[Footnote 4:  Matt. v. 20, xv. 4, xxiii. 3, 16, and following; John viii. 7; Jos., Ant., XII. ix. 1; XIII. x. 5.]

It is easy to understand the antipathy which, in such an impassioned state of society, must necessarily break out between Jesus and persons of this character.  Jesus recognized only the religion of the heart, whilst that of the Pharisees consisted almost exclusively in observances.  Jesus sought the humble and outcasts of all kinds, and the Pharisees saw in this an insult to their religion of respectability.  The Pharisee was an infallible and faultless man, a pedant always right in his own conceit, taking the first place in the synagogue, praying in the street, giving alms to the sound of a trumpet, and caring greatly for salutations.  Jesus maintained that each one ought to await the kingdom of God with fear and trembling.  The bad religious tendency represented by Pharisaism did not reign without opposition.  Many men before or during the time of Jesus, such as Jesus, son of Sirach (one of the true ancestors of Jesus of Nazareth), Gamaliel, Antigonus of Soco, and especially the gentle and noble Hillel, had taught much more elevated, and almost Gospel doctrines.  But these good seeds had been choked.  The beautiful maxims of Hillel, summing up the whole law as equity,[1] those of Jesus, son of Sirach, making worship consist in doing good,[2] were forgotten or anathematized.[3] Shammai, with his narrow and exclusive spirit, had prevailed.  An enormous mass of “traditions” had stifled the Law,[4] under pretext of protecting and interpreting it.  Doubtless these conservative measures had their share of usefulness; it is well that the Jewish people loved its Law even to excess, since it is this frantic love which, in saving Mosaism under Antiochus Epiphanes and under Herod, has preserved the leaven from which Christianity was to emanate.  But taken in themselves, all these old precautions were only puerile.  The synagogue, which was the depository of them, was no more than a parent of error.  Its reign was ended; and yet to require its abdication was to require the impossible, that which an established power has never done or been able to do.

[Footnote 1:  Talm. of Bab., Shabbath, 31 a; Joma, 35 b.]

[Footnote 2:  Eccles. xvii. 21, and following, xxxv. 1, and following.]

[Footnote 3:  Talm. of Jerus., Sanhedrim, xi. 1; Talm. of Bab., Sanhedrim, 100 b.]

[Footnote 4:  Matt. xv. 2.]

The conflicts of Jesus with official hypocrisy were continual.  The ordinary tactics of the reformers who appeared in the religious state which we have just described, and which might be called “traditional formalism,” were to oppose the “text” of the sacred books to “traditions.”  Religious zeal is always an innovator, even when it pretends to be in the highest degree conservative.  Just as the neo-Catholics of our days become more