custom was, such lot should be preceded by prayer and confession of their faith1 on the part of the assembled priests. It was the first week in October 748 A.U.C,2 that is, in the sixth year before our present era, when ‘the course of Abia’3—the eighth in the original arrangement of the weekly service—was on duty in the Temple. True this, as indeed most of the twenty-four ‘courses’ into which the Priesthood had been arranged, could not claim identity, only continuity, with those whose names they