I 



CHRIST AND THE PHARISEES 127 



actor* When I have watched the priests in a Continental 

 Cathedral, I have often thought, and sometimes said, 

 ** They seem to be acting/^ By that I did not of course 

 mean to suggest that the priests were conscious 

 hypocrites* That would in deed have been uncharitable* 

 I simply meant that it looked to me like a performance* 



Now the formal religion of the Pharisees was the 

 perfect antithesis of the religion of spontaneous kindli- 

 ness and benevolence taught by Jesus, and we can well 

 understand how He might say to them, ** Alas, for you, 

 scribes and pharisees, actors/* When we condemn 

 wholesale a large class of men, en masse, we always do a 

 cruel injustice, and it is never fair to judge of men by 

 the verdict of their enemies* When the Gospels were 

 written the Pharisees were the principal persecutors of 

 the Early Church, and it is easy to imagine that if the 

 Gospels had been written later, during the Neronian 

 persecution, we might have had severe censures passed 

 upon the Romans* Certain it is that if we study the 

 history of the Pharisees from any source other than 

 the Gospels we find that they were men of high ideals, 

 who were ready to make great sacrifices for those ideals* 

 Jesus Himself said of them that they compassed sea and 

 land to make a convert, and men who do this are some- 

 thing better than conscious hypocrites* The Pharisees 

 were the Evangelical section of the Church of their day, 

 and they had all the virtues, and some of the vices, of 

 the Evangelical Churches of our own time* They were 

 narrow and intolerant but they were nothing if not 

 sincere* Moreover, forty years later, they showed by 

 their defence of Jerusalem that they had lost nothing of 

 the courage of their forefathers* Their defence of the 

 holy city, was surely not the less heroic because from 

 the first it was hopeless* 



After the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the 

 Temple, the sect of the Sadducees ceased to exist* The 



