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properly belonging to the Messiah; and many that, either through this difference of original views, or from imperfect acquaintance with the life of Jesus, doubted whether he was indeed the promised Messiah. Even John the Baptist doubted that, and his question upon that point addressed to Christ himself, Art thou he who should come, or do we look for another?' has been generally fancied singularly at war with his own earlier testimony,' Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world!' But it is not. The offices of mysterious change for Israel were prophetically announced as coming through a series and succession of characters-Elias, 'that prophet,' and the Messiah. The succession might even be more divided. And the Baptist, who did not know himself to be Elias, might reasonably be in doubt (and at a time when his career was only beginning) whether Jesus were the Messiah.

"Now, out of these mixed elements-men in every stage and gradation of belief or spiritual knowledge, but all musing, pondering, fermenting in their minds-all tempest-shaken, sorrow-haunted, perplexed, hoping, seeking, doubting, trusting-the apostles would see abundant means for peopling the lower or initiatory ranks of their new society. Such a craving for light from above probably never existed. The land was on the brink of convulsions, and all men felt it. Even among the rulers in

Jerusalem had been some who saw the truth of Christ's mission, though selfish terrors had kept back their testimony. From every rank and order of men would press in the meditative to a society where they would all receive sympathy, whatever might be their views, and many would receive light.

"This society-how was it constituted? In the innermost class were placed, no doubt, all those, and those only, who were thoroughly Christians. The danger was from Christianity. And this danger was made operative only, by associating with the mature and perfect Christian any false brother, any half-Christian, any hypocritical Christian, any wavering Christian. To meet this danger, there must be a winnowing and a sifting of all candidates. And because the danger was awful, involving not one but many, not a human interest but a heavenly interest, therefore these winnowings and siftings must be many, must be repeated, must be soulsearching. Nay, even that will not suffice. Oaths, pledges to God as well as to man, must be exacted. All this the apostles did: serpents by experience, in the midst of their dove-like faith, they acted as wise stewards for God. They surrounded their own central consistory with lines impassable to treachery. Josephus, the blind Jew-blind in heart, we mean, and understanding, reporting a matter of which he had no comprehension, nor could have——

(for we could show to demonstration that, for a specific reason, he could not have belonged to the society)—even this man, in his utter darkness, telegraphs to us by many signals, rockets thrown up by the apostles, which come round and are visible to us, but unseen by him, what it is that the apostles were about. He tells us expressly that a preparatory or trial period of two years was exacted of every candidate before his admission to any order; that, after this probationary attendance is finished, 'they are parted into four classes;' and these classes, he tells us, are so severely separated from all intercommunion, that merely to have touched each other was a pollution that required a solemn purification. Finally, as if all this were nothing, though otherwise disallowing of oaths, yet in this, as in a service of God, oaths, which Josephus styles tremendous,' are exacted of each member, that he will reveal nothing of what he learns.

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"Who can fail to see, in these multiplied precautions for guarding what, according to Josephus, is no secret at all, nor anything approaching to a secret, that here we have a central Christian society, secret from necessity, cautious to excess from the extremity of the danger, and surrounding themselves in their outer rings by merely Jewish disciples, but those whose state of mind promised a hopeful soil for the solemn and affecting discoveries which awaited them in the higher states of their

progress? Here is the true solution of this mysterious society, the Essenes, never mentioned in any one record of the Christian generation, and that because it first took its rise in the necessities of the Epichristian generation. And if any man ask how they came to be traced to so fabulous an antiquity, the account now given easily explains that. Three authors only mention them-Pliny, Philo-Judæus, and Josephus. Pliny builds upon these last two, and other Jewish romancers. The last two may be considered as contemporaries. And all that they allege, as to the antiquity of the sect, flows naturally from the condition and circumstances of the outermost circle in the series of the classes. They were occupied exclusively with Judaism. And Judaism had, in fact, as we all know, that real antiquity in its people, and its rites, and its symbols, which these then uninitiated authors understand and fancy to have been meant of the Essenes as a philosophical sect."

Without accepting all the conclusions of De Quincey, we are obliged to admit that the society of the Essen had no little influence in giving to the organism of Christianity that peculiar form which we have seen it adopt in its most primitive period. The association, no doubt, exercised a salutary power over Jewish life and manners; and we discover in it what we have found in all other similar Orders, ancient or modern, an Ideal of Virtue, of Humanity,

of Charity, of Peace and Brotherhood, far above the prevailing thought of the age, and infinitely removed-we had almost said-from the practical life of the debased people among whom it flourished. Indeed the world has not yet risen to the height of its morality, nor accepted in its thoughts its sublime symbol of Peace. Coming into notice at the time it did, it served undoubtedly to prepare the way for the coming of HIM who alone could work out the redemption of man, make clear as noon the problem of human destiny, resolve all social and moral questions, and bring everlasting Peace to Man's suffering heart.

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