ned from animal food, and lived on roots
and bread. They worked and ate in silence, and observed the Sabbath with
great precision. They were great students, and were rigid in morals, and
believed in immortality. They abhorred oaths, and slavery, and idolatry.
They embraced the philosophy of the Orientals, and supposed that matter
was evil, and that mind was divine. They were mystics who reveled in the
pleasures of abstract contemplation. Their theosophy was sublime, but
Brahminical. Practically they were industrious, ascetic, and devout--the
precursors of those monks who fled from the abodes of man, and filled the
solitudes of Upper Egypt and Arabia and Palestine, the loftiest and most
misguided of the Christian sects in the second and third centuries, But
the Essenes had no direct influence over the people of Judea like the
Pharisees and Sadducees, except in encouraging obedience and charity.

(M267) All these sects were in a flourishing state on the death of
Agrippa. Judea was henceforth to be ruled directly by Roman governors.
Cuspius Fadus, Tiberius Alexander, Ventidius Cumanus, Felix Portius,
Festus Albinus, and Gessius Florus successively administered the affairs
of a discontented province. Their brief administrations were marked by
famines and tumults. King Agrippa, meanwhile, with mere nominal power,
resided in Jerusalem, in the palace of the Asmonaean princes, which stood
on Mount Zion, toward the temple. Robbers infested the country, and
murders and robbery were of constant occurrence. High priests were set up,
and dethroned. The people were oppressed by taxation and irritated by
pillage. Prodigies, wild and awful, filled the land with dread of
approaching calamities. Fanatics alarmed the people. The Christians
predicted the ruin of the State. Never was a population of three millions
of people more discontented and oppressed. Outrage, and injustice, and
tumults, and insurrections, marked the doomed people. The governors were
insulted, and massacred the people in retaliation. Florus, at one time,
destroyed three thousand six hundred people, A.D. 66. Open war was
apparent to the more discerning, Agrippa in vain counseled moderation and
reconciliation, showing the people how vain resistance would be to the
overwhelming power of Rome, which had subdued the world; and that the
refusal of tribute, and the demolition of Roman fortifications, were overt
acts of war. But he talked to people doomed. Every day new causes o