Enough, perhaps, has been said by way of general argument to show that Paul's version of Judaism is incorrect and defective. But it will be well, at this point, to indicate more particularly the evidence upon which I have maintained that Pharisaism is not the barren formalism that it is usually supposed to have been, nor the merely preparatory foil to Christianity, which is all that Paul could see in it.

There is first of all the general fact of the existence of the Jewish people in unswerving loyalty to the Torah, and in the faith and practice of the religion founded upon it—an existence and a loyalty maintained through centuries of bitter persecution at the hands of Christians. It is simply impossible that such a result could have been produced, if the religion, by which its adherents lived and for which they died, had been a soulless hypocrisy, a pious sham, or a futile delusion. If such could have been the case, then what better guarantee is there for the truth and worth of the faith for which Christian saints and martyrs have died and heroes fought? A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit. And if the fruit be good, then, in the one case as in the other, the tree must be good. No adverse opinion of the Judaism which has suffered and survived, and which, be it remembered, is the Judaism of the Pharisees, can be justified in face of the witness of Israel to the faith once delivered to its saints.

There is further to be considered the fact that before the time of Paul, and indeed ever since, the Pharisees had for their spiritual nourishment the Scriptures of the Old Testament, including the prophecies and the Psalms. The study of these, and the constant use of them in the Synagogue, would have been uncongenial to men whose one concern was for hair-splitting casuistry, and would either have been discontinued or reduced to an unintelligent formality. It was neither. The Scriptures were the constant study of the Pharisee; and the worship of the Synagogue derived much of its power to minister to the needs of the worshippers, through its close dependence on the devotional outpourings of the Psalms, and the prayers which embodied the spirit of them. The Pharisee never for a moment thought that he was growing aloof from the Prophets and Psalmists of the older time; and while in the Torah, written and unwritten, he believed he had a fuller and more detailed knowledge of what God had revealed, it was still the revelation of the same God who had spoken to Abraham, who had shown His power by the Red Sea and on Sinai, who had inspired the Prophets and been praised in the Psalms. There may be legitimate regret that Israel cut itself off from all knowledge of and contact with the great literatures of Greece and Rome, and so missed the salutary influence of variety of thought. The Pharisees chose their own line deliberately in this matter; and when they saw what came of Hellenism, they might well feel that they had chosen rightly. But whether or not, if they did keep out the great Gentile literature—the "external books," as they called them,—they most certainly did "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" their own. And a religion that has absorbed into itself the ideas of the Hebrew Scriptures, a religion whose springs have been continually fed from that source, and whose ruling purpose was to serve and glorify the God revealed in those Scriptures, cannot have been, and assuredly was not, the hard and narrow formalism which its opponents have declared it to be.

These considerations have weight as evidence of what Pharisaism really was; and their weight has by no means been sufficiently taken into account; indeed, it has been ignored altogether in the commonly accepted estimates of the character of Pharisaism. Strong, however, as such general evidence is, I will further strengthen it by reference to the utterances of Pharisees themselves, taken from their own literature. And, out of many that I might choose, I will take such as bear more particularly upon the points raised in the strictures of Paul.

First, I will take the Pharisaic doctrine[14] of repentance and restoration, because it is on this that the antagonism of Paul is most pronounced, and the injury done by his method of treatment most serious. There is not in the Rabbinical literature a strict and clearly defined theological doctrine of repentance and restoration; but there is a general belief that the way of repentance is always open, by which a sinner may come back to God, and that God will forgive that sinner simply because he has repented. I will illustrate this by a few quotations from Rabbinical, that is, Pharisaical works.

In the Pesikta de R. Cahana (p. 165ª ed. Buber) the following occurs:—"The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Jeremiah (the prophet), 'Go and say to Israel, Repent.' He went and said to Israel ('Repent'). They said to him, 'Master, how can we repent? With what face can we come before God? Have we not angered him? Have we not provoked him? Those mountains and hills upon which we have worshipped false gods, are they not still standing?' Jeremiah came before the Holy One, blessed be He, and told Him. He answered, 'Go and say to them, If ye come to me, is it not to your Father in Heaven that ye come? For I have been a father unto Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn.'"

Again, in the same work (p. 163^b) R. Eleazar says: "It is the custom in the world that a man will insult his neighbour publicly, and afterwards seek to be reconciled to him. The other will say to him, 'Thou didst insult me publicly, and wouldst be reconciled between me and thee (i.e. privately). Go and bring those in whose presence thou didst insult me, and I will be reconciled to thee.' But the Holy One, blessed be He, doeth not so; but though a man stand and revile and blaspheme him in the open street, the Holy One says to him, 'Repent between thee and me, and I will receive thee.'"

A story is told (b. A. Zar. 17ª) of a man who was a particularly gross sinner, and who in the midst of his sins was struck with terror and remorse when it was said to him "Eleazar b. Dordaia will not be received in repentance." His frantic efforts to persuade some intercessor to plead for mercy on him are described in a passage too long to quote; but I translate the conclusion, which runs thus:—"Then he said, The matter hangeth only upon me (i.e. I must seek mercy for myself). He laid his head between his knees and groaned with weeping, until his soul departed from him; and there came a voice from heaven saying, 'R. Eleazar b. Dordaia is summoned to the life of the world to come.'" The purpose of that story is simply to teach that even the vilest sinner can repent, and that, if he does, he will be forgiven. It should be observed that the Talmud means by a sinner one who does definitely wicked actions—a sinner morally, not theologically. It should also be observed that, in the above story, the idea of an intercessor, by whom God might be moved to pardon, is pointedly rejected. The sinner does not plead either the merits of the Fathers, as might have been expected, or the merits of Christ, as according to Paul he ought to have done, if his peace with God were to be made. That he was forgiven, and that anyone in like case would be forgiven upon repentance, is the emphatic declaration of Pharisaic belief.

The Rabbis were fond of moralising upon the case of Manasseh, the idolatrous king; and the following passage contains one of the lessons they drew from it (j. Sanh. 28^c). Manasseh, after he had been carried captive to Babylon and sat in prison there, said to himself: "'I remember how my father caused me to read in the house of assembly this verse (Deut. iv. 30), "When thou art in tribulation, and all these things shall befall thee, in the latter days thou shalt return to the Lord thy God and shalt hearken to His voice. For the Lord thy God is a merciful God; He will not fail thee, nor destroy thee, nor forget the covenant He made with thy fathers." Lo, I will say that, now. If God hear me, it is well; if not——.' But the ministering angels desired to shut the windows of heaven, so that the prayer of Manasseh might not ascend to the Holy One, blessed be He. For they said before Him, 'Lord of the worlds, wilt thou receive in penitence a man who has set up an image in thy sanctuary?' He answered them, 'If I received not him in penitence, lo, I bar the door against all penitents.' What, then, did the Holy One do? He made an opening beneath His throne of glory, and He heard his prayer. And this is what is written (2 Chron. xxxiii. 13), 'And he prayed unto Him, and He was entreated of him, and heard his supplication and brought him again to Jerusalem.'"

