TEACHING OF ST. PAUL
63
Essene. Marriage was to him an abomination. Those Essenes who lived together as members of an order, and in whom the principles of the sect were carried to their logical consequences, eschewed it altogether. To secure the continuance of their brotherhood they adopted children, whom they brought up in the doctrines and practices of the community. There were others however who took a different view. They accepted marriage, as necessary for the preservation of the race. Yet even with them it seems to have been regarded only as an inevitable evil. They fenced it off by stringent rules, demanding a three years probation and enjoining various purificatory rites. The conception of marriage, as quickening and educating the affections and thus exalting and refining human life, was wholly foreign to their minds. Woman was a mere instrument of temptation in their eyes, deceitful, faithless, selfish, jealous, misled and misleading by her passions."[1]
The theological speculations of the Essenes appear to have conformed to the general type which, at a somewhat later period, became known as Gnostic, and their opinions tended to find practical expression in ascetic severity.
"If," concludes the Bishop, "the notices relating to these points do not always explain themselves, yet read in the light of the heresies of the Apostolic age, and in that of subsequent Judæo-Christianity, their bearing seems to be distinct enough; so that we should not be
- ↑ "Colossians," pp. 85, 86.
