I believe that, if the Pharisees had had nothing more than the Halachah, they would still have made a religion out of it. I mean, if they had developed from the Torah, which was to them the supreme revelation, only its Mitzvōth, they would still have been able to find in it some satisfaction for the spiritual wants of their souls. But they had much else, as will be shown in more detail in subsequent chapters. It was their task, or rather their absorbing delight, to elaborate the Halachah, to make it an ever more perfect exposition of the divine will in regard to the conduct at least of Israel; as it was their joy, in the obeying of those precepts, to "walk humbly with their God," as they certainly did. But it should be borne in mind that in addition to the Halachah, with its strenuous and salutary discipline of thought and action; there was the whole range of meditation upon divine things--speculation, imagination, inquiry into the mysteries of nature and human experience, devout wonder at the ways of God and the marvels of His world, all, by the light which He had given in His Torah. For great as the Halachah was, and divine and holy, the Torah was greater, for in it God had given all that He had to give. "Greater," said a Rabbi, "is one single word of Torah, than all the 'Mitzvōth' contained in it." And another: "All the world is not equivalent to one single word of Torah" (j. Peah. 15^d), meaning that the beholding of the perfect revelation of God is more than the realisation in action of a part of it. Again, extravagance, it will be said. Yet only the extravagance of exalting in spoken word that which is owned as supreme in thought. The phrases may be to non-Jewish ears devoid of serious meaning; but in that way the Pharisees chose to express what in their hearts they owned as fully and perfectly divine, that Torah which to them was wisdom from God, the revelation of all truth, goodness, power, and love. It was to them the very expression of the mind and thought of God; and that is what they meant when they said that God looked upon the Torah when He created the world (Tanh. 2^b), or that He Himself studies the Torah every day. It is His self-communing made known to man. All this, which covers the whole field that is occupied in other religions by doctrinal and speculative theology, was included in the Torah and formed part of the religion of those who owned it as supreme. And all this had its place in their thought along with the Halachah. And at the heart of those same Pharisees there was the piety which sought and found God in the worship of the Synagogue and the home, which looked to Him with love and humble trust, and knew Him to be not far off but very near, no mere abstract power, no hard taskmaster, but the Heavenly Father.