by the students of the Evangelists and of Josephus. But it passes the limits of ordinary intelligence to assign any principle, but that of mutual contradiction, to the unresting schism between the schools of Shamai and of Hillel.

Such were the sects and schools, and such the main topics of constant dispute, that were rife at Jerusalem during the childhood and the manhood of Christ. There is scarce a page of the Synoptic Gospels on which a clear and instructive light may not be thrown by the study of the topics which are introduced by the writers as too familiar to need explanation. We may even say, that the most obscure passages thus become plain, and that the true meaning of the words of Christ, the meaning which they bore to His hearers, comes out with unexpected force and often with unsuspected beauty. No one who reads the Gospels with a competent knowledge of the Talmud, will admit that they can otherwise be fully understood. On the entire history of the sons of Israel, from the days of Moses to our own, a comment is here afforded without which the text remains an enigma.

The diffusion of a competent knowledge of the Talmud would have a result which might be ungrateful to certain tempers, but which would be most beneficial to the interest of literature, both religious and ethical. It would tend to extinguish controversy. It might, alas! prove too true that the flames, when stamped out in one place, would break forth with renewed fury in another. But the plain man, who seeks truth for its own sake, would not fail to derive a benefit. As it is, while the clashing views of rival schools are based, in their common ignorance, on imaginary foundations, the unlearned observer may well feel perplexed. But when he finds where the real bone of contention lies, and sees how far the ground can be levelled and swept before the fight fairly begins, it may so chance that he will take but little interest in the contest, and rather leave it to those who are by temperament polemics and disputants quand même.

No subject, for example, has more bitterly divided certain sects of Protestants than what is called the Baptismal Controversy. This is a dispute that has been carried on almost entirely on false assumptions. The two main questions raised are, the age at which the rite of baptism should be administered, and the mode in which it should be effected. This is altogether a distinct question from that of the sacramental efficacy of the institution. It may be named the ritual, or ceremonial, dispute, as distinguished from that which is doctrinal or theological. The Romish Church, more suo,

cuts the question very short. It relies on its own tradition; and asperses, signs, and anoints every infant, in the name of the Church, within the shortest possible period after birth; thus expediting the passage from this world of many a weakly suckling. It deserves remark, that the one point connected with this rite which is accepted by the whole of Christendom as incontrovertible, is the essential necessity of the material employed. The pure element of water is indispensable. The two Eastern monotheistic rituals admit of the substitution of clean sand, for ceremonial ablutions, where water cannot be obtained. In the greater strictness of the Occidental rubric may be traced a mark of the direct filiation of the Christian rite with the administration of the total plunging bath, which the proselyte, and the Jew and Jewess, subject to certain legal pollution, were compelled to undergo. In extending the application of the rite to children, the water-dreading Italians have allowed the symbol of aspersion to replace the original practice; although the use of the element necessary for the total bath, but not necessary for a partial ablution, is retained. In the Greek Church, the original total immersion is still applied to infants, to the great furtherance of the survivorship of the strongest.

Had the controversialists who have vexed our language with the vehement dispute known as the Baptismal Controversy, taken the trouble to acquaint themselves with the facts which they were content to infer from one or two indistinct passages of the New Testament, the quarrel, if not absolutely prevented, would at all events have been confined within the limits of rational discussion. All parties must have recognised the universal practice, in the Catholic Church, of an initiatory rite; the legislation affecting which, if it ever had a definite existence, is entirely lost beneath the darkness of the first three centuries of persecution. Further, they would have traced an historic affiliation with an ordinary Jewish rite, and especially with the performance of that rite by John the son of Zacharias. Thirdly, they must have seen the absolute contrast existing between the actual Christian, and the ancient Jewish, rites, as to person, occasion, and method. With the ground thus cleared, it is of course possible to enter on a long and perplexed inquiry as to the character and effect of the institution. But, for the Baptismal Controversy, as it actually encumbers our shelves, there would have been no room.

While disputes that are rather ecclesiastical than religious must thus be narrowed, if not obviated, by a competent knowledge of the mother facts, quarrels of an altogether different

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order would have been entirely avoided, if the rulers of Catholic Christendom had been enlightened by some of the most rudimentary principles of the interpretation of the ancient Law.

The men who attributed to every word, and to every letter, of the Pentateuch a direct divine origin and ordination, yet admitted a maxim, inspired by the profoundest common sense, the application of which would have prevented the shameful struggle of the Holy See with the immortal Galileo. Loquitur lex, is the rule, phrasibus filiorum hominum. The highest human study, the Rabbins taught, was that of the Law. But if positive science, in other hands, made definite discoveries, there was an elasticity in the unchangeable Word that could never permit of any contradiction arising between Faith and Science. Cultivated Europe should blush to the very finger-nails at her ignorance of such an irenical and philosophical maxim, hidden in the neglected lore of the Jewish sages. It is true that a legislation like that of Moses might admit of a provision for the organic growth of human intelligence which would be fatal to a legislation like that of the Papacy. But the fact is hardly to the advantage of the latter.

