that the body of the returned exiles retained the old clan organisation; and, however this system may have been broken down by the individualising spirit among scribes and priests, there can be little doubt that the Hebrew village community not only lasted far on into Roman times, but (as the Russian Mir to the contemporary communism of Russian reformers) supplied a constant model of social reform and an ideal of Hebrew brotherhood which only needed the touch of the Greek spirit to become cosmopolitan. Such an effort at social reform may be seen in the Essenes, a sect which, retiring from the outward ceremonial of the temple, practised community of property. Josephus, in a peculiarly interesting chapter of his Wars of the Jews,[1] gives us an account of this remarkable sect, which shows that it united the character of social reformers with the deepest personal morality. Basing their social reforms on a return to clan communism—"those who come to them," says Josephus, "must let what they have be common to the whole order, insomuch that among them all there is no appearance of poverty or excess of riches, but every one's possessions are intermingled with every other's, and so there is, as it were, one patrimony among all the brethren"—the Essenes in their conception of the soul and their self-discipline were culturists in the highest sense of the word. "Their doctrine," Josephus observes, "is that bodies are corruptible, and that the matter they are made of is not permanent; but that the souls are immortal and continue for ever, and that they come out of the most subtle air, and are united to their bodies as in prisons, but that when they are set free from the bonds of the flesh they then, as released from a long bondage, rejoice and mount upward." The resemblance
- ↑ Bk. ii. ch. viii.
