_; and a man learns
at last to value himself as his conduct is valued by a critical
onlooker, and to make it the business of his life to produce
"results" which can be weighed and measured by conventional
standards, rather than to grow in grace,--with silent, subtle,
unobtrusive growth.

Were I to try to prove that the _regime_ of the Law was necessarily
fatal to the development of Man's higher faculties--conscience,
freedom, reason, imagination, intuition, aspiration, and the rest--I
should waste my time. Legalism, as a scheme of life, is based on the
assumption that development along the lines of Man's nature is a
movement towards perdition; and to reproach the legalist for having
arrested the growth of the human spirit by the pressure of the Law
were to provoke the rejoinder that he had done what he intended
to do. The two schemes of Salvation--the mechanical and the
evolutional--have so little in common that neither can pass judgment
on the other without begging the question that is in dispute. When I
come to consider the effect of legalism--or rather of the philosophy
that underlies legalism--on education, I may perhaps be able to find
some court of law in which the case between the two schemes can be
tried with the tacit consent of both. Meanwhile I can but note
that in the atmosphere of the Law growth is as a matter of fact
arrested,--arrested so effectually that the counter process of
degeneration begins to take its place. The proof of this statement,
if proof be needed, is that legalism, when its master principle has
been fully grasped and fearlessly applied, takes the form of
Pharisaism, and that it is possible for the Pharisee to "count
himself to have apprehended," to congratulate himself on his
spiritual achievement, to believe, in all seriousness, that he has
closed his account with God.

Pharisaism is at once the logical consummation and the _reductio ad
absurdum_ of legalism. It is to the genius of Israel that we owe that
practical interpretation of the fundamental principle of
supernaturalism, which was embodied in the doctrine of salvation
through obedience to the letter of a Law. And it is to the genius
of Israel that we owe that rigorously logical interpretation of
the _axiomata media_ of legalism, which issued in due season in
Pharisaism. The world owes much to the courage and sincerity
of Israel,--to his unique force of character, to his fanatical
earnestness, to his relentless tenacity of purp