What added gall to bitterness with the Jews was that, from the time of the captivity in Babylon and Persia, from five to seven centuries before Christ, they had not known a national, safe, stable government of their own. There were more Jews in Egypt and Asia Minor than in Palestine. Faction had followed faction; revolution had followed revolution till the Chosen People were the prey to any conqueror from Egypt to Persia; and so there grew up the hope of a Redeemer, a Messiah, a royal son of the line of David, to throw off the conqueror’s yoke and lead them to victory. Such a Messiah, the prophets and the scrolls of the prophets foretold. A Sadducee might be a bigoted sceptical materialist, but when he heard the scrolls of the seers of 500 to 700 B.C. read, predicting exactly what had happened to Babylonia and Assyria and Persia and Greece, the agnostic Sadducee was not prepared to deny there might be a Messiah. Somehow, in the modern mind, the Pharisee is held in lower esteem than the Sadducee. The Pharisee was a gentle and, it might be, attudinizing self-conscious poseur; but he was a scholar, and he was liberal, and he was a gentleman. The Sadducee was a hard, ignorant, materialistic bigot. He swore by Moses, but denied a future life and set himself to grasp all the good things of this life within reach, and had at the time of Christ’s death captured the best sinecures among the offices of the high priests and council of seventy. He hated the Roman with a bigoted, materialistic hatred, though he played politics with him for his own job. The disappointment of both Sadducees and Pharisees at a poor Nazarene named Jesus, calling himself the Messiah and gaining an enormous following, flamed into delirious fanatic frenzy; and just then rose the Zealots and Sicarii (short sword fighters) shouting “freedom at any cost” and rallying all Jews in the Passover of spring—when more than two million pilgrims visited the Holy City—to rise and throw off the Roman yoke. The city gates were shut. The citizens inside had no choice but to join the rebels, or let themselves down by ropes from the walls at night and flee for the desert; but many citizens, knowing the power of Rome and having all their means invested in Jerusalem, tried to compromise. They were plundered, tortured, murdered. Women and children were held for ransom, or hostages for the loyalty of the waverers; and the rebellion that had flamed up in the name of “freedom” presently ran lawless riot under an ægis better named “folly”; and for seven months the Holy City was ruled by brute-beast crime and anarchy. If the Sadducees and the Pharisees had intrigued with the rebellion at first, they were now trapped in their own intrigue, for they saw their temple chests rifled of the revenues of almost a century, the gold sheathing ripped from the great pillars and colonnades, the holy wine brought from vault and cellar and poured out, mingled with human blood, in a deluge