The life and work of St. Paul

36 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL.
pots and tables, carried to so absurd an extreme that, on the occasion of washing
the golden candelabrum of the Temple, the Sadducees remarked that their
Pharisaic rivals would wash the Sun itself if they could get an opportunity.
We know the entire and laborious ablutions and bathings of the whole person,
with carefully tabulated ceremonies and normal gesticulations, not for the
laudable purpose of personal cleanliness, but for the nervously-strained
endeavour to avoid every possible and impossible chance of contracting cere-
monial uncleanness. We know how this notion of perfect Levitical purity
thrust itself with irritating recurrence into every aspect and relation of
ordinary life, and led to the scornful avoidance of the very contact and shadow
of fellow-beings, who might after all be purer and nobler than those who
would not touch them with the tassel of a garment's hem. We know the
obtrusive prayers, 1 the ostentatious almsgivings, 8 the broadened phylacteries, 3
the petty ritualisms, 4 the professorial arrogance, 5 the reckless proselytism, 8
the greedy avarice, 7 the haughty assertion of pre-eminence, 8 the ill-concealed
hypocrisy, 9 which were often hidden under this venerable assumption of
superior holiness. And we know all this quite as much, or more, from the
admiring records of the Talmud which devotes one whole treatise to handwashings,
10 and another to the proper method of killing a fowl, u and another to
12
the stalks of legumes as from the reiterated "woes" of Christ's denuncia-
tion. 13 But we may be sure that these extremes and degeneracies of the Pharisaic
aim would be as grievous and displeasing to the youthful Saul as they were to
all the noblest Pharisees, and as they were to Christ Himself. Of the seven
kinds of Pharisees which the Talmud in various places enumerates, we may be
quite sure that Saul of Tarsus would neither be a " bleeding " Pharisee, nor a
"mortar" Pharisee, nor a "Shechemite" Pharisee, nor a "timid" Pharwee,
nor a "tumbling" Pharisee, nor a "painted" Pharisee at all; but that the
only class of Pharisee to which he, as a true and high-minded Israelite, would
have borne any shadow of resemblance, and that not in a spirit of self-content-
ment, but in a spirit of almost morbid and feverish anxiety to do all that
was commanded, would be the Tell-me-anything-more-to-do-and-I-will-do-it
14
Pharisee !
And this type of character, which" bears no remote resemblance to that
of many of the devotees of the monastic life however erroneous it may be,
however bitter must be the pain by which it must be accompanied,
however deep the dissatisfaction which it must ultimately suffer is very
far from being necessarily ignoble. It is indeed based on the enormous
error that man can deserve heaven by care in external practices; that he
can win by quantitative goodness his entrance into the kingdom of God ;
that
i Matt. vi. 5. Matt. vL 2. Matt, xxiii. 5
Mark vii. 4 & John vii. 49. Matt, xxiii. 15,
1 Luke xs. 47. Luke xviii. It Matt. xxii. 17.
w Yadayim. Ckolin. M Ozekin.
See Schottgen, Hor. Hebr. pp. 7, 160, 204.
14 Jcr. Berachtith, jx. 7, &o. See Life of Christ, vol p. 248, where these name* an
explained.