ised among these returned exiles, as marked
as their faith in God. They were especially tenacious of the laws and
ceremonies that Moses had commanded. They kept the Sabbath with a
strictness unknown to their ancestors. They preserved the traditions of
their fathers, and conformed to them with scrupulous exactness; they
even went beyond the requirements of Moses in outward ceremonials. Thus
there gradually arose among them a sect ultimately known as the
Pharisees, whose leading peculiarity was a slavish and fanatical
observance of all the technicalities of the law, both Mosaic and
traditional; a sect exceedingly narrow, but popular and powerful. They
multiplied fasts and ritualistic observances as the superstitious monks
of the Middle Ages did after them; they extended the payment of tithes
(tenths) to the most minute and unimportant things, like the herbs which
grew in their gardens; they began the Sabbath on Friday evening, and
kept it so rigorously that no one was permitted to walk beyond one
thousand steps from his own door.

A natural reaction to this severity in keeping minute ordinances, alike
narrow, fanatical, and unreasonable, produced another sect called the
Sadducees,--a revolutionary party with a more progressive spirit, which
embraced the more cultivated and liberal part of the nation; a minority
indeed,--a small party as far as numbers went,--but influential from the
men of wealth, talent, and learning that belonged to it, containing as
it did the nobility and gentry. The members of this party refused to
acknowledge any Oral Law transmitted from Moses, and held themselves
bound only by the Written Law; they were indifferent to dogmas that had
not reason or Scriptures to support them. The writings of Moses have
scarcely any recognition of a future life, and hence the Sadducees
disbelieved in the resurrection of the dead,--for which reason the
Pharisees accused them of looseness in religious opinions. They were
more courteous and interesting than the great body of the people who
favored the Pharisees, but were more luxurious in their habits of life.
They had more social but less religious pride than their rivals, among
whom pride took the form of a gloomy austerity and a self-satisfied
righteousness.

Another thing pertaining to divine worship which marked the Jews on
their return from captivity was the establishment of synagogues, in
which the law was expounded by the Scribes, whose business it was to
stu