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the enormous importance of all their own sacred records and traditions. They gathered up every fragment that remained, redacted and arranged most carefully, with the fullest comments, every scrap of the prophets, now that the great order of the prophets had become extinct. They were building the sepulchres of their fathers with a vengeance now that those grand patriarchs of the religious life were dead; and in the verses of the Bible, and their own commentaries upon them, they were not slow to find what they desired to find-divine rules for the conduct of life, and inspired solutions of its bewildering difficulties. When a man was in any doubt or perplexity, he would take his Old Testament and find some law which, although it did not quite meet the case, met it nearly enough; and he would then get some meaning suitable to his own case out of the text, and call that an inspired solution.

39. The best of such glosses were from time to time written down, and were looked upon as to some extent sacred themselves. By degrees there arose in this way a vast tradition which got written down and put into form somewhere between 520 B.C. and 220 A.D. This remarkable book is still extant, and it is called the Talmud. We must try and realise a little more clearly the necessities out of which the Talmud sprung, and the nature of the Talmudical writings. Many of the old laws of Moses, such, for instance, as those about capital punishment, were very harsh, but they belonged to the sacred records. They had to be applied, yet it was

practically impossible to apply them without violating the instincts of an altered state of civilisation and the inspiration of a more humane age. They must, therefore, be explained and adapted to altered circumstances by a method of ingenious interpretation; every sentence must be qualified, nothing need be taken literally. The Scribes who sat in the seat of Moses managed this part of the work; in their hands rested the development of, and the transcription of the Oral Law,' which consisted of an elaborate commentary on, and qualification of the Mosaic Law, adapted to altered times and circum

stances.

The teaching of Jesus Christ is thus quite Talmudical in spirit, when He says Moses for the hardness of your hearts gave you such and such commandments; but as He did not seem anxious to trace His new precepts in each case back to the Law, the people at once detected the difference of His method, and observed that He taught them with authority-His own authority, and not as the Scribes, i.e. with comments on Mosaic authority.

40. The Talmud is one more witness to the necessity of constant change-constant remodelling of old forms, restating of old truths, the peculiar method of interpretation used in the Talmud, the attempt to make a sentence yield what it cannot properly yield, because it really was never intended to bear the new meanings, the stretching of formulas till they fairly gave way; all this is what Christ alluded to when He spoke of pouring new wine into old bottles, which burst them (leather skin

bottles), or sewing new cloth on to old, which would certainly cause a rent.

We shall not have far to go to find something like the Talmudical method in the present administration of our own Church and State. Our laws are being constantly interpreted and modified, or no just administration of law could be carried on. When laws become obsolete they must be repealed, or new readings put upon them. In the State they are usually repealed. The Church is less fortunate. We have had some striking instances of attempts to stretch and strain and explain away formulas in our Ecclesiastical Courts of late; you know how the poor judges have been at their wits' end to interpret the doctrines of the Church, and to interpret the laws of the Church, so as to avoid the necessity of excommunicating everybody all round, or coming into hopeless collision with common sense. You know what a scandal has been in the eyes of simple folk the way in which the articles have been twisted instead of being repealed. I am not against twisting them if you cannot repeal them; it is better to twist them publicly, and say they are twisted, than to turn out of the Church those high church, those low church, those broad church clergy, who are the vital sap of the Establishment, who are the champions of piety, or of order, or progress. It is much better to make out that obsolete statements ought to mean this, in spite of what they seem to mean, or originally did mean, if you cannot modify them at present; for everybody knows that their repeal is only a question of time for which patience is needed, seeing that the

formulas of belief and the laws of our Church were made at a time when people did not know what they now know, and now they know better, and there is an end of it. To admit this as the position of liberal clergymen and churchmen, is the only way to deal with the differences of opinion within the Church, unless you are sanguine enough to suppose that you can make every one think alike. Theology must be modified in the long run to accord with the best obtainable religious feeling and common sense. Meanwhile, it is no doubt much easier to escape out of the Church, and leave it to fall, like the old Catholic abbeys, into a beautiful ruin, than to stay in and assist with patience and long-suffering at the reform of the most conservative and certainly one of the most valuable institutions in England. What ought to be done with ecclesiastical law is what is being daily done, and done without much difficulty, with civil law. Laws that are out of date, or injurious, or unjust, are repealed; only civil laws are repealed or modified much more easily according to common sense than ecclesiastical laws and religious beliefs; because when people become very religious they seem too often to lose their common If we admit the piety of its members, Convocation is an excellent example of this. When judges have to deal with hard and fast laws connected with the affairs of secular life, they ask their common sense to guide them. They point out where the law is unjust, they show what is obsolete, what ought to be repealed; they agitate for improvement; and what cannot be repealed they construe Talmudically in accordance with

sense.

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modern liberal and humane tendencies-they qualify, they interpret the parts not always literally, but looking to the spirit of the whole; and just what we do with our civil law, and what we have in a measure feebly attempted to do with our religious law, the Jews in the Talmud tried to do with the laws of Moses. Many of the Mosaic laws were in fact obsolete, some rules had to be deduced, other precepts had to be inferred, and most had to be modified in the direction of a more and more advanced and spiritual morality. Thus it happened that, at the time of Christ's coming, we get a morality in the Talmud far in advance of the Mosaic dispensation, and having many striking points of contact with Christian ethics.

41. But to understand rightly the manifest connection between Talmudical and Christian ethics, we must remember that the Talmud was divided into Mishna and Gemara, that is to say, contained not only a legal but a legendary element. The intellectual faculties appropriated the legal portions of the Bible as we have pointed out, whilst the imaginative faculties took possession of the historical and prophetical portions, thus producing the Haggadah Legend or Saga, 'a thing without authority, a play of fancy, an allegory, a parable, a tale that pointed a moral and illustrated a question, that smoothed the billows of fierce debate, roused the slumbering attention, and was generally, to use its own phrase, "a comfort and a blessing."'

Thus for it is necessary to bear in mind the legal and legendary nature of the popular instruction of the day

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