Finally, what about merit? The Pharisees were never afraid to talk about merit; but what they said must be taken in the light of what has already been stated. They had no fixed doctrine of merit; and there certainly never was a general Pharisaic belief in a system of bargaining with God as between debtor and creditor on business lines. This or that teacher may have used the terms of such transactions by way of illustration; but they do not represent the general mind of the Pharisees upon the subject. The Pharisees certainly believed that to perform many Mitzvōth was better than to perform one; and they not unnaturally concluded that there could be no more reasonable criterion for a judgment of character than the use which a man had made of the opportunities afforded by the Mitzvōth for serving God. Mitzvōth, being specific commands, could be counted up; and the degree of goodness shown in doing them, or of badness in not doing them, could be thought of quantitatively, instead of qualitatively. This is not, for obvious reasons, the best way of treating the matter; and the Pharisees have, in consequence, come in for a great deal of rebuke and contempt for having degraded the relation of man to God, when all that they did was to use an unfortunate metaphor in order to express a real distinction. It was perhaps mainly through the use of this metaphor, this quantitative description of goodness, that they laid themselves open to the charge of boastful self-righteousness; and no doubt they were occasionally to blame in that respect. Because a Pharisee was able to observe, in a quite dispassionate way, the fact that he had performed so many "Mitzvōth." It would have been better for him not to have learned that method of self-examination. But, nevertheless, it is true, though only those who know the Pharisees can be expected to believe it, that genuine humility could and often did go along with that candid estimate of good performed.