The opposition between Jesus and the Pharisees finds its most emphatic expression in the long speech contained in Matt. xxiii., the keynote of which is: "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" It is sometimes argued that Jesus himself did not say all the hard things in that speech, but that they represent the hostility of the early Church towards the men who had destroyed her founder. That is possible; and certainly the Evangelists do not incline to a favourable view of the Pharisees on any occasion. But I do not feel free to evade the duty of dealing with that speech by availing myself of that argument. Moreover, I do not see anything to make it impossible, or even unlikely, that Jesus did say all those things. Having in effect broken with the religion of Torah, and being in the position of a man driven to bay, fighting, as the saying is, with his back against the wall, it is only human nature that he should so speak as to hit hard. And, if it were the case of any other man, who would take the words spoken under such conditions as expressing the calm and deliberate judgment of the speaker upon the persons addressed, or as weighty evidence of the truth of the statements made? I am not going to go through the various charges in order to estimate the truth or the exaggeration of them. I shall make no suggestions that perhaps the Pharisees in that time were very bad, though they were more respectable before, and, in a curious way, recovered their character afterwards. Nor will I admit that it was perhaps true of the rank and file, but that men like Hillel and Gamaliel and Joḥanan b. Zaccai were honourable exceptions. If it was true at all, it was most of all true of Hillel and Gamaliel and their compeers, because these represented Pharisaism in its perfection, and their religion was the religion of Torah in all its height and depth and length and breadth. Whatever could be truly said of Pharisaism, either good or evil, was true of the religion by which they lived.