I have given these stories just as they stand, with their quaint and childish notions, because they reflect very clearly the fixed belief of their authors that man is not prevented from finding forgiveness and peace from God. He can always repent; and, if he does, God will always forgive him. That this belief makes possible a sort of easy presumption of forgiveness is a danger of whose reality the Pharisees were well aware; and they were careful to warn against it. But they never wavered in their belief that forgiveness did always follow on sincere repentance; and that no sinner need ever remain cut off from God by the barrier of his sin. The definite precepts of the Torah were divine commandments, certainly. But they did not make the Pharisee feel that if he disobeyed them there was no longer any hope for him, any possibility of ever finding his way back to the love of God. The passages I have quoted, and there are many others, and scores and hundreds of sayings about repentance which all teach the same lesson, are the utterance of Pharisees, of men who were steeped to the lips in Rabbinism, who gloried in the Torah, who delighted in the abundance of its precepts, and the consequent casuistry of the schools, and who felt in their hearts that love of God which they did their best to show forth by serving the Lord with gladness in the doing of His commandments.

However great be the difference between the Pharisee and the Christian in the form given to their respective conceptions of religion, the contents of their spiritual experience were to this extent alike, that for each there was, and is, the sense of personal relation to, and communion with, the Divine Being. For the Christian, at least for most Christians, the medium of that communion is Christ. For the Pharisee there is no medium; but there is, as the guide to show the way, and the light to shine upon it, the Torah. The Pharisee did not bring to his religious conceptions the penetrating power of analysis which has been applied by Christian theologians. There has never been a Pharisee who could have done what Paul or Augustine did in this respect, unless it was Maimonides. There will therefore not be found in Pharisaic literature the subtle distinctions of justification, sanctification, prevenient grace, etc., which abound in the great Christian writers.

But, none the less, the main terms are found, and the spiritual realities thereby signified were known in Pharisaic experience. Grace was known. The Holy Spirit was known. Faith was known. These and other of "the deep things of God" were objects of real experience and devout contemplation. Pious fancy played round them, and represented them in parable and allegory; but they were seldom if ever made the subject of close philosophical examination, nor were they formulated in defined doctrines.

Much is said about the Holy Spirit in the Pharisaic literature, without any attempt to make all that is said consistent. But, behind all such utterances, there is the unwavering belief in the direct communion of God with man. The Holy Spirit was naturally most often referred to in the case of the prophets, in whom its manifestation was most conspicuous. But its influence is implied in the fact of prayer, and is nowhere denied in regard to men in general. "Whatever the righteous do, they do it by the Holy Spirit." That is the utterance of a Pharisee (Tanḥ. Vajeḥi, xiii. p. 110ª), and it is the key to the whole Pharisaic conception of the relation of man to God.

So, too, in regard to Faith, while the word does not appear so often on the pages of the Talmud as it does in the Epistles of Paul, the thing was an essential element in the religion of the Pharisees as it was in that of Paul. They never defined precisely what faith meant; it appears as a simple and unquestioning trust in God; and they thought about it after a simple fashion, without, however, being thereby shown to be wanting in it. "Great is faith," says a Midrash (Mechilta Beshall. ii. 6, 33^b). "For Israel believed in Him who spake and the world was; and as a reward for believing in the Lord, the Holy Spirit rested on them, and they uttered a song: as it is written, 'They believed on the Lord.... Then sang Moses, etc.'" (Exod. xiv. 31; xv. 1). "And so you find" (continues the Midrash) "that Abraham our father did not inherit this world and the world to come except by the merit of faith, because he believed in the Lord. As it is written, 'And Abraham believed in the Lord, and He counted it to him for righteousness'" (Gen. xv. 6). R. Nehemiah said, "Everyone who receives even one commandment in faith is worthy that the Holy Spirit should rest on him." So even the Pharisees could appeal to the same Abraham, whom Paul called as a witness against them; and they did so with the most obvious sincerity, as having a perfect right to do so, and probably with complete ignorance that the Christian apostle had appealed to Abraham in support of his argument against their religion. And it was well done of the compiler of the Midrash to add the closing words of the passage I quoted; for I know of hardly any other saying which so illumines the inner side of Pharisaism as this, that "Every man who receives even one commandment in faith is worthy that the Holy Spirit should rest on him."

In all that I have said in the course of this chapter, I have had before me the purpose of showing what is true about the religion of the Pharisees upon those points which are affected by Paul's condemnation. True, Paul condemned it as a whole, as a system of thought and practice fundamentally and in principle contrary to what he regarded as the truth. But he only alleged certain features of Pharisaism as the sign and expression of its defect. He alleged its reliance upon the Law and its consequent non-reliance upon Christ. He drew certain conclusions from its alleged defects, and his conclusions have been accepted as valid ever since. I have therefore tried to show chiefly on these points what the Pharisees themselves thought and felt and believed; and have left out of notice other aspects of Pharisaism which were not challenged, and which might have been challenged with more reason than those which Paul actually chose. He might have made a strong case against the particularism of the Pharisees in comparison with the universalism of his own Gospel. For though it can be shown that the Pharisaic conception of religion did not exclude universalist ideas in regard to mankind in general, yet it can hardly be questioned that such ideas were but seldom touched upon and by no means conspicuous in the ordinary thought and debate of the Pharisees. Moreover, the Torah itself, which was to them so all important, was given only to Israel, and could serve only them as a means of salvation. If the Gentiles were to profit by it, they must do so in fellowship with Israel. And that made real universalism impossible, whatever might be the aspirations of this or that particular Rabbi. God offered the Torah, says the Midrash, to all the nations of the world; and all refused it except Israel. They had their chance, and rejected it. That is for Jews a not unnatural view, but it does not lead to universalism. Yet, if Paul had challenged Pharisaism on this its weakest side, instead of aiming his blows at an unreal creation of his own brain, he would not have been left unanswered. The Pharisees would have replied, "True, we have not grasped the idea of universalism in any effective way. But what does your own universalism amount to? Only to this, that amongst the elect, those whom you say God chooses out to be saved, the distinction of Jew and Gentile does not count. But neither for you nor for us is there any question of his actually saving all men. There is no real universalism at all. And there is this between us, that you tell of the wrath of God poured out on all mankind except the elect; you tell of Christ who in some way is the means of saving those elect; you hold that life in this present world is only a temporary captivity in an evil state from which there will be a speedy release at the coming of Christ in glory. To us there is no Christ; for we need none, except the Messiah, who shall come when God shall please, and who will do otherwise than he of whom you speak. But we need none to save us from our Father in Heaven, and none to persuade Him to forgive when else He would turn away. And this present life, in this present world, is to us not a vale of tears or a captivity in an evil state. It is the scene of our service of God. And that Torah, of which you have said such hard things,—you who once gloried in Torah yourself, and must have known, though now you have forgotten, how it was once "the light of all your seeing,"—that Torah is to us the guide of life, that shows us how in the small deeds of every day we can, if we will, do that which is pleasing to God. Yes, we fail sometimes; and as your own master said, "even if we did all the 'mitzvōth,' we should still be but unprofitable servants, having done only that which was our duty to do." Still, we serve Him with heart and soul, the best we can; and we count it nothing to have done only the mere act prescribed, without the intention of pleasing Him. We look to Him as our help and our shield, our Father and Lord, our strength and our redeemer. And He does not turn away from us. Go you and worship Him as you will; and if the Torah no longer says aught to you of what once it said, then seek the revelation of God elsewhere, and hear his voice in other tones. As for us we will "abide in the things we have learned, knowing from whom we have learned them." And so long as we are faithful to the trust that God committed to Israel, when He made him a nation, and gave him the Torah and raised up the prophets, and sent psalmists and wise men to teach their brethren, so long "may the Lord God be with us as He was with our fathers."

