salvation
through obedience will lead its votaries, when its master
principle--that of distrust of human nature--has been followed out
into all its natural consequences,--followed out, as it was by
Pharisaism, with a fearless logic and a fixed tenacity of purpose.
An immense and ever-growing host of formulated rules, not one in a
hundred of which makes any appeal to the heart of Man or has any
meaning for his higher reason, will crush his life down, slowly and
inexorably, beneath their deadly burden. "At every step, at the work
of his calling, at prayer, at meals, at home and abroad, from early
morning till late in the evening, from youth to old age, the dead,
the deadening formula"[3] will await him. The path of obedience
for the sake of obedience speedily degenerates into the path of
mechanical obedience; and the end of that path is the triumph of
machinery over life.

For it is to the letter of the Law, rather than to the spirit, that
the strict legalist is bound to conform. The letter of the Law is
divine; and obedience to it is within the power of every man who will
take the trouble to learn its commandments. What the spirit of the
Law may be, is beyond the power of fallen Man to determine; and were
an attempt made to interpret it, the result would be a state of
widespread moral chaos, for there would be as many interpretations of
it as there were minds that had the courage and the initiative to
undertake so audacious a task. As it is with the Law as such, so it
is with each of its numerous commandments. The man who professes to
obey the spirit of a commandment is in secret revolt against its
divine authority. For he is presuming to criticise it in the light
of his own conscience and insight, and to limit his obedience to it
to that particular aspect of it which he judges to be worthy of his
devotion. From such a criticism of the Fourth Commandment as "the
Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath" to open violation
of the letter of the commandment (on this occasion or on that) there
is but a single step. The whole structure of legalism would collapse
if men were allowed to absolve themselves from obedience to the
letter of the Law, out of regard for what they conceived to be its
spirit. To interpret a commandment, in the sense of providing for its
application to the fresh cases that may arise for treatment, is the
work, not of poets and prophets but of Doctors and Scribes. The path
of literal, and therefo