BIRTH LEGENDS 21 1

some of us blush at the very idea even of a legitimate
sexual union." The reasons for this feeling — which
often amounted to a repudiation of marriage, as a con-
tamination of the flesh — were many ; and we can infer
that they were already widely operative inside Judaism
before Christianity was heard of, from the fact that
most of the Essenes abjured marriage. In the time
of Josephus, when their numbers were dwindling,
their communion still numbered thousands of men,
all living a monkish life. Philo also describes a
similar society, in which women participated, called
the Worshippers, or Therapeutce, who had their head-
quarters at Alexandria, but ramified all round the
Mediterranean, no less among Jews than among
proselytes. These societies consisted of men and
women living in separate cells, but meeting together
on certain days for sacramental banquets, where
prayer and praise led up to a sort of communion in
bread and water, flesh and wine being excluded from
the holy repast. The women, says Philo, were all
virgins or widows. Within a few years of the cruci-
fixion, Paul's Epistles reveal a similar impulse at work
in the earliest Christian society of Corinth. It was
urged that a believer should not touch his wife.