It is the Pharisee who has kept the promise of Israel; and to these latest days he keeps it still.

CHAPTER V
Some Points of Pharisaic Theology

In the second chapter it was pointed out that the development of the religion of Torah, in the centuries from Ezra to the Pharisees and on to the Talmud, took place along two main lines. These are indicated by the two words Halachah and Haggadah. Upon the meaning of the former I dwelt at some length; but, for the sake of clear and adequate treatment, it seemed better to defer the consideration of the latter. The thread then dropped I shall pick up now; for the answer to the question "What was the theology of the Pharisees?" is given in the Haggadah. This is true in more senses than one; for to understand what is meant by Haggadah is to understand the Pharisaic mode of approaching questions of doctrinal theology, while a comprehensive knowledge of all that they taught upon such questions could only be obtained by a survey of the whole mass of Haggadah contained in the Rabbinical literature. To accomplish anything like that would need a very large volume. Weber devoted a whole book to it; and he might well have written a second, to include all that he had left out of the first. It will meet the purpose of the present work to explain the way in which the Pharisees dealt with doctrinal theology, and to illustrate this by reference to some main heads of belief, choosing such as may serve to throw light on references in the New Testament to Pharisaic doctrines. I shall then be in a position to use the results obtained for an explanation, in the final chapter, of the remarkable difference in character and tone between the Pharisaic religious discourse and that of the New Testament teachers—a difference felt by all who are able to compare the two literatures.

For the purpose of the present inquiry I must again remind the reader that the religion of Torah, since the time of Ezra, was based upon the belief that God had made to Israel a full and final revelation, had given a body of teaching, for their guidance and enlightenment upon all matters in which the divine and the human came into contact. The vehicle of this revelation, the written record of it, was the Pentateuch, called therefore the Torah, par excellence. But all the other Scriptures were considered to be of divine authority, and only subsidiary to the Pentateuch, because they helped to make clear its meaning. Further, what was implicit in the divine revelation, written in the Pentateuch and amplified in the other Scriptures, was rendered explicit in the oral interpretation. And whereas the litera scripta manebat, unaltered in form and quantity, the oral interpretation continually increased in amount and in multiplicity of detail, as being an ever more full and exact exposition of the contents of the original revelation. To use a mathematical simile, the whole Torah might be compared to the sum of an infinite series, written in definite symbols, and made to express a more detailed concrete result by the progressive evaluation of its terms.

It is evident that for the religion of Torah the prime necessity was to know the meaning of the Scriptures in general and of the Pentateuch in particular. The oral Tradition started with the interpretation of Scripture; and never in its furthest flights of allegorical extravagance or daring imagination did it wholly forget or entirely disown its connection with the written word. The connection is not always easy to trace; but it is there, none the less. The Tradition of the Elders, wherever it be examined, and whatever be the subject of its pronouncements, is, from first to last, and from its highest to its lowest, the declaration that, when God gave the Torah to Israel, "this" and "this" and "this" is what he meant by it.

When Ezra and his successors made it their chief task to study and interpret the written Torah, what they looked for before everything else was direction for doing the divine will. The reasons why they took this line have already been explained, and need not be repeated (see above, Chapter II.). The effect was that in the body of tradition gradually formed, the element of precept was the most conspicuous and the most systematically developed. It was essential that the Jew, desiring to serve God, should know exactly what he was commanded to do, and what he was forbidden to do, and what was the right course to take in cases where no divine command or prohibition had been explicitly given. The Halachah was the answer to these questions; being of the nature of a comprehensive rule of right conduct, and intended to cover every possible occasion on which a decision was called for. The results, obtained by proper methods of interpretation, and recognised as valid by competent authority, were clear and definite, and could only be disputed by showing that in fact the real intention of Scripture was otherwise. Hence it was possible to elaborate a consistent system of Halachah, and eventually to codify it all.[15]

But the interpreters of Scripture found more in its pages than precept; the Torah taught other things besides directions for doing the divine will. It contained instruction about God Himself, about Israel's relation to Him, about the creation and divine providence as shown in past history, about human virtues and vices, and the divine approval or disapproval of them, and so on. It was the task of the interpreters to set forth this teaching, as well as the positive or negative precepts. It is probable that the early Sopherim described their work of interpretation as a whole by the word Haggadah; or, rather, that they used the cognate verb "higgid" to indicate that the Scripture "declared" so and so. But when they began to develop the special line of Halachah, the meaning of what had been the more general term was restricted so as to denote all the remainder that was not Halachah. This is, in practice, what Haggadah does mean, namely, interpretation of Scripture in all other directions except that of precept.[16] As a technical term, indeed, the actual word Haggadah may be no earlier than the first, or even the second, century of our era; but that method or process of interpretation which it was used to describe was in practice long before.

Haggadah, then, covers the whole field of scriptural interpretation except so far as it relates to precept; and this is why the contents of the Haggadah are so much more diversified than those of the Halachah. One might truly say that the Haggadah is the Pharisaic comment upon life as a whole in the light of Scripture, the element of duty being reserved for special treatment.

If the Scripture could give even a hint upon any aspect of human nature, upon any phase of human experience, upon any attribute of God, upon any mystery of His providence, then the unfolding of the true meaning of that hint is Haggadah.

It will be clear, from what has been said, that all the subjects usually included under the term doctrinal theology would find their place under the head of Haggadah. Such are the doctrine of God, His existence and attributes; the doctrine of sin and restoration; the doctrine of revelation; the doctrine of "the last things," etc. And it is quite true that whatever the Pharisees taught upon those subjects is found in the Haggadah and not in the Halachah. But there will not be found a consistent system of doctrine upon these or any other subjects; there will not be found a detailed scheme of heads of belief. There will be found the utterances of individual teachers, sometimes diverging widely from the opinions of other teachers upon the same subject. There will be found, not indeed a complete and unrestricted license to any man to say and teach and believe what he liked, but a liberty to differ where each had what seemed to him good warrant for his belief. Uniformity of religious belief was never required by the Pharisees; and the most that was done in that direction was to recognise that there were certain limits beyond which a Jew could not go and still remain within the Jewish communion. Thus, even if he claimed to prove from Scripture that there were other gods than the One, he would cease to be acknowledged as a Jew. Or, if he said that the Torah was not from Heaven, i.e. was not a divine revelation, he would in like manner be regarded as no longer a Jew. But (to put it generally), if he loyally accepted the axioms and postulates of Judaism, then he was free to draw his own conclusions from them in regard to what he believed. The Rabbis never drew up a doctrinal creed; and when Maimonides did so, in the twelfth century of our era, he did what was felt by many to be uncongenial to the spirit of Judaism.

