We have said that in the pre-Maccabæan era the tendencies which in later years had the effect of calling into existence two antagonistic parties were already present; we have also said that the Jews _as a whole_ were more or less imbued with the Hellenistic spirit; let us explain our meaning a little more fully. Not all the Jews at this period were Hellenistically inclined, though the bulk were, and the _influence_ was more or less upon all; but there was a minority of the nation which had followed in the wake of those who since the time of Ezra and Nehemiah had clung tenaciously to a rigid observance of the Law; not that they were wholly uninfluenced by the Hellenistic spirit, any more than the more thorough-going Hellenistic Jews as a body were really disloyal to the Law. This minority consisted of those who were called the “Pious ones,” or _Chassidim_[128]; it was connected with the Scribes, for in the important passage, 1 Maccabees vii. 12-14, it is said: “And there were gathered together unto Alcimus and Bacchides a company of scribes, to seek for justice. And the Chassidim were the first among the children of Israel that sought peace of them....” It was the _Chassidim_ who in post-Maccabæan times developed into the distinct party of the Pharisees, the party of rigid orthodoxy, legalistic, exclusive, and narrow. Opposed, then, to the ideas of this minority were those who were led by the governing classes and the family of the High-Priest; men who were the friends of Hellenistic culture, and who were not legalistic in the sense that the _Chassidim_ were. These represented what in post-Maccabæan times became the Sadducæan party. It cannot, however, be too strongly insisted upon that, as already pointed out, in pre-Maccabæan times there was neither a Sadducæan nor a Pharisaic _party_. The great mass of the people, including many among the _Chassidim_, in these pre-Maccabæan times, was not ranged definitely on either one side or the other of those who represented the two tendencies just referred to; their main religious interest was Apocalyptic. We feel convinced that the evidence concerning the various religious thought-tendencies in pre-Maccabæan times, taken as a whole, supports M. Friedländer’s contention that “the great mass of the people, the multitudes (_Am-haarez_) remained before and after [i.e. of the Maccabæan struggle] under the spell of the Hellenistic spirit; and, as in the case of the ruling parties, they, too, had, also in post-Maccabæan times, their teachers and their ‘Pious’ ones. These teachers were the _Chassidim_ and the creators of the apocalyptic literature.”[129] These Apocalyptists, therefore, had this in common with the Pharisees that both were descended from the ‘Pious ones,’ or _Chassidim_; only, as Friedländer puts it, “whereas the Pharisees were the bodily descendants of the pre-Maccabæan ‘Pious ones,’ the Apocalyptists were their spiritual descendants; the former transformed the faithfulness