Jesus made no attack upon Judaism itself, he had no idea of becoming the reformer of Jewish doctrine or the propounder of a new law; he sought merely to redeem the sinner, to call him to a good and holy life, to teach him that he is a child of God, and to prepare him for the approaching Messianic time. He insisted upon the unity of God, and was far from attempting to change in the slightest degree the Jewish conception of the Deity. To the question once put to him by an expounder of the Law, "What is the essence of Judaism?" he replied, "'Hear, O Israel, our God is one' and 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' These are the chief commandments" (Mark xii. 28). His disciples, who had remained true to Judaism, promulgated the declaration of their Master--"I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill; till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in nowise pass from the Law till all be fulfilled" (Matthew v. 17). He must have kept the Sabbath holy, for those of his followers who were attached to Judaism strictly observed the Sabbath, which they would not have done had their master disregarded it. It was only the Shammaitic strictness in the observance of the Sabbath, which forbade even the healing of the sick on that day, that Jesus protested against, declaring that it was lawful to do good on the Sabbath. Jesus made no objection to the existing custom of sacrifice, he merely demanded--and in this the Pharisees agreed with him--that reconciliation with one's fellow-man should precede any act of religious atonement. Even fasting found no opponent in him, so far as it was practised without ostentation or hypocrisy. He wore on his garments the fringes ordered by the Law, and he belonged so thoroughly to Judaism that he shared the narrow views held by the Judæans at that period, and thoroughly despised the heathen world. He was animated by that feeling when he said, "Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet and turn again and rend you." The merit of Jesus consists especially in his efforts to impart greater inner force to the precepts of Judaism, in the enthusiasm with which he obeyed them himself, in his ardor to make the Judæans turn to God with filial love as children to their father, in his fervent upholding of the brotherhood of men, in his insistence that moral laws be placed in the foreground, and in his endeavors to have them accepted by those who had been hitherto regarded as the lowest and most degraded of human beings.