faith, but not without ingrafting on it something of heathen philosophy. War breached the walls which separated them from other nationalities, and the schools of the heathen entered at the breach. Carried away captive by Nebuchadnezzar, they imbibed some Oriental ideas during the Babylonian captivity. Restored only to be overrun by Alexander the Great, they were subjected to the influence of the Grecian schools as well as to the dominion of the Grecian sword. Conquered by Ptolemy, their learned men, carried by him into Egypt, endeavored to combine the religion of Moses with the fanciful philosophy of a land as fertile in imagination as in agricultural products. Brought under the dominion of Antiochus Epiphanes, who, resolving to obliterate Judaism and substitute the religion of Greece, planted his own image in the Temple, commanded swine to be offered on the altar, and outrivaled the later cruelties of Nero against the Christians in the bitterness of his persecutions of the persistent Jew, many from fear adopted the forms of a philosophy which had no real charms for them.

Then it was the Pharisaic party arose. They constituted at first the purists of Judaism. They insisted on the divorce of the Jewish religion from heathen worship and philosophy. They insisted that nothing should be added to the Jewish religion by importation. They were the reformers of the second century before Christ. They braved, undaunted, the bitterest persecution that untempered cruelty, armed with unlimited power, could heap upon them. They passed through fires which made every nerve iron and every sinew steel. In this experience they were sustained by a faith at first devout, eventually fanatical, in the providence of God. They were his chosen people. They were assured through him of eventual victory. The events which seemed adverse were ordered by his will. To submit to the divine decrees was their first religious duty. Their foes were the foes of God, whose power he would surely break, and whom, at the last, he would miserably destroy. In the persecutions of the present they con

soled thewselves with expectations of the future. The hope of a Messianic kingdom cheered them in every disaster and defeat. Thus, out of their sufferings they evolved the two characteristic features of their creed-faith in immortality, faith in the absolute decrees of God. All things were ordered by his will. Nothing, therefore, went wrong. All things that seemed so to do he would righten in the future.

But in the maintenance of this faith they were met at the outset by an argument which sorely perplexed them. They borrowed their hope from the future. But when they were asked for the evidences of immortality in the laws of Moses, they were compelled to confess that those laws contained no clear revelation of any future state. On the contrary, it seemed in the main to represent God's government as administered by temporal rewards and punishments. "If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the fat of the land; but if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword,"* was Isaiah's correct epitome of the system which the Jewish law afforded. If there were intimations of immortality which Christ afterward discovered, they were merely intimations. Nowhere was Job's question, "If a man die, shall he live again?" categorically answered.

Nor were there any commands to prayer. The later books of the prophets, indeed, partially supplied this seeming omission; but it certainly was omitted from the Mosaic statutes. The Pharisees did not comprehend that these statutes were the civil constitution of a state. They did not perceive that considerations drawn from immortality are not the proper sanctions of civil laws. They did not understand that prayer is a privilege rather than a duty; to be instinctively demanded by the soul rather than enjoined upon it by positive enactments. Pressed by their opponents, who demanded authority for the faith which they rightly held, but the foundations whereof are in the intuitions of the soul rather than in the statutes of a commonwealth, they invented a singular *Isaiah i., 19, 20.

fiction. They asserted that during the forty days which Moses spent with God in the mount, Jehovah gave him an additional revelation. In this he promulgated the doctrine of a future life and the duty of prayer. In this, too, he af forded an authoritative interpretation of all the precepts of the written law. This additional revelation had been, they said, subsequently handed down from father to son. It constituted a body of traditions of equal binding force with the Scriptures which accompanied it.

Such a doctrine, once incorporated in their religion, opened wide the door to corruption. The oral traditions soon overgrew the written Word. The laws of Moses occupy less than a fifth part of our Bible. The Babylonian Talmud occupies twelve large folio volumes. The traditions became to the Pharisees what in the Middle Ages the decrees of the Church and the literature of the fathers were to the Romanist. The Scriptures took a subordinate place. Heaven was depicted as a school of Rabbis, God himself the chief Rabbi, The words of the scribes were declared to be more delightful than the words of the prophets. "The Bible is like water, and the Mishna like wine," became a Pharisaic proverb. To read the Scriptures was considered as dangerous for the common people in the time of Christ as in the time of Luther. To read them, except in the light of the authoritative interpretation, was equivalent to atheism. Nor was it only the place of the Scriptures which this oral tradition usurped. It became the exclusive object of study among the learned of the land. To investigate Grecian philosophy subjected the student to an anathema. To teach a single precept of the law demanded the pupil's eternal gratitude; to forget a single point of doctrine endangered his soul.

