=7. Hillel: a Contrast.=――There is never a cloud without a silver lining. Whilst Herod the Idumean raged in the palace, Hillel, ‘the greatest of the Rabbis,’ taught in the schools. Hillel was president of the Sanhedrin from 31 B.C. till the year 9 of the common era. He was one of the first, and certainly the most famous, of the presidents to whom the title of Nasi[3] came to be given. Hillel was born in Babylon, but when quite young he went to Jerusalem, which was a sort of university for students. He was very poor, and had some difficulty once in getting admittance to a certain school. It is said that, one winter’s morning, he climbed up on the window-sill of the class-room, and there listened as well as he could till the cold and the cramp made him drowsy. The lesson went on, and the master fancied that the room was darker than even the thick-falling snow would account for. He went to the window, and there was poor Hillel curled up fast asleep and more than half frozen. When Hillel grew up and became teacher instead of student, pupils in his school met with no such adventures. He was always ready to listen and to help, and as painstaking and sweet-tempered as he was wise. ‘As patient as Hillel,’ and ‘as modest as Hillel,’ came to be used as proverbial standards. One day there came a knock at his school door. A heathen lad stood there, laughing and defiant. ‘Teach me the law,’ he cried, ‘in the time in which I can stand on one leg.’ He meant to mock at the Rabbis and at the Law they taught, and he had already been driven away from the door of Shammai, another famous Rabbi. Shammai took impertinence as a personal affront. Hillel looked on it rather as a sign of disease or deficiency. ‘A sensible and well-bred man will not offend me, and no other can.’ That was the spirit in which Hillel received the rude jester. ‘Certainly,’ we may imagine him saying to the lad in his dignified way, ‘it is rather a short time for a lesson, and, possibly, standing before me in the usual attitude would be more comfortable for you. But I can teach you what you want to know whilst you stand on one leg. “Do not unto another what you would not that another should do unto you. That is the whole of the law; the rest is commentary.”’ Often Hillel would robe his wisdom in wit, as is somewhat a Jewish trait. ‘I must hurry home to a guest I have been rather neglecting of late,’ he said one day as he finished his lecture at the school, ‘a guest who is here to-day and gone to-morrow.’ Some of his disciples wondered, but some were quick enough to divine their master’s meaning. Hillel meant his soul, the guest who has his ‘lordly dwelling-place’ in the body, but often has very little given beyond the lodging.