his
attitude towards the problem of keeping food warm for the Sabbath
day. "According to Exodus xvi. 23, it was forbidden to bake and to
boil on the Sabbath. Hence the food, which it was desired to eat hot
on the Sabbath, was to be prepared before its commencement, and kept
warm by artificial means. In doing this, however, care must be taken
that the existing heat was not increased, which would have been
'boiling.' Hence the food must be put only into such substances as
would maintain its heat, not into such as might possibly increase it.
'Food to be kept warm for the Sabbath must not be put into oil-dregs,
manure, salt, chalk, or sand, whether moist or dry, nor into straw,
grape-skins, flock, or vegetables, if these are damp, though it may
if they are dry. It may, however, be put into clothes, amidst fruits,
pigeons' feathers, and flax tow. R. Jehudah declares flax tow
unallowable and permits only coarse tow.'"[10] Following his rule
out, step by step, with unflinching loyalty, into these ridiculous
consequences, the Pharisee had entirely lost the power of seeing that
they were ridiculous, and was well content to believe, with Jehudah,
that the difference between keeping food warm in coarse tow and in
flax tow was the difference between life and death. This _reductio
ad absurdum_ of legalism is exactly paralleled, in many of our
elementary schools, in the answers to arithmetical questions given by
the children. The "Fifth Standard" boys who told their inspector, as
an answer to an easy problem, that a given room was five shillings
and sixpence wide, had followed out their rule--they had
unfortunately got hold of a wrong rule--step by step, till it led
them to a conclusion, the intrinsic absurdity of which they were one
and all unable to see.[11] There are many elementary schools in
England in which a majority of the answers given to quite easy
problems would certainly be wrong, and a respectable minority of them
ludicrously wrong. Nor is this to be wondered at; for though the
types of problems that can be set in elementary schools are not
numerous, to provide his pupils with the by-rules which shall enable
them in all, or even in most cases, to determine which of the
recognised rules are appropriate to the given situation, passes the
wit of the teacher. But if the helplessness of so many elementary
scholars in the face of an arithmetical problem is lamentable, still
more lamentable is the fact that the scholar is seld