tability. The Pharisee was an infallible and faultless man, a
pedant always right in his own conceit, taking the first place in the
synagogue, praying in the street, giving alms to the sound of a
trumpet, and caring greatly for salutations. Jesus maintained that
each one ought to await the kingdom of God with fear and trembling.
The bad religious tendency represented by Pharisaism did not reign
without opposition. Many men before or during the time of Jesus, such
as Jesus, son of Sirach (one of the true ancestors of Jesus of
Nazareth), Gamaliel, Antigonus of Soco, and especially the gentle and
noble Hillel, had taught much more elevated, and almost Gospel
doctrines. But these good seeds had been choked. The beautiful maxims
of Hillel, summing up the whole law as equity,[1] those of Jesus, son
of Sirach, making worship consist in doing good,[2] were forgotten or
anathematized.[3] Shammai, with his narrow and exclusive spirit, had
prevailed. An enormous mass of "traditions" had stifled the Law,[4]
under pretext of protecting and interpreting it. Doubtless these
conservative measures had their share of usefulness; it is well that
the Jewish people loved its Law even to excess, since it is this
frantic love which, in saving Mosaism under Antiochus Epiphanes and
under Herod, has preserved the leaven from which Christianity was to
emanate. But taken in themselves, all these old precautions were only
puerile. The synagogue, which was the depository of them, was no more
than a parent of error. Its reign was ended; and yet to require its
abdication was to require the impossible, that which an established
power has never done or been able to do.

[Footnote 1: Talm. of Bab., _Shabbath_, 31 _a_; _Joma_, 35 _b_.]

[Footnote 2: _Eccles._ xvii. 21, and following, xxxv. 1, and
following.]

[Footnote 3: Talm. of Jerus., _Sanhedrim_, xi. 1; Talm. of Bab.,
_Sanhedrim_, 100 _b_.]

[Footnote 4: Matt. xv. 2.]

The conflicts of Jesus with official hypocrisy were continual. The
ordinary tactics of the reformers who appeared in the religious state
which we have just described, and which might be called "traditional
formalism," were to oppose the "text" of the sacred books to
"traditions." Religious zeal is always an innovator, even when it
pretends to be in the highest degree conservative. Just as the
neo-Catholics of our days become more and more remote from the Gospel,
so the Pharisees left the Bible at each step more and more. This is