God shall please, and who will do otherwise than he of whom you speak. But we need none to save us from our Father in Heaven, and none to persuade Him to forgive when else He would turn away. And this present life, in this present world, is to us not a vale of tears or a captivity in an evil state. It is the scene of our service of God. And that Torah, of which you have said such hard things,--you who once gloried in Torah yourself, and must have known, though now you have forgotten, how it was once "the light of all your seeing,"--that Torah is to us the guide of life, that shows us how in the small deeds of every day we can, if we will, do that which is pleasing to God. Yes, we fail sometimes; and as your own master said, "even if we did all the 'mitzvōth,' we should still be but unprofitable servants, having done only that which was our duty to do." Still, we serve Him with heart and soul, the best we can; and we count it nothing to have done only the mere act prescribed, without the intention of pleasing Him. We look to Him as our help and our shield, our Father and Lord, our strength and our redeemer. And He does not turn away from us. Go you and worship Him as you will; and if the Torah no longer says aught to you of what once it said, then seek the revelation of God elsewhere, and hear his voice in other tones. As for us we will "abide in the things we have learned, knowing from whom we have learned them." And so long as we are faithful to the trust that God committed to Israel, when He made him a nation, and gave him the Torah and raised up the prophets, and sent psalmists and wise men to teach their brethren, so long "may the Lord God be with us as He was with our fathers." It is the Pharisee who has kept the promise of Israel; and to these latest days he keeps it still. CHAPTER V SOME POINTS OF PHARISAIC THEOLOGY