This absence of a system of doctrinal theology is a feature of Pharisaism which is most important for the right understanding of it; and Christian scholars have gone far astray through not being aware of this essential fact. Weber proclaims his error in the very title of his book, A "System" of Ancient Palestinian Synagogue Theology. There is much to be learned from Weber's book, and much that is extremely valuable to those who know how to use it; but, none the less, the whole conception of Pharisaic theology expounded in that book is fundamentally wrong, because Weber calls that a system which never was a system, and never set out to be. Christian doctrinal theology is capable of being presented as a system; and has, in fact, been so represented by almost every denomination of Christians. Weber presumably had such a system on Lutheran lines. He took for granted that there must have been a system on Pharisaic lines; in other words, that the doctrines of Pharisaic belief were developed from fundamental principles with such logic as was admissible, and were consistent with each other. He therefore took the general scheme of his own Christian theology, and set down under its several heads what he could find of Rabbinical doctrine upon each point. He must have been perplexed by the want of agreement amongst his authorities, but he got over that by regarding the more prominent doctrine as the rule, and the other as the exception; the former was a part of the system, the latter was an aberration. Christian scholars are pathetically grateful to Weber for having given them an orderly and methodical arrangement of the medley of Pharisaic doctrine; certainly he has done so; but with as much success and as much truth as if he had described a tropical jungle, believing it to be a nursery-garden. Many people have seen a nursery-garden. Few have seen a jungle. It is easy and natural and highly convenient to identify the unfamiliar with the familiar; but the jungle remains a jungle, when all is said and done.

The meaning of which is this, that the Rabbis adjusted their beliefs to the Torah; they believed whatever they found there, or could deduce from its plain statements and obscure hints, or could shelter under its sanction. It never troubled them that what they found in the Torah was not always mutually consistent. One teacher drew forth this lesson, and another drew forth that, and a third something different. But what then? Only that the Torah contained these various lessons; and why should not they all be learned? For had not God given them all? What he said had many meanings, and was not exhausted by one interpretation.[17] Even if contradictory conclusions were drawn, they were not on that account any the less divine truth. It was said (j. Ber. 3^b), in regard to the controversy between the school of Hillel and the school of Shammai, "The words of each are the words of the living God." And that applies to the whole field of the Haggadah. If the results of interpretation were arrived at by legitimate methods, and declared by competent teachers, then they were received as valid. Not indeed that anyone was required to believe what was stated in them. That was not the intention of the teacher. Haggadah was above all things meant for edification; it presented religion under a great variety of aspects, and by means of an extraordinary wealth of illustrations drawn from the whole field of knowledge and experience. To learn this was good, by reason of the variety; the religious thought of the learner was enriched, his moral nature benefited, and his spirit continually refreshed by the contemplation of the everchanging aspects of divine truth. Uniformity would have made that impossible; to have required it would have been fatal; and to suppose that it was required is to miss the point of Haggadah, which is what Christian scholars usually do.

If a Jew were told by some teacher a piece of Haggadah, he would be impressed by the wisdom or the beauty of the thought contained in it, or perhaps would admire the skill which drew it forth from some obscure hint of Scripture; but he would never say to himself, "I must straightway believe this; if I do not, I shall be in error, and in peril of my soul." He would more likely say, "Blessed art thou, Abraham our father, from whom has sprung such a teacher for Israel." And observe that Haggadah is still Torah. It is an exposition and application of what is implicit in the divine revelation, drawn forth and made articulate. Yet, even so, there is no demand made for the acceptance, as an article of belief, of each Haggadic exposition. The Jew, and notably the Pharisee, knew what faith was, as well as the Christian did; but he did not make it the regulator of his attitude towards that which was taught him as the contents of revelation.

I have said that Haggadah is interpretation of Scripture in all directions except that of precept. And that is true; but the term "interpretation" must be taken in a very wide sense. A connection of some kind there always is between Scripture and Haggadah; but it is sometimes extremely slight. For the Haggadic interpreter performed his task in two ways: either he developed what he believed to be the real teaching of Scripture upon this or that point; or he sought to find in Scripture a sanction for truths which he already believed. And not merely for definite truths, but for anything which might tend to edification,—ethical principles, mystical speculations, meditations on providence and the wonders of creation, the imaginings of pious fantasy, and even the play of daring wit. There was nothing that could not find a place in the Haggadah, if it could be linked on to some text or word or letter of Scripture. The methods employed were, from the point of view of strict exegesis, often wildly extravagant. No freak of allegory, of word-play, of fantastic juggling with letters and syllables, is without illustration in the Haggadah. And the men who employed such methods knew well that what they were setting forth was not the plain literal meaning of Scripture. What they saw, with their inward vision, was the divine truth, holiness, justice, beauty, goodness, love; they read it in their own experience, and traced it in nature and history and man. They looked to see it all mirrored in Scripture; for there was the divine revelation, and there all that they believed to be divine must be. Some of it could be plainly seen; for, in essentials, the Haggadic teaching upon ethics and piety kept to the main lines of the Scriptures. What could not be plainly seen was inferred to be there; and no hint was too slight to indicate its presence. We say that this means reading into the text what is not there. And doubtless that is the case. But the Haggadist did not so understand what he did. If he was conscious of ideas, thoughts, beliefs, which he felt to be variously good, then, since Scripture was for him the only vehicle of divine revelation, somewhere in Scripture must be indicated all that various good. And any method was justified by which it could be brought forth and made clear. That I take to be the theory of the Haggadah, the explanation which a Haggadist would give of the reason for his peculiar treatment of Scripture. Haggadah, like Halachah, is a natural, perhaps even a necessary, development of a religion of Torah. Both are integral parts of Torah; and a thorough understanding of the nature and function of each is necessary for the understanding of the whole. Halachah and Haggadah, together with the personal spiritual life of the individual, cover the whole field of the religious consciousness of the Pharisee. For it is entirely wrong to say that the Pharisee was wholly taken up with the Halachah, the discipline of direct precept. No Pharisee that ever lived confined his thoughts and aspirations, his beliefs and hopes, within the range of Halachah, nor could have done if he had tried. He guided his conduct by the Halachah certainly, because he believed that by following it he was doing the will of God exactly as it ought to be done. But the Halachah did not teach him, and did not profess to teach him, how he should think about God, nor did it seek to regulate his own private communion with his Father in heaven. For this last he sought no other teacher except the promptings of his own soul and the answer of God to his prayers. And for the knowledge of God's nature and His works in providence and human history, he gladly learned from any wise and gifted teacher who could tell him anything, or in any way help him to think wisely, to worship devoutly, to live worthily. I shall have more to say about this in the concluding chapter. I only mention it here, because it was necessary to show the place which the Haggadah occupied in the religious thought of the Pharisee, and how it did for him what in other religions is done by a scheme of doctrinal theology. For the present I keep to the subject of the Haggadah itself, and proceed to inquire what can be learned from it as to the main heads of Pharisaic belief, especially in the period covered by the New Testament. It is mainly for the sake of this inquiry that I have given the foregoing explanation of the nature and intention of Haggadah.

