[Footnote 1:  Matt. iii. 15; 1 Cor. i. 17.]

[Footnote 2:  Matt. vii. 21; Luke vi. 46.]

[Footnote 3:  Matt. xv. 8; Mark vii. 6.  Cf.  Isaiah xxix. 13.]

The observance of the Sabbath was the principal point upon which was raised the whole edifice of Pharisaic scruples and subtleties.  This ancient and excellent institution had become a pretext for the miserable disputes of casuists, and a source of superstitious beliefs.[1] It was believed that Nature observed it; all intermittent springs were accounted “Sabbatical."[2] This was the point upon which Jesus loved best to defy his adversaries.[3] He openly violated the Sabbath, and only replied by subtle raillery to the reproaches that were heaped upon him.  He despised still more a multitude of modern observances, which tradition had added to the Law, and which were dearer than any other to the devotees on that very account.  Ablutions, and the too subtle distinctions between pure and impure things, found in him a pitiless opponent:  “There is nothing from without a man,” said he, “that entering into him can defile him:  but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.”  The Pharisees, who were the propagators of these mummeries, were unceasingly denounced by him.  He accused them of exceeding the Law, of inventing impossible precepts, in order to create occasions of sin:  “Blind leaders of the blind,” said he, “take care lest ye also fall into the ditch.”  “O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh."[4]

[Footnote 1:  See especially the treatise Shabbath of the Mishnah and the Livre des Jubiles (translated from the Ethiopian in the Jahrbuecher of Ewald, years 2 and 3), chap.  I.]

[Footnote 2:  Jos., B.J., VII. v. 1; Pliny, H.N., xxxi. 18.  Cf.  Thomson, The Land and the Book, i. 406, and following.]

[Footnote 3:  Matt. xii. 1-14; Mark ii. 23-28; Luke vi. 1-5, xiii. 14, and following, xiv. 1, and following.]

[Footnote 4:  Matt. xii. 34, xv. 1, and following, 12, and following, xxiii. entirely; Mark vii. 1, and following, 15, and following; Luke vi. 45, xi. 39, and following.]

He did not know the Gentiles sufficiently to think of founding anything lasting upon their conversion.  Galilee contained a great number of pagans, but, as it appears, no public and organized worship of false gods.[1] Jesus could see this worship displayed in all its splendor in the country of Tyre and Sidon, at Caesarea Philippi and in the Decapolis, but he paid little attention to it.  We never find in him the wearisome pedantry of the Jews of his time, those declamations against idolatry, so familiar to his co-religionists from the time of Alexander, and which fill, for instance, the book of “Wisdom."[2] That which struck him in the pagans was not their idolatry, but their servility.[3] The young Jewish