what is good. And what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God? 99 But, notwithstanding all this, the Pharisees had gone on multiplying laws, and surrounding every trivial circumstance of life with absurd rules and regulations. They were greatly concerned about phylacteries and fringes, and long prayers, and tithing of mint and anise and cumin, and hand-washing, etc., but the weightier things of the law, such as judgment and mercy and faith, they neglected. They strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel; they made clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but not the inside; for within they were full of rapine and iniquity. Such were the proud, conceited hypocrites against whom Our Lord pronounced a woe and a heavy judgment, for that they neither entered heaven themselves nor allowed others to do so, nor moved with a finger of their own the insupportable burdens with which they loaded others.
But it was on the question of Sabbath observance that the Pharisees outdid themselves. In their hands that simple precept : " Thou shalt keep holy the Sabbath day " grew and dilated into twenty-four long and inconceivably intricate chapters of the Talmud. No journey over 2,000 cubits in length should be undertaken, no meal prepared, no candle or fire lighted, no forbidden food greater than the size of an olive partaken of, no labor done heavier than the lifting of a fig. Then follows such a mass of cases, suppositions, difficulties, and evasions that one wonders how