The inquiry is by no means an easy one. For, while it is only necessary to open a volume of the Talmud, or of one of the great Midrashim, to find on almost every page some Haggadic utterance, often indeed a great mass of Haggadah, it is wholly unwarranted to say "this" and "this" is what the Pharisees believed. It may be; and, of course, if it were not in some way acceptable to Pharisaic minds, according to their canons of judgment, it would not be found in their books. But the Haggadah does not carry its meaning on the surface, nor yield it to the hearer or reader who has only a passing glance for it or a careless ear. And thus, what really represents the truth believed, or the good discerned, the element to which the mind assented, and which it gratefully received, is not expressed in the verbal form of the Haggadah, nor in its statements,—extravagant and even impossible as they sometimes are. There was no idea of taking those statements as they stand, as if they were to be accepted as true, and believed as divine revelations. When it is said by a Haggadist that since the creation God has been occupied in making marriages (Ber. R., p. 133^c § 68. 4), that does not represent as it stands what any Pharisee, or the Haggadist himself, really believed about God. As George Eliot truly says of that particular Haggadah, "The levity of the saying lies in the mind of him who hears it"; and, as she might have added, puts a frivolous meaning on it. The Haggadah is full of such things; but the Haggadah is not on that account frivolous or absurd. And when the unwary Christian produces specimens of Haggadah, and says, "See what those Rabbis believed and taught," the foolishness which he illustrates is not that of the Rabbis. To get at the real meaning and serious purpose of Haggadic teaching is one of the difficulties in the inquiry into what the Pharisees believed. In itself it is not a great difficulty, but it needs to be recognised.

A further difficulty is presented by the question, how far can the utterance of some individual teacher be taken to represent a generally accepted belief, seeing that there was no requirement of uniformity of belief? To that question a decisive answer is scarcely ever possible, except within wide limits of probability. If a doctrine can be formulated upon some topic of theology, it will represent a de facto consensus of belief, rather than the conscious acceptance of the teaching of any authority; and those who held the belief might still prefer a different statement of it. Everywhere caution is necessary in drawing forth from the Haggadah its real meaning, and in forming conclusions as to the generality of its acceptance.

A still further difficulty, and one which is of especial importance for the purpose of this book, is that of using, for comparison with the teaching of the New Testament, Haggadah often of much later date. Of the enormous mass of Haggadah contained in the Rabbinical literature, only a small proportion is contemporary with the Gospels, and very little indeed contemporary with Jesus. One of the most famous Haggadists was R. Joshua b. Levi, in the middle of the third century of our era. If we find that he teaches some doctrine, are we entitled to use his words as evidence that such doctrine was believed by Pharisees in the time of Jesus and the Apostles? If not, then, of course, the appeal to the Talmud and Midrash, in illustration of Pharisaism in the New Testament period, is futile. Here, again, caution is necessary; but, with caution, the answer is that the later literature may rightly be used as evidence of earlier beliefs and ideas. We have already met the same question in reference to the Halachah (see above, Chapter II.). And the answer there was that the principle of Halachah was accepted, and the development of that principle was begun long before the time of Christ. What changed continuously through the centuries was the body and form of ascertained Halachah, determined by the gradual expansion into greater detail of its precepts, and their application to a greater variety of cases. The Halachah, as codified in the Mishnah, is much more extensive than the Halachah as it was known to the Pharisees in the time of Jesus. But the intention of it is the same for the earlier period as for the later. Wherefore it is legitimate to use the Talmud to illustrate the principle of Halachah as accepted in the New Testament period, as also for the periods before and after; but it would not be safe to infer that some particular definition, propounded by Akiba or Judah the Holy, was already regarded as Halachah, and taken for a rule of conduct by the contemporaries of Hillel and Shammai. Now, with regard to the Haggadah, the case is somewhat different, because, as has been already explained, no uniformity of belief was required, while uniformity of practice was required. But, allowing for that difference, what was said about the use of the later literature in regard to the Halachah applies also to its use in regard to the Haggadah. For here, also, there is an element which does not change, or not to any great extent, over a period which includes that of the New Testament and a considerable time before and after. That element is the general Pharisaic belief about God, Israel, and the world, about man's relation to God and to his fellow-men, about virtues, vices, the nature of sin, the function of prayer, and so on. What the Haggadah did was to teach this, illustrate it in all manner of ways, and present it in every possible aspect, but not in any great degree to modify it. Indeed, I think hardly to modify it at all. There is, in Pharisaism, no such progressive development of doctrine as there is in Christianity. Of course there could not be, in the nature of things, a Pharisaic Christology. But there was no progressive doctrine of a Messiah, nor of the Torah, nor of the resurrection of the dead, nor, I think, of any of the main subjects of belief. There were general ideas commonly held upon these subjects, beliefs upon which there was substantial agreement, and no thought of challenge. And the Haggadah was the means by which this general body of belief was continually illustrated and illumined, so that it might have ever renewed power to refresh the soul. Just as the Halachah was the detailed application of Torah to conduct, on its practical side, as the doing of the divine will, so the Haggadah was the detailed application of Torah to the spiritual life generally, so that the light which God had given might be shed over the "things which are eternal."

I proceed to sketch out what I take to be the general beliefs of the Pharisees which form the background, or the substratum, of the Haggadah, so far as I have been able to make it out. Afterwards I will give some Haggadic illustrations upon particular points. I purposely do not attempt a systematic arrangement, because the Pharisees themselves did not.

The object of worship is God—one, and undivided. He is the Creator of the world and of everything in it; and no other being shared with Him in that work. He does what He will; but His will is always just. His providence supplies the wants of His creatures. He is good, kind, and merciful.

It is the duty of man to obey Him. He has made known His will; He rewards those who fulfil His command, and punishes those who disobey. He has made all the human race; but Israel stands in a special relation to Him, because only Israel is bound to Him by a covenant. The Torah was offered to the other nations, but they would not have it. They are therefore outside the range of God's favour. They can only come within it by learning from Israel the Torah. There are, nevertheless, good men amongst the other nations.

It is the privilege of Israel to have been found worthy to receive the Torah, and his highest aim is to fulfil it, not only by doing what it sets before him as the divine will, but by taking to heart all that it teaches him concerning sacred things.

The Pharisee believed himself to be under the immediate care of God. Nothing happens to him except by the divine permission. God sees, and knows all that he does and all that he is going to do. Nevertheless, his will is free. He is not compelled either to obey or to disobey. If he obeys, God is pleased with him. If he disobeys, God is angry with him. Reward will follow in the former case, punishment in the latter. If he has sinned, repentance will make his peace with God. Forgiveness is never refused to the penitent. He can always pray to God, and God will always hear him.

It is his duty to be kind towards his fellow-men, "especially towards them which are of the household of the faith"—namely, Israel. He must not wrong anyone, whether Jew or Gentile. He must especially do acts of charity towards the poor and the suffering. He must not live an idle life; and in all that he does he must serve God.

