They were practical communists in the largest sense of the word, for they had no separate or individual interests, and held all things in common; they were industrious, quiet, orderly, and free from every kind of vice practised in ordinary society; they held solitude and celibacy in high esteem. Some say they allowed no marriages or sexual intercourse in their society; but this is doubted. They allowed no change of raiment till necessity required; they abstained from wine and other fermented liquors; they were not permitted to eat but with their own sect, and then a certain portion of food was served out to each person, of which they partook together after solemn ablutions. It is, no doubt, the similarity of many of these practices to those of some of the early Christians, and of the Therapeutæ in particular, that has led some Roman Catholic divines, and also some philosophic writers, to speak of the Essenes as of a Christian sect. Were the supposition of these writers correct, history would in that case be without one single testimony to show that the theory or practice of the equality of human rights was known to any ancient people on earth, Jew or Gentile, before the propagation of the Gospel. We believe, however, that the supposition is without foundation. We believe the Essenes were a Jewish, not a Christian sect. We believe their sect was anterior to Christ, and even to John the Baptist. We believe it consisted of ardent Jews, who, inflamed by the pious, fervid, and truly democratic outpourings of Nehemiah and others of their prophets, and disgusted by the manner in which they saw all Moses’s laws in favour of the poor set aside by the scribes and Pharisees of their day, to the profit of usurers and land-monopolisers, resolved, in the language of their own Scripture, to “come out from amongst them and be separate;” and that, accordingly, in the words of Dr. Neander, they were “distinguished from the mass of ordinary Jews in this--that they knew and loved something higher than the outward ceremonial and a dead faith--that they really did strive after holiness of heart and inward communion with God.” We believe moreover, that, instead of owing their origin to Christianity, Christianity in a great measure owed its early progress and successes to the Essenes; and that the Therapeutæ, with whom they have been confounded, were but an offshoot of their society, which subsequently engrafted itself upon a Christian stock. With these considerations we hold it to be an established fact that the Essenes do constitute a veritable exception, but the only solitary one recorded in all history, of any people, before Christ’s advent, repudiating the doctrine and practice of human slavery. This singular exception, if it be one, proves two things worthy of every serious man’s notice. One is, that if we are not indebted to Christianity for the first or earliest repudiation of human slavery, we are indebted for it to the purest