The life and work of St. Paul

SAUL THE PHARISBB. 3?
that kingdom is meat and drink, not righteousness and peace and joy in
believing. Occasionally, by some flash of sudden conviction, one or two of
the wisest Doctors of the Law seem to have had some glimmering of the
truth, that it is not by works of righteousness, but only by God's mercy,
that man is saved. But the normal and all but universal belief of the religious
party among the Jews was that, though of the 248 commands and 365 prohibitions
of the Mosaic Law some were " light " and some were " heavy," 1
yet
that to one and all alike not only in the spirit but in the letter not only
in the actual letter, but in the boundless inferences to which the letter might
lead when every grain of sense and moaning had been crushed out of it
under mountain loads of " decisions "
a rigidly scrupulous obedience was due.
This was what God absolutely required. This, and this only, came up to the
true conception of the blameless righteousness of the Law. And how much
depended on it ! Nothing less than recovered freedom, recovered empire,
recovered pre-eminence among the nations ; nothing less than the restoration
of their national independence in all its perfectness, of their national worship
in all its splendour ; nothing less than the old fire upon the altar, the holy oil,
the sacred ark, the cloud of glory between the wings of the cherubim ; nothing
less, in short, than the final hopes which for many centuries they and their
fathers had most deeply cherished. If but one person could only for one day
keep the whole Law and not offend in one point nay, if but one person could
but keep that one point of the Law which affected the due observance of the
Sabbath then (so the Rabbis taught) the troubles of Israel would be ended,
and the Messiah at last would come. 2
And it was at nothing less than this that, with all the intense ardour of
his nature, Saul had aimed. It is doubtful whether at this period the utter
nullity of the Oral Law could have dawned upon him. It sometimes dawned
even on the Rabbis through the dense fogs of sophistry and self-importance,
and even on their lips we sometimes find the utterances of the Prophets
that humility and justice and mercy are better than
"
sacrifice. There was
a flute in the Temple," says the Talmud, "preserved from the days of
Moses it was ; smooth, thin, and formed of a reed. At the command of the
king it was overlaid with gold, which ruined its sweetness of tone until the
gold was taken away. There were also a cymbal and a mortar, which had
become injured in course of time, and were mended by workmen of Alexandria
summoned by the wise men but their usefulness ;
was so completely
destroyed by this process, that it was necessary to restore them to their
former condition." 3 Are not these things an allegory? Do they not imply
that by overlaying the written Law with what they called the gold, but what
1 See Life of Christ, ii. 239. All these distinctions were a part of the Seyyag, the
"hedge of the Law," which it was the one raison d'etre of Kabbinism to construct. The
object of all Jewish learning was to make a mishmereth ("ordinance," Lev. xviii. 30) to
God'u mishmereth, (Tebhamdth, f. 21, 1).
3 See Acts iii. 19, where 5rrs 3* is "in order that haply," not "when," as in E. V,
(Shabbath, f. 118, 6).
* EircAin, t. 10, 2.