must be confessed, of a regard to the duties which man owes to society. The influences arising from this system of religious philosophy, so novel to the Semitic races, were tardy is making themselves felt upon the Hebrews, but they became gradually apparent. The doctrine of a future life with rewards and punishments, doubtless derived from Chaldean and Mazdean sources during the Captivity and under the Persian Empire, slowly made its way, and though opposed by the aristocratic conservative party in power—the Tsadukim or Sadducees (descendants of Zadoc, or just men)—it became one of the distinctive dogmas of the Beth Sopherim or House of Scribes, composed of religious teachers, trained in all the learning of the day, sprung from the people, and eager to maintain their nationality against the temporizing policy of their rulers.[12] At the breaking out of the Maccabean revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes we find the nation divided into two factions, the Sadducees, disposed rather to submit to the Hellenizing tyranny of Antioch, and the Chassidim (the Assideans of the Authorized Version), democratic reformers, ready for innovation and prepared to die in defence of their faith. In the triumph of the Hasmonean revolution they obtained control of the state, and in the development of the Oral Law by the scribes, supplementing the Torah or Written Law, they engrafted permanently their doctrines upon the ancestral belief. With the tenet of spiritual immortality, there followed as a necessary consequence the subordination of the present existence to life hereafter, which is the direct incentive to asceticism. The religious exaltation of the stormy period which intervened between the liberation from Antioch and the subjugation to Rome afforded a favorable soil for the growth of this tendency, and rendered the minds of the devout accessible to the influences both of Eastern and of Western speculation. How powerful eventually became the latter upon the Alexandrian Jews may be estimated from the mysticism of Philo. With their triumph over Antioch, the name of the Chassidim disappears as that of an organized party, and in its place we find those of two factions or sects—the Perushim (Pharisees) or Separatists, who maintained an active warfare, temporal and theological, with the Sadducees, and the Essenes, mystics, who bound themselves by vows, generally including the Nazirate, and withdrew from active life for the benefit of spiritual growth and meditation.