And early in the morning, all had gone up there from the dark alleys and from the fine houses, from the work-shops and from the public squares, leaving all their affairs, with the restless anxiety of those who hope for miracles, or revenge. The day-laborers had come, the weavers, the dyers, the cobblers, the woodworkers, all those who detested the swindlers, the stranglers, the shearers of poverty, traders who enriched themselves at the expense of indigence. Among the first had come the lamentable scum of the city, the dirty vermin-ridden prisoners of eternal beggary, with leprous scabs, with their sores uncared for, with their bones protruding through the skin to testify to their hunger. There had also come pilgrims from outside, those of Galilee, who had accompanied Jesus in His festal entrance; and with them Jews from the Syrian and Egyptian colonies, dressed in their best, like distant relatives who reappear every once in so often at the family home for a family festival. But there came up also, in groups of four or five, the Scribes and Pharisees. They were fraternal colleagues, fitting companions for each other. The Scribes were the Doctors of the Law; the Pharisees were the Puritans of the Law. Nearly all the Scribes were Pharisees, many Pharisees were Scribes. Imagine a professor adding religious pedantry to his doctoral pedantry; or a religious hypocrite provided also with the grave face of a casuistical pedagogue, and you will have the modern equivalent of a Pharisaical Scribe, or of a Pharisee who was also a Scribe. A Tartuffe with academic honors; an Academician, who is at the same time a religious hypocrite; a philosophizing Quaker, are other modern equivalents. These men therefore went up that morning to the Temple with much show of pride without and many evil intentions within. They came up proudly wrapped in their long cloaks, with their fringes fluttering, their chests thrown out, their eyes clouded, their eyebrows raised, with sneering mouths and quivering nostrils, with a step which announced their importance and the indignation felt by them, God’s privileged sheriffs. Jesus, in the midst of all these eyes turned on Him, waited for those men. It was not the first time that they had come about Him. How many discussions between Him and the provincial Pharisees had taken place here and there in the country! They were Pharisees who had demanded a sign from Heaven, a supernatural proof that He was the Messiah—because the Pharisees, unlike the skeptical Sadducees, sunk in legalized Epicureanism, believed in the imminent arrival of the Saviour.