9.  The leaders of the popular thought, on the other hand, were chiefly noted for their religious zeal and theological acumen.  They represented the outgrowth of that spirit which in the Maccabean time had risked all to defend the sanctity of the temple and the right of God’s people to worship him according to his law.  They were known as Pharisees, because, as the name ("separated”) indicates, they insisted on the separation of the people of God from all the defilements and snares of the heathen life round about them.  The Pharisees constituted a fraternity devoted to the scrupulous observance of law and tradition in all the concerns of daily life.  They were specialists in religion, and were the ideal representatives of Judaism.  Their distinguishing characteristic was reverence for the law; their religion was the religion of a book.  By punctilious obedience of the law man might hope to gain a record of merit which should stand to his credit and secure his reward when God should finally judge the world.  Because life furnished many situations not dealt with in the written law, there was need of its authoritative interpretation, in order that ignorance might not cause a man to transgress.  These interpretations constituted an oral law which practically superseded the written code, and they were handed down from generation to generation as “the traditions of the fathers.”  The existence of this oral law made necessary a company of scribes and lawyers whose business it was to know the traditions and transmit them to their pupils.  These scribes were the teachers of Israel, the leaders of the Pharisees, and the most highly revered class in the community.  Pharisaism at its beginning was intensely earnest, but in the time of Jesus the earnest spirit had died out in zealous formalism.  This was the inevitable result of their virtual substitution of the written law for the living God.  Their excessive reverence had banished God from practical relation to the daily life.  They held that he had declared his will once for all in the law.  His name was scrupulously revered, his worship was cultivated with minutest care, his judgment was anticipated with dread; but he himself, like an Oriental monarch, was kept far from common life in an isolation suitable to his awful holiness.  By a natural consequence conscience gave place to scrupulous regard for tradition in the religion of the scribes.  The chief question with them was not, Is this right? but, What say the elders?  The soul’s sensitiveness of response to God’s will and God’s truth was lost in a maze of traditions which awoke no spontaneous Amen in the moral nature, consequently there was frequent substitution of reputation for character.  The Pharisees could make void the command, Honor thy father, by an ingenious application of the principle of dedication of property to God (Mark vii. 8-13), and thus under the guise of scrupulous regard for law discovered ways for legal disregard of law.  Their theory of religion gave abundant room for a piety which made broad its phylacteries and lengthened its prayers, while neglecting judgment, mercy, and the love of God.