We may take a step further in the same luminous direction. Men are not yet very old who can remember the alacrity with which theologians of different schools hastened to extinguish, first the glimmer and then the glow, which was thrown upon the unwritten history of mankind by the discoveries of Cuvier and his school. The excitement in men's minds in England on the subject was hardly less keen than that which was previously aroused, in cultivated Italy, by the announcements of Galileo. The Latin literature of the time of the Tuscan Artist' shows that a terror, like that caused by an actual earthquake, shook the most intelligent men. They felt as if the solid earth was falling from under them. In our time the fear was, perhaps, more narrow, but it was nevertheless intense. It was the conscientious opinion of many good men that the hypotheses of the immense antiquity of our planet; of the existence on its surface of successive forms of life, and of death; and of the long-descended and hoary age of the human species; were in contradiction to the plain words of the Book of Genesis. But the educated Jew would not be content, in this respect, with the enlargement of vision insured by the knowledge that the Divine Law spoke so as to be intelligible to its hearers. His light was yet brighter. He knew that the Mikra had its Agada no less than the Mishna. He knew that all the teachers of his people, in long line of associated Sanhedrin ascending to the great Master, Moses, himself, had shown

that the Holy Writings contained allegory as well as precept and history. He could have used the words of the writer of the Second Epistle of Peter in the sense in which they were composed-that no prophetic, or allegoric, part of Scripture was for the interpretation of idiotai—(idías émiλúσews)—men unlearned in the Law. He would have been told in plain terms by his Rabbins that the man who attached a literal meaning to an allegoric part of Scripture was a fool. He would soon have been made aware that the study of the work of the 'Creation,' as well as of the work of the Chariot,' † was specially prohibited to the unlearned. Without going to the full extent to which this view is carried by the Rabbins, critical discrimination, and due knowledge of the Sacred Books, are enough to show the purely absurd character of a group of English publications of which we may not even yet have seen

the last.

If we pass from the regions, which are yet far from being absolutely deserted, of ecclesiological controversy; if we shun any outburst of that guerilla warfare which is yet active on the confines where science and religious opinion march, we shall find that one special study of our own day, the pursuit of an exhaustive and determinative criticism, has yet very much to gain from a competent acquaintance with the Talmud. The very words of the Mishna are often quoted verbatim by the New Testament writers, as when Paul uses the phrase, The cup of blessing which we bless.' In the Sermon on the + Mount, Christ three times § distinctly quotes the Oral Law, by the appropriate phrase, It has been said by the elders,' He proceeds, on that and on other occasions, to give His judgment on points which we know to have been main topics of dispute between the doctors of the great schools of His day. Such was the controversy between the Beth Shamai and the Beth Hillel as to the causes which would justify a man in giving a Get, or bill of divorce. Such were various points at issue between the Pharisees, who exalted ceremonial observance

Gen. i.

† Ezek. i.

1 Cor. x. 16.

§ Matt. v. 21, 27, 33. The injunctions thus cited are taken from the Mishna, where it is explanatory of the Written Law. In v. 3138, and 43, are references to oral precepts which are not founded on the letter of the Pentateuch. A distinction is made between the two, both in the mode of quoting them, and in the character of the comment. In the first case the injunctions are fortified by the enunciation of their purport; in the second they are contradicted. This distinction pervades the whole teaching of Christ recorded in the Synoptic Gospels.

above doctrine, and the oral above the written Law, and the Karaites and Sadducees, who were the strict literalists of the day; the latter of whom questioned the certitude of the prevalent doctrine as to spirits and a future life, because it was not to be arrived at from the direct words of the Mikra. Such were those between the Herodians, who held that it is lawful to change forms of observance for purely worldly reasons, when constrained to do so by force, and the Gaulonites or Zealots, an offshoot of the Pharisees, who teach, in the Talmud, that the Jews can be subjects or tributaries of no king but the Eternal. Such, again, were the questions as to the observance of the rules laid down in the Seder Tahoroth, as to ablutions and purifications, and the prohibition of eating grains from the ear on the Sabbath. Such were the legal objections raised by the Pharisees, not to a miracle of healing, but to the breach of the Law of Sabbath by commanding a man to carry his bed on that day. In fact, the whole text of the New Testament is so full of references to the points around which the controversies of the great religious sects of the day revolved, that no distinct and intelligent idea of the meaning of the writers can be arrived at by persons who are altogether ignorant of the literary history of the period.

We may, indeed, well think it inexplicable that the doctors of the Christian Church should not have been induced by the plain language of Christ Himself to undertake that study of the Hebrew literature which was necessary to a clear grasp of the meaning of His words. It cannot be doubted that Christ gave the full weight of His authority to the support of the Oral Law. When He says of those who sit in Moses' seat, Whatsoever they bid you observe, observe and do,'* there can be no question of the written precepts, as to which no such enforcement could for a moment be thought necessary. The forms in which the Mikra and the Mishna are severally quoted are so distinct as to leave no pretext for confusion. The line which is drawn by Christ lies between the ancient constitutions, orally handed down, in elucidation of the brief injunctions of the Pentateuch, and those later regulations of the Sanhedrin, which had no such origin. In speaking of the unchangeable authority of the law of Moses, the whole body of written and ancient traditional legislation is distinctly accepted by Christ.

A striking instance may be adduced of the manner in which important questions of historical criticism may be solved by

Matt. xxiii. 3.