Although at present he has much to endure, yet there will be in the future a better time, when the Messiah shall come and set up the kingdom of God upon earth. Then Israel will be freed from the oppression of the Gentiles, and will enjoy peace and prosperity and the fulness of the blessing of God. When that shall be, no one knows. God will send the Messiah when it pleases Him to do so. But the sins of Israel hinder his coming.

When life on earth is over, there is a life beyond the grave. For the righteous there is Heaven, where they will be rewarded; and for the wicked there is Hell, where they will be punished. The righteous in Heaven will live for ever. The wicked in Hell will be destroyed and made an end of. There will be no chance to repent after death.

Man is under the protection of angels, and liable to temptation and harm from evil spirits. There are many such, and there is a prince over them. The angels are God's messengers. Each man has in himself two opposing impulses or tendencies; one towards good and the other towards evil. It is his duty to control the evil impulse and strengthen the good one. God will help him to obey the good, and will not prevent him from yielding to the bad. To keep his mind fixed on the Torah, and filled with its teaching, is his protection against sin and his incitement to right living. He is glad that the Torah gives him so many precepts to fulfil, because it thereby constantly reminds him of God, and provides opportunities for serving Him. The Torah is the centre and circumference of all his thoughts and beliefs about religion. In it God has revealed everything that He has revealed at all. It is the greatest gift He could make, and He has bestowed it all on Israel, and kept nothing back.

Such, in bare outline, and purposely stripped of all details, I believe to have been the contents of the religious consciousness of the Pharisees in general, the beliefs and ideas common to them all. In different periods, according to circumstances, there would be variety in the emphasis laid upon particular points.

For instance there might be, as there certainly was, more than one period when the group of beliefs centring on the Messiah rose into exceptional prominence, and were held with more than usual fervour. And, again, the destruction of the Temple in a.d. 70, and the final overthrow of the Jewish national polity in a.d. 135, had a profound influence upon Pharisaic belief, by laying additional stress on faithfulness to the divine will, and by causing deeper reflection upon the mystery of that will as shown in the suffering of Israel. The Pharisees deplored, with sincerest grief, the loss of the Temple and the cessation of its services. But they were well able to learn the lesson of a worship and a religious life, for which such external means were needless. And they did learn it with wonderful rapidity.

So, too, for individuals according to temperament, some elements of the general belief would have more importance than others; and there would be, further, a great variation in the strength of conviction with which the beliefs were held, as also in the character of those who held them. It is clear that such a general conception of religion could open a way for the faults of pride and hypocrisy, charged against the Pharisees, as it also could open the way for the virtues of humble piety and sincere devotion. It probably did the one. It certainly did the other. There were good, bad, and indifferent Pharisees, as there are good, bad, and indifferent Christians. And all that I am concerned with at present is the general Pharisaic consensus of belief, thought, and feeling upon divine things.

If I have described it correctly, then it represents the underlying meaning of the Haggadah; and whatever is contained in the Haggadah is intended to illustrate, or enforce, or make prominent, some aspect of those beliefs. It matters nothing that there is endless variety, and frequent contradiction, in what the Haggadists say, i.e. in the form in which they clothe their thoughts; nor that they make statements which are extravagant, or impossible, or absurd, or grotesque, or even occasionally, in appearance at least, irreverent. What really was in their mind was the underlying religious truth or ethical principle which they sought to illumine. That was their serious intention; and it is not a denial of this if it be admitted that, like all interpreters who use the method of allegory, they occasionally let their fancy run riot, and indulged in freaks of exposition whose connection with religion is not obvious.[18] Trivialities of that kind, however, may be left out of account.

It will be of more use to take some of the points of the foregoing sketch of Pharisaic belief, and examine them in greater detail. And the first shall be the doctrine of God, and more particularly certain aspects of the doctrine of God.

Between the Pharisees and the New Testament teachers there was no dispute as to the sole sovereignty of God, or that He was the Creator and upholder of all things. But it is well to lay stress upon the Pharisaic belief in the nearness of God and the directness of access to Him; also to make clear the fact that emphatic resistance was offered by the Pharisees to any idea of a plurality of divine persons. They would own no being who could be regarded either as in some sense a second God, or as a mediator between God and man.

That the Pharisees commonly thought of God as a cold abstraction, a distant and inaccessible Power, is by Christian scholars frequently but quite erroneously asserted. Of course, it was never denied that God was the Almighty, the Lord of all worlds, supreme over everything. Indeed, that was affirmed over and over again, and is one of the axioms of Pharisaic belief. But, whatever other Jews may have done, under the influence of Hellenism, the Pharisees never doubted for a moment that God Himself, the one supreme God, was actually near to every one of His people; "near, in every kind of nearness," as it was said (j. Ber. 13ª). That is the really effective belief of the Pharisees, as can be seen on well-nigh every page of the Talmud and the Midrash. How it was to be reconciled, if it needed to be reconciled, with the belief in the abstract infinity of God, was a question which the Pharisees never troubled to answer, even if they were aware of it. There was no Jewish philosophy of religion till long after the closing of the Talmud. And the Pharisees most certainly did not logically develop their conception of God from their idea of the Torah. Whether, even if they had done so, they would have arrived at the barren abstraction, which Weber declares to have been the Pharisaic idea of God (Weber, System, etc., p. 149), is open to question. But they never allowed any theoretical reasoning which would prevent them from owning the love and goodness of God, or which would place an impassable gulf between Him and His creatures. The following piece of Haggadah illustrates this point: "It is said (Exod. xx. 1), 'And God spake all these words.' He doeth the whole at once (i.e. in one action). He kills and He makes alive, in one action. He wounds and He heals, in one action. The woman in travail, those that go down to the sea, travellers in deserts, captives in prison, east and west, north and south, He hears them all, in one act (of hearing)" (Shem. R. p. 50^b). And a few lines further on it is stated that He spoke all the ten commandments in one act (of speaking). There is here no attempt to explain how God, being Almighty, can take particular notice of persons; there is the unquestioning belief that He does so. He may be high in Heaven, but no suffering creature of His suffers unseen or unheard. "A bird perishes not, without Heaven" (i.e. except by the will of God); so said a great Pharisee, in words that have a striking likeness to a saying of Jesus on the same subject (j. Sheb. 38^d, and cp. Matt. x. 29). A story is told (Debar. R. 102ª) of a certain Jew who was on board a ship, where all the other passengers were Gentiles. The ship touched at an island, "and the sailors said to the Jew, 'Take money and go ashore, and buy something for us.' He said, 'I am not at home here; how shall I know where to go?' They said, 'A Jew is at home everywhere. For whithersoever thou goest, thy God goeth with thee.'" (The reference is to Deut. iv. 7, "What great nation hath a God who is so nigh to them.")

