(g) In morals they seem to have attained no ordinary excellence. Over anger they kept a guard like just stewards. All the passions they knew how to restrain. They were eminent for fidelity and ministers of peace. Their word was more to be trusted than some men's oaths.
(h) The great aim of their inquiries, whether they searched the books of the ancients or studied the virtues of plants, was to gather such lessons of wisdom as might render them able to administer, like skillful physicians, to the maladies both of the mind and the body.
(i) They had no slaves; all were free, serving one another. They repudiated lordships as un just, as destructive of natural equality, as irre ligious, as opposed to the laws of nature. Na ture they held to be the common mother and instructress of all, and with them all men were brethren, not in name, hut in reality.
Thus, while they were careful to preserve a practical subordination in their communities, without which social existence is an impossibility, those who were highest amongst them held office merely for the common good, and in themselves were neither richer nor better clad than others, nor had they any political power.
(j) Pain they disregarded; the miseries of life they held of small account, and they even pre ferred death to living always.
The calm and unmoved firmness with which they endured at the hands of the Romans, during `the Jewish war,' the cruelest tortures, and death itself, rather than be faithless to their convictions or forswear their order, serves to show that the ascetic spirit and the martyr spirit have no little in common, and exhibits within the limits of Palestine the very same results, from the very same discipline, as Sparta was proud to call her own.
(k) With their ascetic notions it was natural they should disregard the body, and the usual care which, especially among the ancients, was taken of it. Accordingly they considered oil a defilement, and if any one was anointed contrary to his will the body was carefully cleansed.
J. R. B.
Besides Josephus and Philo, the reader may consult Schurer Jewish Pcop., div. ii, vol. ii : Igo ff.: Edersheim, Lifc and Times of the Mes siah, ii :329. ff.