a record and everlasting memorial of that chrism by which their Founder was made the Anointed of God, thought it little consistent with reverential feelings to use that consecrated rite of anointing in the economy of daily life. They abstained from this Grecian practice, therefore, not as the ignorant Jew imagines, from despising it, but from too much revering it. The symbolic meaning overpowered and eclipsed its natural meaning; and they abstained from the unction of the palæstra just as any man amongst ourselves, the least liable to superstition, would (if he had any pious feeling at all) recoil from the use of sacramental vessels in a service of common household life.

After this explanation of our view, we shall hardly need to go forward in proof, that this sanctity of the oil and of the anointing act has sustained itself in traditionary usages, and propagated its symbolic meaning to a posterity far distant from the Essenes. The most solemn of the ceremonies in the coronation of Christian kings is a memorial of this usage so reverentially treated by the Essenes. The affecting rite by which a new-born stranger upon earth is introduced within the fold of the Christian Church, is but the prolongation of that ancient chrism. And so essential, in earlier ages, was the presence of the holy Judæan oil used by the first Christians, were it only to the amount of one solitary drop, that volumes might be collected on the exertions made for tending the trees which produced it, and if possible for multiplying or transplanting them. Many eastern travellers in our own day, have given the history of those consecrated trees, and their slow declension to the present moment; and to this hour, in our London bills of mortality, there is one subdivision headed, "Chrysom children,"† which echoes

"As the heart of Judea."-It was an old belief amongst the Jews, upon their ideas of cosmography, that Judæa was the central region of the earth, and that Jerusalem was the omphalos or navel of Judæa-an idea which the Greeks applied to Delphi.

* 66 Chrysom children."-Tell a child of three years old to pronounce the word helm; nine times out of ten it will say helom from the imperfection of its organs. By this mode

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