Another lively illustration of the gulf which separated the two races is offered by the Greek games. These were introduced into Palestine by the Greek rulers and colonists, were adopted by the Hellenizing minority among the Jews themselves, and were denounced with horror by the Conservative majority. Nudity, in the eyes of the latter, was the colophon of shamelessness, while by the Greeks the discarding of false shame was regarded as one of the first steps to true civilisation. Thucydides mentions the athletic habit of racing perfectly naked as an index to the progress achieved by his country and as one of the things that marked off the Hellene from the Barbarian.[7] The Greeks were free from that morbid consciousness of sex which troubled the over-clothed Asiatics. Nor were they aware of that imaginary war between the spirit and the flesh which gave rise to the revolting self-torments of Eastern aspirants to heaven. The peculiar characteristics of the Hebrew mind found their supreme manifestation in the sect of the Essenes--the extreme wing of the Pharisaic phalanx. The strictness of the Pharisees was laxity when compared with the painful austerity of their brethren. The latter aimed at nothing less than a pitiless immolation of human nature to the demands of an ideal sanctity. Enamoured of this imaginary holiness, the Essenes disdained all the real comforts and joys of life. Their diet was meagre, their dwellings mean, their dress coarse. Colour and ornament were eschewed as Satanic snares. The mere act of moving a vessel, or even obedience to the most elementary calls of nature, on the Sabbath, was accounted a desecration of the holy day. Contact with unhallowed persons or objects was shunned by the Essenes as scrupulously as contact with an infected person or object is shunned by sane people in time of plague. They refused to taste food cooked, or to wear clothes made, by a non-member of the sect, or to use any implement that had not been manufactured by pure hands. Their life in consequence was largely spent in water. For whosoever was not an Essene was, in the eyes of these saints, a source of pollution. Thus godliness developed into misanthropy and cleanliness into a mania. Thus these holy men lived, turning away from the sorrows of the earth to the peace of an ideal heaven; deriving patience with the present from apocalyptic promises of future glory; and waiting for the day when the unrighteous would be smitten to the dust, the dead rise from their graves, and the just be restored to everlasting bliss under the rule of the Redeemer--the Son of Man revealed to the holy and righteous because they have despised this world and hated all its works and ways in the name of the Lord of Spirits. Celibacy, seclusion, communion of goods, distinctive garb, abstinence, discipline and self-mortification, ecstatic rapture, sanctimonious pride and prejudice--all these Oriental traits, gradually matured and subsequently rejected in