How deeply was the Gentile world sunk in wild and cruel superstition, when the Great Prophetic Spirit and the Disperser of that Egyptian darkness, which hung over it, repeated or wrote down those first words of light for the spiritual no less than the material creation! Assuredly he had in view thereby a new genesis for his people--a new life and a new beginning of light. Then followed fifteen centuries of probation. And what was this long period but one ceaseless though alternating struggle between light and darkness? At the end of it, in spite of its great and noble gifts and superior knowledge, the whole nation had fallen into the lowest depths of luxury and corruption, on the one hand a prey to the wilder passions, on the other spiritually dead and rotten. But, the shadow of its former self, it dragged on a miserable existence, oppressed by a foreign yoke and torn by intestine sects and parties. The one claiming to be the only legal sect (and as concerned the letter of the law, and the outward ritual, it was so in fact), and arrogant and obstinate, closely adhering to the dead letter, was widely estranged and alienated from the spirit of love and mildness. And thus the very name of Pharisee has become odious and hateful, having passed into a proverb and a by-word. Wholly mistaking the meaning of the revelation imparted to them, they misunderstood the future to which it referred, no less than the immediate fortunes of their nation and their own condition. Consequently they went totally wrong in the interpretation of the former, as well as of the problem of the present which was laid before them. For they took it in the narrow and perverted spirit of party. No doubt the Pharisees reckoned among their members many truly pious, well-disposed, and right-thinking individuals--men, who in the beginning of the new era of the world, as appeals from the simple history of those times, acknowledged the truth, and recognized the hand of God pointing and leading onward to the future. These men mourned in silence over the revolting pride and stiffneckedness of their cotemporaries. But though endued with great learning and talents, and burning zeal for right and truth, they did not venture openly to oppose and to teach differently from their brethren, even because in reality the law, the dead and external law, was on their side. But the other party was that of the Sadducees. Quite different in principle, these were the innovators among the Jews. Explaining away the theological creed of their nation, they went so far in this direction as to throw into shade, and to question, or, rather, absolutely to deny, the immortality of the soul. In civil matters and questions of law and policy, they were the liberal free-thinkers of their day.