was regulated in the minutest details. As the Dayan M. Hyamson has
said, the maxim _De minimis non curat lex_ was not applicable to
the Jewish Law. This Law was a system of opinion and of practice and of
feeling in which the great principles of morality, the deepest concerns of
spiritual religion, the genuinely essential requirements of ritual, all
found a prominent place. To assert that Pharisaism included the small
and excluded the great, that it enforced rules and forgot principles,
that it exalted the letter and neglected the spirit, is a palpable libel.
Pharisaism was founded on God. On this foundation was erected a structure
which embraced the eternal principles of religion. But the system, it
must be added, went far beyond this. It held that there was a right and
a wrong way of doing things in themselves trivial. Prescription ruled
in a stupendous array of matters which other systems deliberately left to
the fancy, the judgment, the conscience of the individual. Law seized upon
the whole life, both in its inward experiences and outward manifestations.
Harnack characterises the system harshly enough. Christianity did not add
to Judaism, it subtracted. Expanding a famous epigram of Wellhausen's,
Harnack admits that everything taught in the Gospels 'was also to be
found in the Prophets, and even in the Jewish tradition of their time. The
Pharisees themselves were in possession of it; but, unfortunately, they
were in possession of much else besides. With them it was weighted,
darkened, distorted, rendered ineffective and deprived of its force by a
thousand things which they also held to be religious, and every whit as
important as mercy and judgment. They reduced everything into one fabric;
the good and holy was only one woof in a broad earthly warp' (_What
is Christianity?_ p. 47). It is necessary to qualify this judgment,
but it does bring out the all-pervadingness of Law in Judaism. 'And thou
shalt speak of them when thou sittest in thine house, when thou walkest by
the way, when thou liest down and when thou risest up' (Deut. vi. 7). The
Word of God was to occupy the Jew's thoughts constantly; in his daily