=3. Their Tenets and Position, Religions and Political.=――The Pharisees were rigid upholders of the law. They believed it to be the guiding rule of life, not only for the individual, but for the State. They tightened and narrowed whilst they strengthened the obligations of the law. They insisted not only on a high standard of duty, but on the most minute observance of every precept, Mosaic and traditional. Many persons believed that the Pharisees overdid it a little, over-armour-plated the ship, and were in a degree responsible for some ugly barnacles that came in time to cling about and clog the keel. Those who thought thus formed the body of the Sadducees. The Sadducees took it all much more lightly. They were content to conform to the main rites of Judaism without troubling much about every detail. They looked on the things of this world and the things of the other world as quite distinct matters, and on the whole, perhaps, considered this world to be the more interesting. The Sadducees did not much believe in the other world at all. They said that right should be done for right’s sake, and without hope of reward. A pure and lofty doctrine in itself, yet hardly worth the cost, since it made them go a step further, and reject altogether the thought of future rewards and a future life. But the Sadducees were mostly well off, and heaven to them would have been only a luxury the more. The Pharisees were of the people, the less wealthy and cultivated classes. They were not all, however, of the same high type of character. There were as many as seven sorts of Pharisees, we are told, and these seven sorts varied from real saints to real shams in their ‘zeal’ for the law. As a power in the State the Pharisees had numbers and learning on their side, whilst the Sadducees on theirs had money, and what goes now by the name of culture. To use political words, the Sadducees called themselves liberal, and the Pharisees, in their aims, were certainly conservative. The Sadducee, in fact, rather prided himself on his liberal principles. He would have told you that he cordially admitted every man’s right to his own opinions, and that he never meddled with other people’s observance. And this was perhaps true. But then he stopped there. He never sought to see things from other people’s point of view, he showed no sympathy in their researches, no respect for their acquirements. This unprogressive sort of mind in professed friends of progress was a fatal bar to liberalism in any just sense of the word. And, in effect, the Pharisees were the true liberals; and the Sadducees, despite their wide views and their easy-going way, were the obstructionists. With all their rigid adherence to the law, the purpose and the practice of the Pharisees was to extend and to expound it, to make it elastic enough to fit everybody’s needs. In their passionate desire to keep the ship afloat they armour-plated it, but equally they never hesitated, on occasion,