At the time of Christ this Rabbinical law was still mainly, if not exclusively taught by word of mouth in the schools, and handed down by successive Rabbis from generation to generation. Great sacredness attached to it; great mystery enwrapped it. It was forbidden to be written. When at

last it was reduced to writing, a curse was pronounced on whoever should translate it into any heathen tongue. To teach it to a woman, a child, or a gentile was a profanation. In the second century after Christ the first written compilation of this oral law was effected. Three centuries later the commentaries of the scribes were added. The former is termed the Mishna. The latter is called the Gemara. The two combined constitute the Talmud. The prohibition of its translation was a work of supererogation. No one is ever likely to attempt to exhume from this valley of dry bones more than a few single anatomical specimens. There is no book about which more has been written and less is known than this Jewish Talmud.* Like the religion of which it is the literature, it is a singular mass of contradictions, of wisdom and folly, of philosophy and of wild Oriental imagination, of pure ethics and of loose and pernicious casuistry. Let any one attempt to analyze the religious literature of Europe; let him compile in one work the pure spirituality of Madame Guyon and the abominable licentiousness of the miracle plays; the high-toned morality of Pascal and the casuistries of Escobar and Reginald, which he so indignantly protests against; the religious philosophy of Augustine, the father of modern theology, with the disquisitions on angelology by Thomas Aquinas, and he will have proposed to himself a task somewhat similar to that which is essayed in the attempt to analyze the Talmud, a compend of the Jewish literature of many centuries-" the sweepings of the intellectual thresh

* Of the Talmud there are two editions, the Babylon and the Jerusalem, in which the text, or Mishna, is the same; the commentary, or the Gemara, is different. The reader who is puzzled by finding constantly the words Gemara, Mishna, and Talmud used interchangeably, may be helped by the following tabular statement:

The Talmud is composed of

The Mishna, or oral law, first written in the 2d century after Christ.

Gemara, or commentaries of the scribes, of which there are two, comprising, with the Mishna,

Jerusalem Talmud, 4th century.

Babylon Talmud, 6th century.

ing-floor of Judaism, accumulated during some centuries, and consigned to the Talmudic garner without any effectual winnowing.*

That it contains some clear enunciation of divine truth is not to be denied. Scattered through its pages are many maxims which embody the spirit of Christianity. In a negative form the golden rule is there found, "Thou shalt not do to thy neighbor what is hateful to thyself." The law of love, enacted under Moses and repeated by Christ, it reiterates— "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Secret charity it commends: "He who gives in secret is greater than Moses himself." Humility and self-abnegation it commends: “Whoever runs after greatness, greatness runs away from him; he who runs from greatness, greatness follows him." Interior sins it rebukes: "Pride is like idolatry." Immortality it proclaims: "This world is like an inn, the world to come like home." It even gives a glimpse of the Fatherhood of God: "If we are called servants of God, we are also called his children." The parallels of these maxims in the teachings of Christ and his apostles will readily occur to the reader.† Remembering, however, that the Talmud was not compiled till several centuries after Christ; remembering, too, that it has borrowed, without hesitation and without credit, from the literature of the East and from the philosophy of Greece, the suspicion that its compilers have put some of the words of Christ into the mouths of the ancient Rabbis is not without at least a seeming foundation.

But these maxims are as single stars shining in a murky night. They lie like nuggets of gold imbedded in masses of quartz. For the most part the theology is puerile, the imagination extravagant, the morals pernicious, the very language often so indecent as to forbid translation. We have depicted the best side of the Talmud. Its worst aspects hide in an ob

* S. H. Cowper in Journal of Sacred Literature, Jan., 1868, p. 257. † Matt. vii., 12; xxii., 39; vi., 2-4; Luke xiv., 7-11; Col. iii., 5; Heb. xi., 13, 14; John xv., 15.