employment and during his manifold activities; when at work and when
at rest. And as a correlative, the Law must direct this complex life,
the Code must authorise action or forbid it, must turn the thoughts and
emotions in one direction and divert them from another.

Nothing in the history of religions can be cited as a complete parallel to
this. But incomplete parallels abound. A very large portion of all men's
lives is regulated from without: by the Bible and other sacred books; by
the institutions and rites of religion; by the law of the land; by the
imposed rules of accepted guides, poets, philosophers, physicians; and
above all by social conventions, current fashions, and popular maxims.
Only in the rarest case is an exceptional man the monstrosity which,
we are told, every Israelite was in the epoch of the Judges--a law
unto himself.

But in Judaism, until the period of modern reform, this fact of human
life was not merely an unconscious truism, it was consciously admitted.
And it was realised in a Code.

Or rather in a series of Codes. First came the _Mishnah_, a Code
compiled at about the year 200 A.D., but the result of a Pharisaic
activity extending over more than two centuries. While Christianity was
producing the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament--the work in large
part of Jews, or of men born in the circle of Judaism--Judaism in its
other manifestation was working at the Code known as the _Mishnah_.
This word means 'repetition,' or 'teaching by repetition'; it was an
oral tradition reduced to writing long after much of its contents had
been sifted in the discussions of the schools. In part earlier and in
part later than the _Mishnah_ was the _Midrash_ ('inquiry,'
'interpretation'), not a Code, but a two-fold exposition of Scripture;