had imagined it to be: and he had imagined it very wonderful indeed. But
there was a certain native shrewdness in Joseph; and after leaving the
High Priest's place he had not taken many steps before he began to see
through Hanan's plans: which no doubt are laid with the view to impress
me with the magnificence of Jerusalem and its priesthood. He walked a
few yards farther, and remembered that there are always dissensions
among the Jews, and that the son of a rich man (one of first-rate
importance in Galilee) would be a valuable acquisition to the priestly
caste.

But though he saw through Hanan's designs, he was still the dupe of
Hanan, who was a clever man and a learned man; his importance loomed up
very large, and Joseph could not be without a hero, true or false; so it
could not be otherwise than that Hanan and Kaiaphas and the Sadducees,
whom Joseph met in the Sanhedrin and whose houses he frequented,
commanded his admiration for several months and would have held it for
many months more, had it not been that he happened to be a genuinely
religious man, concerned much more with an intimate sense of God than
with the slaying of bullocks and rams.

He had accepted the sacrifices as part of a ritual which should not be
questioned and which he had never questioned: yet, without discussion,
without argument, they fell in his estimation without pain, as naturally
as a leaf falls. A friend quoted to him a certain well-known passage in
Isaiah, and not the whole of it: only a few words; and from that moment
the Temple, the priests and the sacrifices became every day more
distasteful to him than they were the day before, setting him pondering
on the mind of the man who lives upon religion while laughing in his
beard at his dupe; he contrasted him with the fellow that drives in his
beast for slaughter and pays his yearly dole; he remembered how he loved