Under the Herodian dominion, secured as it had been by the destruction of an illustrious royal house and the sacrifice of their bravest patriots, the sympathies of the people revolted from the throne to cluster for a time around the temple; but just as the dignity of the office of the high priest was rising in their estimation, successive nominations to it by the king and procurator of men odious to the good turned the tide in a different direction. The hierarchy was represented by the Sadducees, a party small in number and far from popular. Though wearing names of ancient and honoured families, they were obviously careless alike of the sanctuary and of the interests of the nation. Strict observers of the law of their Davidic ancestor, they rejected the prevalent interpretations of it, and all the new-fangled doctrines concerning angels and spirits, and the resurrection of the just, which had been formulated since the Exile. Especially opposed to the belief that the keeping of the law would procure for a man recompence in a future state, they held that the law must be kept to the letter just because it was God’s will, even though the soul died with the body. Their wealth and position as the aristocracy brought them into connection with the representatives of the great foreign powers of the times, whose manners and fashions they copied; but the nearer they drew to the Roman and Asmonean nobility the further they drew apart from the people whom they never pretended to love, and who, equally alienated, regarded them with similar dislike. Withdrawn from the temple, the affections of people were freely given to the synagogue leaders as the representatives and fosterers of the national ideals and hopes. In these days every small town had its synagogue, while in Jerusalem alone there were said to be four hundred and eighty. These were not only places of worship, but schools in which the Law was made the common possession of all without distinction, and also arenas for exciting discussion, in which was nursed that love of dialectics to which so many striking analogies exist both in India and Greece. They were dominated by the Scribes, the sole copiers for the ever increasing synagogues of the ancient Scriptures, and the true interpreters of the law. Pedantic and self-important though they generally were, they were revered so by the people for their piety and gifts that from them were chiefly selected the members of the court of the Sanhedrim, which represented all that was left to the nation of executive power. Their Cabbala, revealing the secret doctrines to be found in names, of which we have specimens in the writings of St. Paul,[120] and the mystic significance of numbers, of which we have traces in the Apocalypse, may be only interesting now as curiosities, but we must never forget that they rendered undying service to the world in preserving from corruption, by many arts carefully studied and applied, the texts of Holy Scripture.[121]