To make disciples, in the sense of imparting knowledge of Torah, has always been the aim and the practice of Rabbinical Judaism; a fact to which the Talmud bears ample witness. The names, Torah, Talmud, Mishnah, Midrash, all imply the idea of teaching and learning--study as regarded either by the student or the instructor. In this larger relation, the minor one of discipleship to a particular teacher holds but a small place. Equally the ancient Scribe or the later Rabbi was enjoined not to make adherents of himself, but to impart to all whom he could influence the knowledge of divine truth which he possessed. To "make a hedge about the Torah" is a famous phrase that has been much misunderstood. It certainly does not imply any intention to make a rigid system of precept in which all the spiritual freedom enjoyed by the enlightened soul in communion with God should be lost. The Talmudic Rabbis, who entirely endorsed the maxim, never read in it any such intention, and never supposed that they suffered any such loss of spiritual freedom. As in fact they did not. The notion that they did is an idea which only exists in the minds of Christians, misreading an experience which, as Christians, they have never known. What was always understood by the "hedge about the Torah" was the means taken to keep the divine revelation from harm, so that the sacred enclosure, so to speak, might always be free and open for the human to contemplate and commune with the divine. And, so far as the Torah consisted of precepts, positive and negative, the "hedge" was of the nature of warnings whereby a man might be saved from transgression before it was too late. The detailed mass of precept elaborated in the course of centuries, known as the Halachah (see Chapter II.) or rule of right conduct, and finally embodied in the Talmud, was part of the Torah itself made explicit, the divine teaching so far as it related to such and such departments of conduct. And even if the Halachah were the rigid and oppressive system which it is often supposed to have been, but which those who devised it and lived under it did not feel it to be, it was not itself the "hedge about the Torah." The religious guides of the Jewish people, from the early Sopherim to the latest Rabbi whose words are incorporated in the Talmud, did make a "hedge about the Torah"; and did their work so well that, whatever else was torn from Israel in the course of cruel centuries, the Torah remained, and still remains, the peculiar treasure of the chosen people.