But the Halachah, as the reader will wish to remind me, came very much more closely home to the Jew than a code of civil and criminal law could do. It was the rule of his private and domestic life, it defined his conduct both towards God and his fellow-man. Certainly it did. And the Pharisee would say, "Why not? Do I not need to serve God in everything I do, however small? And if the Torah can teach me exactly--yes, very exactly--what is most pleasing to Him, shall I not thankfully receive that teaching, and the more of it the better?" On this theory, it can easily be seen that there is no real distinction of great and small, important and trivial, in the things that are done in accordance with Halachah, because, in each case, what was done was regarded as a doing of God's will. In themselves, and apart from that, actions were trivial or important, great or small, and the Pharisees knew perfectly well that they were. But the Pharisee never regarded the mere doing of the action as sufficient; in all and every case there must be the purpose of serving God, the intention of pleasing Him. If he were assured that God had directed such and such a thing to be done, in a given case, then he would not say, "This is a trivial thing," or "This is a great thing"; but, "This is precisely what God would have me do at this moment and under these circumstances," and he felt a joy in doing it as exactly as he could. All this is widely different from what Christians are accustomed to, in determining their actions; but my object is to make clear the point of view of the Pharisees, and to show that on the lines of their theory they were perfectly justified in those precise definitions of conduct, even in matters which on other lines would be considered trifling. However small might be the details upon which the Halachah was defined, it was still Torah that enjoined the doing of the action in this way and not in that way, though, on the face of it, there might seem to be no reason to do it in one way rather than another. And the authority of Halachah was the will of God. It is easy to pick out from the Mishnah instances of minute regulation upon points of no apparent importance--such, for instance, as the rules for dealing with an egg laid upon the Sabbath. If a Pharisee were challenged upon that, or any similar case, he would say: "The Torah, the divine revelation, extends over the whole of life; and its principles, when drawn out and applied to that particular case, yield the results stated in the Halachah, bearing thereon. The divine will is taught me in regard to that; and what concerns me is the doing of the divine will, and not the smallness of the occasion in regard to which I do it."