And who is this wonderful Hillel of whom Testament writers and teachers say almost nothing at all? Few of the young ever heard of him. We must ask, for some have even called him another Jesus, he was so good and great. He was a very princely Jew, this Hillel, this lover of mankind, this gentle and humane reformer, whose life benefited the whole age in which he lived. As a poor Babylonian youth, he went over to Jerusalem to study under the great rabbis of the church. He soon became very distinguished, and through him Jewish life and religion were reformed. He is often called the founder of Judaism as taught in the Talmud. Herod made him president of the great Sanhedrin, with the title of prince, and the honor descended in his family. His aphorisms, his maxims, his wise sayings were known to every Jew in Palestine, and affected all Jewish life. One of his sayings was: "Do not unto others what thou wouldst not have done unto thyself. This is the whole law; the rest go and finish." Another: "Do not believe in thyself till the day of thy death." Again: "If I do not care for my soul, who will do it for me?" Still one: "Say not I will repent at leisure. Leisure may never come." And another: "Whosoever is ambitious of aggrandizing his name will destroy it." Beyond a doubt, many of the sayings of this great and gentle teacher were as familiar to the young carpenter working at His bench in little Nazareth as the Galilean's own sayings are to the youth of to-day. Hillel was thirty years older than Christ, and survived Him ten years. Many of the heart-sayings of the Master can be traced to Hillel, to Philo, the Egyptian, or to Moses. Let us not forget that He was human--divinely so--and that His mind, like that of any other human being, was susceptible to the teachings, the sayings, the surroundings that were nearest. He not only absorbed all, He refined all. Philo was another of the great philosophers whose works helped to influence the young Galilean. He, though a Jew, lived all his life in Egypt. There he wrote maxims worthy of the Master himself. He was twenty years older than the Galilean. He had studied Plato, and spent his life in trying to harmonize religious Greek thought with the thoughts of Moses, the lawgiver of the Jews. We will hear little in our Testament writers of these two wise men, who must have had a tremendous influence on the youth at Nazareth. Indeed, as already said, the Testament anyway tells us not much of the life at Galilee, or elsewhere. The larger part of the Testament story relates to the deeds of the passion week, or the last days of the Master's life. One-third of the book is taken up with that single week. It has been guessed that had the details of the Galilean's whole life been written out fully, it would have made a book eighty times as big as our Bible.