But good advice is seldom more than a luxury, and the history of the Jews was to centre about the strug gles between the two other tendencies which began during these years to show themselves so clearly. Indeed, the two hundred and fifty or three hundred years preceding the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus may be said to be filled with little else than the grad ual and unobserved triumph of legalism in the persons of the Pharisees over ritualism, whether in the persons of the Sadducees or of the nation as a whole.