We can therefore perfectly understand how the Sadducees hated and persecuted the apostles, and how the orthodox Pharisees were disposed to hail them as auxiliaries against the common enemy. And Sadduceeism was at that time in full power and arrogance, exercising intolerable tyranny. Herod the Great, having fallen in love with Mariamne, daughter of a certain Simon, son of Boethus of Alexandria, desired to marry her, and saw no other means of ennobling his father‐in‐law than by elevating him to the office of high‐priest (B.C. 28). This intriguing family maintained possession of the high‐priesthood for thirty‐five years. It was like the Papacy in the house of Tusculum, or the primacy of the Irish Church in that of the princes of Armagh. Closely allied to the reigning family, it lost its hold of the high‐priesthood on the deposition of Archelaus, but recovered it in A.D. 42. This family, called Boethusim, formed a sacerdotal nobility, filling all the offices of trust and emolument about the Temple, very worldly, supremely indifferent to their religious duties, and defiantly sceptical. They were Sadducees, denying angel, and devil, and resurrection; living in easy self‐indulgence; exasperating the Pharisees by their heresy, grieving the Essenes by their irreligion. In the face of the secularism of the ecclesiastical rulers, the religious zeal of the people was sure to break out in some form of dissent. John the Baptist was the St. Francis of Assisi, the Wesley of his time. If the Baptist was not actually an Essene, he was regarded as one by the indiscriminating public eye, never nice in detecting minute dogmatic differences, judging only by external, broad resemblances of practice. The ruling worldliness took alarm at his bold denunciations of evil, and his head fell. Jesus of Nazareth seemed to stand forth occupying the same post, to be the mouthpiece of the long‐brooding discontent; and the alarmed party holding the high‐priesthood and the rulership of the Sanhedrim compassed his death. To the Sadducean Boethusim, who rose into power again in A.D. 42, Christianity was still obnoxious, but more dangerous; for by falling back on the grand doctrine of Resurrection, it united with it the great sect of the Pharisees.