Presently a new Reformer appeared upon the worldly stage. The Hebrew code had long before his day begun to decline; for forms of faith, being but earthly things, are subject to that eternal law which to every beginning pre-creates and ordains an end. Its decay was hastened by political convulsions. The captivity of the Jews had supplied them with a multitude of new and strange articles of belief derived from their Pagan masters. Hence arose heresies and schisms, which further weakened the ancient edifice, tottering as it was from the effects of age, from the new creed-wants of the people, and from the shocks of the passing events. The Sadducees, adhering to the letter, rejected the spirit of the Books of Moses. Pharisaic superstition founded upon tradition--that earthy alloy ever added to the pure ores of heavenly revelation--was fast undermining the temple of Judaism. Idolatry had perished by slow degrees out of the land; but the contrary extreme, bibliolatry, to use a modern word, sown upon the wide ground of priestly pride and castish prejudice, had spread rankly over the world of Judaism. To clear away this poison growth, to reform the people of Israel, Jesus of Nazareth began his ministry. A man of humble fortune, but of proud birth, the Founder of Christianity preached a creed in conformity with his circumstances. His tenets were the Essene, the third sect of philosophizing Jews. “While the Pharisees were heaping traditions upon the original structure of the Mosaic system, and the Sadducees were rigidly preserving and adhering to the simplicity of that structure, the Essene gave their whole mind to the ascertainment and realization of its moral import.” They were thus the Sufis, the Spiritualists, and the Gnostics of Judaism. They abounded most at Alexandria, then the grand centre where the Greek and the Roman, the Indian and the Persian, met the Arab and the Egyptian. A species of anchorite philosophers, they called themselves physicians of souls and bodies; they lived in voluntary poverty, rigid chastity, and implicit obedience to the civil power; they were purists in language, non-resistants, and haters of political action.