The same author indicates the Essenes as cherishing these beliefs: “Deriving their tenets from the East, they believed in the Persian dualism, regarded the sun as the impersonation of the Supreme Light, and worshipped it in a modified way.” He adds: “To the sect of the Essenes the originals of John the Baptist and Jesus must have belonged.” “We may possess a trustworthy account of the spirit that was in Jesus,” he says again, “and yet be altogether in the dark respecting his precise sayings and doings. The condition of the world at this period being such as I have described, it was inevitable that any impressive personality whose career enabled such things, with however small a modicum of truth, to be predicated of it as were predicated of Jesus, should be seized upon and appropriated to the purposes of a new religion.... “For the masses the spectacle of an heroic crusade against the authority, respectability, and pharisaism of an established ecclesiasticism, combined with complete self-devotion, with teaching of the most absolute perfection in morals—a perfection readily recognizable by the intuitive perceptions of all—and with a confident mysticism that seemed to imply unbounded supernatural knowledge—_all characteristics of the sect of Essenes to which he and the Baptist manifestly belonged_,—these were amply sufficient to win belief in Jesus as a divine personage. And especially so when they found him persistently reported not only as having performed miracles in his life, but as having shown that traditional superiority to all the limitation of humanity which was ascribed to their previous divinities by rising from the dead and ascending into heaven. Familiar as they were with the notion of incarnations in which the sun played a principal part, and accustomed to associate such events with virgin mothers impregnated by deities, births in stables or caves, hazardous careers in the exercise of benevolence, violent deaths, and descents into the kingdom of darkness, resurrections and ascensions into heaven, to be followed by the descent of blessings upon mankind,—it required but the suggestion that Jesus of Nazareth was a new and nobler incarnation of the Deity, who had so often before been incarnate and put to death for man’s salvation, to transfer to him the whole paraphernalia of doctrine and rite deemed appropriate to the office.”