The nearness of God is especially emphasised in relation to prayer. He hears all who pray to Him, and it is He himself who hears and to whom prayer should alone be offered. "Every man," says the Talmud, "has a 'patronus' (a 'friend at court'). If there comes trouble upon him, he does not go direct to his patron, but goes and stands at his door, and calls to the servant or to a son of the house, and he tells the patron 'So and so is standing at the door of thy court.' Perhaps the patron has him admitted. Perhaps he leaves him alone. But the Holy One, blessed be He, is not so. If trouble comes on a man (God says), 'Let him pray, not to Michael and not to Gabriel, but to me, and I will answer him at once.' And this is that which is written (Joel ii. 32), 'Everyone that calleth on the name of the Lord shall be delivered'" (j. Ber. 13ª). Here we have not only the declaration of belief in direct access to God Himself through prayer, but also the repudiation of any mediator. Michael and Gabriel may be servants of God, but they do not come between God and man to keep them apart or to serve as the necessary medium of intercourse. They were never, in Pharisaic theology, allowed any place which might seem to impair the divine Unity. The idea of a second God was steadfastly resisted; and no personification of divine attributes, or exaltation of archangels, was ever carried so far as to imply a plurality of persons in the Deity. As against the doctrine of the Logos, and the Christian exaltation of Christ, the Pharisees maintained the strict unity of God. Neither the Memra of the Targums, nor the Shechinah of the Talmud and the Midrash, however personified for Haggadic purposes, was regarded as being in any sense a personality co-existent with God Himself. The Holy Spirit was either God, or the influence of God, but not a personality distinguishable from Him. Metatron comes the nearest to the conception of a second God; but, whatever the later Cabbalists may have made of Metatron, the Pharisees of the Talmud expressly rejected the notion that he was a second God. It is told (b. Ḥag. 15ª) that the famous Elisha b. Abujah, the nearest approach to a Jewish heretic, went up into Heaven (Paradise), and there saw "Metatron, to whom was given power to sit and write down the merits of Israel." (Elisha) said: "It is taught that on high there is no sitting, no strife, no parting, and no joining. Can there be, Heaven forbid, two powers? (i.e. two Gods). They brought out Metatron, and gave him sixty lashes of fire." The commentator on this passage explains that Metatron was treated in that manner in order to show that he was not superior to the other angels in kind, and that he was subservient to God, not on any sort of equality with Him. Metatron, as I have elsewhere maintained,[19] is the Rabbinical reply to the Gnostic and Christian doctrines which seemed to threaten the divine Unity. It was perhaps with reference to Christian doctrine that the Rabbis laid stress on the belief that God has no Son. Commenting on Exod. xx. 2: "R. Abahu said: 'A parable of a king of flesh and blood; he reigns and has a father or a brother. The Holy One, blessed be He, saith, "I am not so"; (but) (Isa. xliv. 6) "I am the first," I have no father; "and I am the last," I have no son; "and beside me there is no God," I have no brother'" (Shem. R. 51^b). Abahu lived in the third century of our era; and most of the Haggadic expositions of the unity of God, on the lines indicated, are later than the New Testament period. But, as they were only developed in opposition to Christian teaching, it is not likely that in the time of Jesus or the Apostles the Pharisees were divided or uncertain upon a point which had scarcely as yet been challenged. Jesus himself never challenged it, so far as the Synoptic Gospels are evidence; and, upon a belief so fundamental in Pharisaic Judaism, it is not to be supposed that he was more consistent than the Pharisees themselves. The challenge came not from Jesus but from Paul, even though Paul may not have intended, or been conscious of, any infraction of the unity of God in his teaching about Christ. The Pharisees took the alarm from him; and, in opposition to his Christology, and the later Johannine doctrine, taught with especial emphasis the undivided sole supremacy of God. And they had no more difficulty than Jesus had in believing that the one God was both sovereign Lord and heavenly Father, as in fact they called Him.

So much for the Pharisaic conception of God. We will now consider another set of beliefs of theirs upon which a comparison with New Testament teaching is possible and instructive—the Pharisaic ideas about Retribution, reward and punishment, merit. There is no consistent Pharisaic doctrine upon the subject, but rather a comment upon the facts of human experience from different points of view. That man's will is free is one of the axioms of Pharisaism. It was stated by R. Akiba, "Everything is foreseen, and freedom is given, and the world is judged, and all is according to the amount of work" (M. Aboth. iii. 15). Man is therefore a moral agent, cognisant of the distinction between right and wrong, capable of acting upon that distinction, and liable to be judged accordingly. "All is in the hand of Heaven except the fear of Heaven," said another teacher (b. Ber. 33^b). If, then, man serves God, he does so not on compulsion. He is therefore subject to the approval or disapproval of God for what he does. Experience, interpreting life, discerns evident tokens of such approval and disapproval; and Scripture clearly teaches that God distinguishes between the righteous and the sinner in His treatment of them. Whatever form His approval or disapproval may take, they are His certain judgment on human actions, to be looked for as the consequence of doing those actions.

The Pharisees, like other moralists, expressed this by saying that God rewarded the good and punished the bad. And they used that principle as a clue to the meaning of providence, as shown in human suffering and happiness. They pondered on the problem why suffering should be inflicted on the apparently innocent? and why the obviously sinful seemed often to prosper? And they suggested various partial solutions of the problem, but wisely left it an open question. It might be that there was no suffering without previous sin, or it might be that suffering was sometimes the chastisement imposed on the righteous through the love of God, as it is said: "Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth." It might be that material prosperity and adversity were the signs by which the divine approval and disapproval were shown, the reward or the punishment for human actions; or it might be that these were manifested only inwardly, in the soul and not in the outward lot. All these different views find varied expression in the utterance of Pharisaic teachers, and there is no attempt to set up one as true to the exclusion of the rest. And when the Pharisee spoke of reward and punishment, he meant to indicate his belief that in some way it went well with the man who did good, and ill with the man who did wrong, and both by the divine appointment.

In the Gospels, Jesus also speaks of reward, as every reader knows; and many readers have winced when they read:—"Pray to thy Father, ... and thy Father shall reward thee." "Great is your reward in Heaven." "If you do good to them that do good, what reward have ye?" Phrases like these have an unpleasant sound, wherever they occur, because of the notions commonly attached to the term reward. No one supposes that Jesus, in using that term, was appealing to low motives of self-interest; and I believe that he meant exactly what I have given as the Pharisaic meaning, namely, that there was a divinely appointed difference between the condition of the good and that of the bad, as a consequence of their actions. It is at least not justifiable to say that Jesus must have meant what he said, according to its best interpretation, and that the Pharisees must have meant what they said, according to its worst interpretation. Jesus was one, and the Pharisees were many; and while he remained ever on the highest plane of spiritual wisdom, the Pharisees represented different degrees of that wisdom. Some might, and occasionally did, interpret divine reward and punishment in terms of material welfare, while others saw more deeply into the spiritual meaning of those terms. But it is not true that the material interpretation represents the general belief of the Pharisees, while the spiritual interpretation is the exception. The truth is that they would not reject any interpretation which might throw some light upon the problem; and they cared nothing that different interpretations contradicted one another.

