to cut away for a while a mast or a spar. The Sadducees, when they took to the boats, took all they meant to keep with them. They would have no ‘forms,’ no ‘traditional’ burdens of any kind; they would obey the law, they declared, in its entirety and in its purity, nothing more and nothing less. It sounded promising. But a little effort of thinking will show that a policy of absolute standing still, of contentment with the present, ignoring of the past, and denial of the future, is not progress. Nor can the mood which lightly tosses tradition overboard, refusing to see that it is as likely to prove compass as cargo, be rightly called liberal. In intention probably the best of the Pharisees and the best of the Sadducees were both right. The Pharisee wanted to keep his religion intact, and wrapped it up in observance; the Sadducee, with perhaps the same object, would have stripped it bare of forms and ceremonies, and relied only on conduct (צְדָקָה). The Sadducees, it must be owned, considered the ceremonial law binding, but only as prescribed in the law, and as applied according to their own interpretation. And, oddly enough, they who were so easy-going in their habits were much harder in their judgments than the strict Pharisees. Rejecting the notion of future rewards or punishments, the Sadducees considered it a man’s duty to be as severe as possible in judging his neighbour’s conduct. They aimed at being just (צְדָקָה), whilst the Pharisees were content to be merciful. Each had the defects of his qualities, but the defects of the Pharisee were, to superficial sight, of a more patent and troublesome sort than those of his rival. To be always dreadfully in earnest makes a man a distinctly uncomfortable companion. The ‘zeal’ of the Pharisees might make them pious and devout, might render them first-rate martyrs, and even very tolerable bigots, but hardly, under any circumstances, good courtiers. The Sadducees must always have been pleasanter people to live with. In the early fighting days, the ‘zealous’ Chasidim had been a very satisfactory court circle of soldiers for the warlike Maccabees, and the first two priest-kings were well content to find their mainstay in the Pharisaic faction. But as things grew more settled and peaceful the Pharisees grew exacting and somewhat irksome companions. The numerous restrictions which traditional law enforces on the will and desires of man made princes and courtiers look on the Pharisees as uncomfortable people, as obstacles. At court they grew to be more and more disliked, and towards the end of the reign of John Hyrcanus there came about a decided estrangement.