A sadder picture could scarcely be drawn than that of the dying Rabbi Jochanan ben

Saccai, that "light of Israel" immediately before and after the destruction of the Temple,

and for two years the president of the Sanhedrim. We read in the Talmud (Ber. 28 b) that,

when his disciples came to see him on his death-bed, he burst into tears. To their

astonished inquiry why he, "the light of Israel, the right pillar of the Temple, and its

mighty hammer," betrayed such signs of fear, he replied: "If I were now to be brought

before an earthly king, who lives to-day and dies to-morrow, whose wrath and whose

bonds are not everlasting, and whose sentence of death, even, is not that to everlasting

death, who can be assuaged by arguments, or perhaps bought off by money--I should

tremble and weep; how much more reason have I for it, when about to be led before the

King of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He, Who liveth and abideth for ever, Whose

chains are chains for evermore, and Whose sentence of death killeth for ever, Whom I

cannot assuage with words, nor bribe by money! And not only so, but t here are before

me two ways, one to paradise and the other to hell, and I know not which of the two

ways I shall have to go--whether to paradise or to hell: how, then, shall I not shed

tears?" Side by side with this we may place the opposite saying of R. Jehudah, called

the Holy, who, when he died, lifted up both his hands to heaven, protesting that none of

those ten fingers had broken the law of God! It were difficult to say which of these two

is more contrary to the light and liberty of the Gospel--the utter hopelessness of the

one, or the apparent presumption of the other.

And yet these sayings also recall to us something in the Gospel. For there also we read

of two ways--the one to paradise, the other to destruction, and of fearing not those

who can kill the body, but rather Him who, after He hath killed the body, hath power to

cast into hell. Nor, on the other hand, was the assurance of St. Stephen, of St. James, or

of St. Paul, less confident than that of Jehudah, called the Holy, though it expressed

its elf in a far different manner and rested on quite other grounds. Never are the voices of

the Rabbis more discordant, and their utterances more contradictory or unsatisfying

than in view of the great problems of humanity: sin, sickness, death, and the hereafter.

Most truly did St. Paul, taught at the feet of Gamaliel in all the traditions and wisdom of

the fathers, speak the inmost conviction of every Christian Rabbinist, that it is only our

Saviour Jesus Christ Who "hath brought life and immortality to light through the

Gospel" (2 Tim 1:10).

When the disciples asked our Lord, in regard to the "man which was blind from his

birth": "master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?" (John

9:1,2) we vividly realise that we hear a strictly Jewish question. It was just such as was

likely to be raised, and it exactly expressed Jewish belief. That children benefited or

suffered according to the spiritual state of their parents was a doctrine current among

the Jews. But they also held that an unborn child might contract guilt, since the Yezer

ha-ra, or evil disposition which was present from its earliest formation, might even then

be called into activity by outward circumstances. And sickness was regarded as alike

the punishment for sin and its atonement. But we also meet with statements which

remind us of the teaching of Hebrews 12:5, 9. In fact, the apostolic quotation from

Proverbs 3 is made for exactly the same purpose in the Talmud (Ber. 5 a), in how

different a spirit will appear from the f llowing summary. It appears that two of the

o

Rabbis had disagreed as to what were "the chastisements of love," the one maintaining,

on the ground of Psalm 94:12, that they were such as did not prevent a man from study,

the other inferring from Psalm 66:20 that they were such as did not hinder prayer.

Superior authority decided that both kinds were "chastisements of love," at the same

time answering the quotation from Psalm 94 by proposing to read, not "teachest him,"

but "teachest us out of Thy law." But that the law teaches us that chastisements are of