The life and work of St. Paul

SAUL THE PHARISEE. 39
believed, between sunset and darkness, or, as the Pharisees asserted, between
the beginning and end of sunset ? Was it a matter worth the discussion of two
schools to decide whether an egg laid on a festival might or might not be
eaten P 1 Were all these things indeed, and in themselves, important ? And
even if they were, would it be errors as to those littlenesses that would really
kindle the wrath of a jealous God ? How did they contribute to the beauty of
holiness ? in what way did they tend to fill the soul with the mercy
which was
better than sacrifice, or to educate it in that justice and humility, that patience
and purity, that peace and love, which, as some of the prophets had found grace
to see, were dearer to God than thousands of rams and ten thousands of rivers
of oil P And behind all these questions lay that yet deeper one which agitated
the schools of Jewish thought the question whether, after all, man could reach,
or with all his efforts must inevitably fail to reach, that standard of righteousness
which God and the Law required ? And if indeed he failed, what more
had the Law to say to him than to deliver its sentence of unreprieved condemnation
and indiscriminate death ? 2
Moreover, was there not mingled with all this nominal adoration of the Law
a deeply-seated hypocrisy, so deep that it was in a great measure unconscious P
Even before the days of Christ the Rabbis had learnt the art of straining out
gnats and swallowing camels. They had long learnt to nullify what they professed
to defend. The ingenuity of Hillel was quite capable of getting rid of
any Mosaic regulation which had been found practically burdensome. Pharisees
and Sadducees alike had managed to set aside in their own favour, by the devices
of the " mixtures," all that was disagreeable to themselves in the Sabbath
scrupulosity. The fundamental institution of the Sabbatic year had been
stultified by the mere legal fiction of the prosbol. Teachers who were on the
high road to a casuistry which could construct " rules " out of every superfluous
particle had found it easy to win credit for ingenuity by elaborating prescriptions
to which Moses would have listened in mute astonishment. If there be
one thing more definitely laid down in the Law than another it is the unclean-
ness of creeping things, yet the Talmud assures us that " no one is appointed
a member of the Sanhedrin who does not possess sufficient ingenuity to prove
from the written Law that a creeping thing is ceremonially clean ;" 3 and that
there was an unimpeachable disciple at Jabne who could adduce one hundred
and fifty arguments in favour of the ceremonial cleanness of creeping things. 4
Sophistry like this was at work even in the days when the young student of
Tarsus sat at the feet of Gamaliel and can we ;
imagine any period of his life
when he would not have been wearied by a system at once so meaningless, so
stringent, and so insincere P Could he fail to notice that they " hugely violated
what they trivially obeyed P"
We may see from St. Paul's own words that these years must have been
very troubled years. Under the dignified exterior of the Pharisee lay a wildly-
an anxious brain throbbed with terrible questionings under the
beating heart ;
See Bltsah, I ad in.
* Bom. x. 5 ; Gal. til. 10. Sankedr. f, 17, 1.
* ErubMn, f. 13, 2,