=3. The Masters of the Schools.=――If the method of instruction differed somewhat from our modern sort, no less different were the instructors. Many of the most eminent ‘doctors’ were only humble tradesmen. Tentmakers or shoemakers often, or carpenters, or weavers, or bakers. One of them, Rabbi Zadok, distinctly taught, ‘Use the Law, not as a crown to shine with, nor as a spade to dig with.’ Their practice gave expression to their belief that labour is one form, and perhaps not the least admirable form, of praise. They hated idleness, and they loved learning. They managed to give full employment to their heads and their hands, and they kept their hearts too in active and healthy condition, since the good of others rather than self-culture was the aim of their studies. The _Tanaim_[6] did not indulge in writing books, but they made good shoes, and good tents, and good loaves, and they turned out good and fairly educated young Jews by the score. So we, their descendants, may be grateful both for what they did and for what they did not do. =4. The Moral Influence of the Schools.=――Dispersed as the Jews were amongst all people, these schools became a breakwater against the floods of barbarous ignorance and ungodly cultivation which surged around. The schools gave a religious education in the widest sense of the word, since the word of God supplied the text for every discussion and for every discourse. A guide for health, a code for justice, a theme for literature, a field for every branch of historic and scientific inquiry, was sought and found in the Bible. ‘Turn it, and turn it again,’ says the Mishnah, ‘for everything is in it.’ The ‘Law’ was to the Jew a treasury of knowledge as well as a ‘tree of life.’ The minor moralities, the everyday virtues of sobriety, and of content, and of cheerfulness, the students must have learnt by example in the persons of their humble and hard-working teachers. =5. The Political Influence of the Schools.=――Politically, these schools united the Jews and kept them a nation. Each community was visited in turn by a legate of the Patriarch, and this brought the whole of the scattered people into close and intimate relations. And besides this official connection with one another, there was the feeling of freemasonry which always exists among scholars, and which keeps up a bond of mutual interest. The constitution of the schools, too, helped and confirmed this sense of community. There were no class distinctions in the Kallahs, no broad line of division between ‘town and gown’――absolutely no differences, save of character and of brain power, between student and student, or even between student and professor. Those who taught and those who learnt were all workers, and all of the people. This old Jewish school system produced a democracy of a very pure and patriotic sort, and with no opening for demagogues.