When the worship of Jehovah was restored to its rights and external religious pressure ceased, the place of the former sects, the heathenising Hellenists and the orthodox Chasidees (Assideans), was taken by the Sadducees and Pharisees, two schools of religious brotherhoods which followed the same tendencies, only with less roughness and without violent means of conversion. The Sadducees, named after their founder Zadok, made the attempt “in teaching and precept to amalgamate the Greek wisdom of the time with the Jewish nature, not in order to destroy the latter, but to uplift and advance it.” Consisting of the wealthier and more aristocratic part of the people, they aimed at greater freedom in life and thought, put a less strict construction upon the Mosaic Law and tried to bring it more into harmony with Greek customs, teachings, and mode of thought. Under the influence of Greek philosophy they took the ground that there is no higher fate which unalterably predestines all human affairs, and especially that God neither does evil nor controls it; that good and evil, human weal and woe, depend solely upon man’s own choice, and upon his knowledge or his ignorance. A further step brought them to the denial of immortality and eternal reward, as well as of the actual existence of angels and spirits. In contrast to the Sadducees were the Pharisees (_i.e._, “the particular”), who claimed to be distinguished from others by their greater piety. They originated in the ranks of the Chasidees (“the pious”), and held strictly to the law and the prophets. But they regarded with greatest care and solicitude the letter and the wording of the law, and thus through arbitrary and forced interpretation, they produced a great mass of directions, commandments, and petty definitions of external sanctimoniousness, upon the observation of which they set great value. In this way they fell into hypocrisy and mock holiness. Acting on the principle: “Build a fence about the law,” they saw in the restriction and limitation of action a sign of orthodox piety. “Driven by ambition, and more or less consciously indulging their own selfishness, the Pharisees made piety a kind of trade, in order by it to gain permanent power.” They wore certain signs, _e.g._, little rolls on arm or neck inscribed with words from the sacred law; and they sought by the “appearance of piety” to draw the people to them. “Living poor in the sight of the world, many of them, nevertheless, did not despise the treasures and pleasures of the world.”