best to defy his adversaries.[3] He openly violated the
Sabbath, and only replied by subtle raillery to the reproaches that
were heaped upon him. He despised still more a multitude of modern
observances, which tradition had added to the Law, and which were
dearer than any other to the devotees on that very account. Ablutions,
and the too subtle distinctions between pure and impure things, found
in him a pitiless opponent: "There is nothing from without a man,"
said he, "that entering into him can defile him: but the things which
come out of him, those are they that defile the man." The Pharisees,
who were the propagators of these mummeries, were unceasingly
denounced by him. He accused them of exceeding the Law, of inventing
impossible precepts, in order to create occasions of sin: "Blind
leaders of the blind," said he, "take care lest ye also fall into the
ditch." "O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good
things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh."[4]

[Footnote 1: See especially the treatise _Shabbath_ of the Mishnah and
the _Livre des Jubiles_ (translated from the Ethiopian in the
_Jahrbuecher_ of Ewald, years 2 and 3), chap. I.]

[Footnote 2: Jos., _B.J._, VII. v. 1; Pliny, _H.N._, xxxi. 18. Cf.
Thomson, _The Land and the Book_, i. 406, and following.]

[Footnote 3: Matt. xii. 1-14; Mark ii. 23-28; Luke vi. 1-5, xiii. 14,
and following, xiv. 1, and following.]

[Footnote 4: Matt. xii. 34, xv. 1, and following, 12, and following,
xxiii. entirely; Mark vii. 1, and following, 15, and following; Luke
vi. 45, xi. 39, and following.]

He did not know the Gentiles sufficiently to think of founding
anything lasting upon their conversion. Galilee contained a great
number of pagans, but, as it appears, no public and organized worship
of false gods.[1] Jesus could see this worship displayed in all its
splendor in the country of Tyre and Sidon, at Caesarea Philippi and in
the Decapolis, but he paid little attention to it. We never find in
him the wearisome pedantry of the Jews of his time, those declamations
against idolatry, so familiar to his co-religionists from the time of
Alexander, and which fill, for instance, the book of "Wisdom."[2] That
which struck him in the pagans was not their idolatry, but their
servility.[3] The young Jewish democrat agreeing on this point with
Judas the Gaulonite, and admitting no master but God, was hurt at the
honors with which they surrounded th