James, "the Lord's brother," set an example of sanctity worthy of a high-priest. In fact, he assumed the position of a priest, and filled it with such austerity that he was called "the righteous." He tasted, says Hegesippus, neither wine nor strong drink; he ate nothing that had life; his hair was never shorn; his body was never anointed with oil, or bathed in water; his garments were of linen, never of wool; so perfect was he in all righteousness that, though no consecrated priest, he was permitted to enter the holy place behind the veil of the temple, and there he spent hours in intercession for the people, his knees becoming as hard as a camel's from contact with the stone pavement. To those who asked him the way to life, he replied: "Believe that Jesus is the Christ." When some dissenters protested against this declaration and asked him to retract it, he repeated it with stronger emphasis; when the malcontents who revered him, but would have none of his Messiah, raised a tumult and tried to intimidate him, he reiterated the statement, adding: "He sits in heaven, at the right hand of the Supreme power, and will come in clouds." For this testimony, says tradition, he laid down his life. The fellow-believers of James imitated him as closely as they could. They were proud of their descent from Abraham; they were tenacious of the privileges granted to the twelve tribes; they kept up their relation with the synagogue; they had faith in forms of observance; they revered the Sabbath; their trust in the literal efficacy of prayer was implicit; they were excessively jealous of intellectual activity outside of their narrow communion; their anticipations were confined to the restoration of Israel, and never wandered into the region of social improvement or moral progress; in general ethical and social culture they were not interested. They had no ecclesiastical establishment apart from the Jewish Church; no separate priesthood, no sacraments, no cultus, no rubric, no calendar, no liturgy. The validity of sacrifice they maintained, the doctrine of sacrifice possessing a deeper significance for them from the growing faith that their Lord was himself the paschal lamb, the shedding of whose blood purchased the remission of sins. Hence a special encouragement of the sacerdotal spirit, an exaggerated sense of the efficacy of blood, a theory of atonement more searching and absolute than had prevailed in the ancient church. The later doctrine of atonement in the christian church may have grown from this small but vital germ.