So far, there is no essential difference, that I can see, between the Pharisaic teaching and that of the Gospels, or the New Testament generally, about reward and punishment. The difference that does exist is due to the fact that Pharisaism was the religion of Torah. For here the divine approval or disapproval was necessarily associated in an especial degree with the "Mitzvōth," the precepts which expressed the will of God for the conduct of man. To say that there is a reward for doing a "Mitzvah" is no more out of keeping with true piety than to say there is a reward for praying to the Father which seeth in secret. In each case it only means that the act of devotion to God, whatever form it take, is acceptable to Him, and His blessing is given to the doer of it. Now, the Mitzvōth were clearly-defined, specific acts; and the Pharisee, as has been already pointed out in a previous chapter, regarded them not as irksome constraints, but as welcome opportunities for serving God. The more Mitzvōth he could meet with the better. If, by doing them, he could thereby please God, what more could he wish for? Certainly he looked for reward; but the joy of service and the blessing of God was the reward he looked for. That is the real mind of the Pharisee in regard to reward. And if some Pharisees interpreted the blessing of God in a material sense, to be shown in outward prosperity, while others interpreted it in a spiritual sense, that is only a difference of temperament as between particular Pharisees. What the reward should be, in what way God would show His approval and give His blessing, was as God should please. The Pharisee served Him with gladness and zeal; and only hoped (as Christians also have been invited to hope) that God might say to him: "Well done, good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."

It was a Pharisee who said, "The reward of one Mitzvah is the opportunity to fulfil another" (Aboth. iv. 5); and perhaps no words could better indicate the Pharisaic view of reward in the service of God. The service is everything; the reward is God's way of showing that the service is acceptable. Moreover, the reward, if it were expected to be anything more than the present consciousness of divine approval, was not looked for in this world, but would be part of the bliss of the world to come. "Thou wilt find," said a Rabbi, "no single Mitzvah in the Torah, to which a reward is attached, which does not depend on the raising of the dead. 'Honour thy father and mother, that thou mayest prolong thy days,' and 'that it may be well with thee.'... 'That thou mayest prolong thy days' in a world which is endless, and 'that it may be well with thee' in a world which is wholly good" (b. Ḥull. 142ª). And again it is taught, "What is that which is written (Deut. iv. 7) 'which I command thee to do them this day?'" To do them this day, and not to-morrow. To do them this day, and not to receive the reward this day" (b. Kidd. 39^b); and on the same page is the express statement, "Reward for a Mitzvah in this world there is none." Of the nature of the reward this is said: "The world to come is neither eating nor drinking, nor increasing and multiplying, nor giving and receiving, nor jealousy, nor hatred, nor strife; but the righteous sit with crowns on their heads, and enjoy the light of the Shechinah" (b. Ber. 17ª).

Such ideas were in the minds of the Pharisees when they spoke of the reward for doing the will of God; ideas not hardened into a formal doctrine, and perhaps by some only dimly apprehended, but yet indicating a vision of divine things not very unlike what has floated before the gaze of Christian souls. But while the Pharisees thus delighted to muse on the reward, they were emphatic in teaching that the "Mitzvah" was not to be done for the sake of the reward, as if to obtain thereby some payment of what was due. The distinction is somewhat fine, especially as the reward hoped for was spiritual bliss and not material advantage. But the Pharisees drew the distinction, nevertheless. Thus it is said, in reference to Ps. i. 2, "His delight is in the law of the Lord." R. Eliezer says, "Who delighteth greatly in his commandments." "In his commandments (Mitzvōth), but not in the reward of the Mitzvōth" (b. A.Z. 19ª). The sole reason allowable for doing a Mitzvah is the hope of pleasing God thereby. And then follows the well-known saying of the ancient Antigonos of Socho: "Be not like servants who serve their master for a reward." These are only a few instances out of many to show that the Pharisee was not actuated by motives of the kind which are usually ascribed to him in his performance of the things commanded him. If to an ideal so lofty and so austere, the Pharisee sometimes failed to rise, and said what was not worthy of it, there is no cause for wonder, since the same may be observed amongst Christians, and is merely due to individual human nature. But the Pharisaic conception of religion in general, and of this phrase of it in particular, is entitled to be judged by the best to which it looked up, and not to be condemned for its occasional failure to apprehend that best.

Finally, what about merit? The Pharisees were never afraid to talk about merit; but what they said must be taken in the light of what has already been stated. They had no fixed doctrine of merit; and there certainly never was a general Pharisaic belief in a system of bargaining with God as between debtor and creditor on business lines. This or that teacher may have used the terms of such transactions by way of illustration; but they do not represent the general mind of the Pharisees upon the subject. The Pharisees certainly believed that to perform many Mitzvōth was better than to perform one; and they not unnaturally concluded that there could be no more reasonable criterion for a judgment of character than the use which a man had made of the opportunities afforded by the Mitzvōth for serving God. Mitzvōth, being specific commands, could be counted up; and the degree of goodness shown in doing them, or of badness in not doing them, could be thought of quantitatively, instead of qualitatively. This is not, for obvious reasons, the best way of treating the matter; and the Pharisees have, in consequence, come in for a great deal of rebuke and contempt for having degraded the relation of man to God, when all that they did was to use an unfortunate metaphor in order to express a real distinction. It was perhaps mainly through the use of this metaphor, this quantitative description of goodness, that they laid themselves open to the charge of boastful self-righteousness; and no doubt they were occasionally to blame in that respect. Because a Pharisee was able to observe, in a quite dispassionate way, the fact that he had performed so many "Mitzvōth." It would have been better for him not to have learned that method of self-examination. But, nevertheless, it is true, though only those who know the Pharisees can be expected to believe it, that genuine humility could and often did go along with that candid estimate of good performed.

This accumulation of goodness, through the performance of "Mitzvōth," is what the Pharisees meant by merit, "Zachuth." And though they were not in the least ashamed of it, nor saw why they should be, they were careful to keep the idea of merit within limits. Like the reward hoped for, the merit acquired was not a motive, but an accessory. They believed, certainly, that merit counted for much with God. As has been said, they believed that He judged men according to whether the goodness of their deeds or the badness was the greater; in other words, by the amount of merit which they possessed. But they did not presume to set up a claim against Him; and while they pleaded merit before Him, they were taught that it was not their own merit they should plead, but that of others. "He who pleads the merit of others is answered for his own; and he who pleads the merit of himself is answered for that of others" (b. Ber. 10^b). Very often it was the merit of the Fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to whose influence with God great effect was ascribed. Yet what is all this but the idea of intercession, of the good on behalf of the less good? And as between Pharisaic and Christian ideas on the subject, the difference is more in the form than the substance. Even the appeal to the merits of the Fathers was discouraged by many Pharisees, on the ground that it tended to shift responsibility for a man's own conduct on to someone else. They never for long forgot that, nor wavered in their trust that God was a just and loving God, into whose hands they need not fear to commit themselves. With simplicity of heart, rather than with profound philosophical acumen, they mused on their experience of life in the light of Scripture and in the thought of service of God; and if they did not get much further than the conviction that it is well with the righteous and not well with the sinner, that God knows all and will deal justly with all, that some of His ways are plain to be seen, and others past finding out, and that the whole duty of man is to fear God and keep His commandments; and that the highest joy is to serve Him with gladness, and in doing justly, and loving mercy to walk humbly with Him,—who will say that they are very far wrong?