law rests solely upon the testimony of its transmitters, but here these persons are convicted of transmitting palpable falsehood: their testimony to the oral law is therefore useless, and the whole fabric of tradition falls. This one fable is sufficient, but the readers will remember that this is only one of a considerable number selected from the Jewish Prayer-book. To extract all similar stories from the Talmud would be to make some folio volumes. The Prayer-book, however, gives enough to invalidate the testimony of the Scribes and Pharisees, and to incapacitate them for ever from appearing as witnesses. Perhaps some one will say, But they are also the witnesses for the written law, and therefore, if we reject their testimony, we must give up the written law also. But this is not so. For _that_ we have other testimony—we have that of the Jewish nation, of which the Scribes and Pharisees were at first only an inconsiderable portion. We have the testimony of Jesus and his disciples, the great opposers of the oral law. We have the testimony of the predictions, which we behold still accomplishing. We have the whole internal evidence, so that if there never had been Pharisees, the evidence for the written law would be just as valid. As it is, the contrast which the written law presents, when compared with the oral law, furnishes in itself a strong evidence of its truth and authenticity. The written law is simple, sober, dignified. The oral law is multifarious, extravagant, absurd. The oral law is poison—the written law is the antidote. The oral law is a counterfeit, which proves the existence of the genuine coin. Men who receive both on the sole authority of the rabbies may, when they find the falsehood of the one, reject the other also, but this can never be the case with those who calmly compare and weigh the two in the balance of right reason.