The teachers of the oral law had, and even now have a temptation to uphold its doctrines, because they make them the absolute rulers of the Jewish people, and this tendency is a strong ground of suspicion. When God sent Moses, he preserved him from all similar imputation, for though he possessed the supreme power during his life, his claims were attested by miracles which could not be denied: and at his decease his children were chief neither in Church nor State. The priesthood remained in the family of Aaron, and the chief magistracy fell to the lot of Joshua. Thus disinterestedness distinguished the characters of Moses and Jesus from those of the rabbies. The doctrine of the Sanhedrin reveals but too plainly the motives by which the authors of the oral law were actuated. Of course we do not mean to ascribe the same motives to all the advocates of the oral law in the present day. Those motives are necessarily confined to those times when Judaism can be realized, and cannot, therefore, be called forth until there is a prospect of restoring the Rabbinic polity. Our object is not to condemn the modern Jews, but to open their eyes to a true view of that system by which they have been so long deluded. And if they should ask us, Where, then, is the truth to be found? we reply, in Moses and the prophets. For though we are Christians, we firmly believe that true faith in the Old Testament must terminate in Christianity. The only real obstacle in the way of a Jew's receiving Jesus as the Messiah, is the prejudice, that his fathers, who rejected him, must have been in the right; and this obstacle we are endeavouring to remove. We have already made it appear that they were in the wrong; and our late papers have removed the strongest objection that they urge, namely, that the sentence of the Sanhedrin was decisive against his claims. We have shown that the Sanhedrin was altogether an unlawful tribunal, not established by Moses, but, as its name intimates, by the Greeks, and modelled by artful and ambitious men for their own purposes: and as the tribunal was unlawful, so was the sentence. Indeed the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ was condemned by an unlawful tribunal is a testimony in his favour. It shows that he disapproved of and opposed their unlawful doings. Jesus was not condemned by the friends of Moses, but by his enemies. The religion of Christ was persecuted, not by those who conscientiously kept Moses' commands, but by those who had first defaced every feature of Mosaism. The men who condemned the Lord Jesus were the tyrannical usurpers of an authority which Moses had given to others; and if Moses himself had appeared amongst them, and asserted the rights of the priests and Levites against the rabbies, they would just as readily have crucified him as the Lord Jesus Christ. The Jews, therefore, of the present day, who approve the condemnation of Jesus, unite with the enemies of Moses; but those who are lovers of the Mosaic law must approve the efforts of Jesus to deliver it from the corruptions of wicked and ambitious men. An unlawful tribunal condemned him for doing what every true Jew must acknowledge to be right. Whether, then, they acknowledge him as the Messiah or not, they must confess that he died a martyr to his zeal for the law of Moses, and are, therefore, bound to re-consider his claims. Jesus was put to death, not because he violated the Mosaic precepts, but because he reproved others for their transgressions—not because he endeavoured to overturn the religion of Moses, but because he resolutely defended its truth against those who were introducing a new religion upon its ruins. No. XLVI. CONTEMPT FOR THE FEMALE CHARACTER. MODERN Judaism, or the religion of the oral law, cannot bear the slightest investigation. Its existence depends altogether upon a blind faith. As long as a man is willing to deliver up his understanding into the hands of the rabbies, and at their bidding believe that his right hand is his left, as they require; so long he may be a zealous professor of Judaism. But, the moment that he begins to think and to reason, and to compare his traditional faith with the doctrines of Moses and the prophets, he must begin to doubt, and if he really has a love for the law of God, he must ultimately renounce that superstition which caused the destruction of the temple and all the subsequent calamities of his people, and still enslaves the greatest portion of his nation. It matters not at which point he views it— its theoretic principles and its practical effects equally condemn it, and prove that it is so far from being a revelation from God, that it is not even the work of good or wise men. The doctrine of the Sanhedrin, which we lately considered, exhibits it as a spiritual despotism the most intolerable; but the utter contempt with which it looks down upon the female portion of mankind makes it to this hour a positive curse to the daughters of Israel, and proves that it does not proceed from Him who created male and female, and pronounced a blessing upon the one as well as the other. One of the prominent characteristics in every false religion is the degradation of womankind. The Mahometan imposture debases women to the level of the brute creation. Judaism places them in the same category with slaves. In Maho metan countries, women are deprived of all culture of head and heart. Rabbinism, as we saw in No. 3, pronounces that fathers are exempt from all obligation to teach their daughters the law of the Lord: but we must proceed to consider fully the estimate which Rabbinism teaches the Jews to form of their daughters, their sisters, their mothers, and even the wife of their bosom and in doing this we shall not go to the opinions of the ignorant, the vicious, or the superstitious, but to the standard books of the nation. It is not possible to produce in English much of the slanderous assertions contained in the Talmud; many are too bad for translation, but still enough can be brought forward to prove satisfactorily that the rabbies look upon womankind with contempt. It is generally agreed that Rambam or Maimonides, was one of the most learned and enlightened of the rabbies, and yet the contempt which he felt for the female head and heart appears very plainly in the following passage : אל יאמר אדם הריני עושה מצות התורה ועוסק בחכמת' כדי שאקבל כל הברכות הכתובות בה או כדי שאזכה לחיי העולם הבא ואפרוש מן העבירות שהזהירה תורה מהן כדי שאנצל מן הקללות הכתובות בתורה או כדי שלא אכרת מחיי העולם הבא • אין ראוי לעבוד השם על הדרך הזה שעובד על דרך זה הוא עובד מיראה ואינה מעלת הנביאים ולא מעלת החכמים • ואין עובדין ה' על דרך זה אלא עמי הארץ והנשים והקטנים שמחנכין אותן לעבוד מיראה עד שתרבה דעתן ויעבדו מאהבה : "Let not any man say, Behold I perform the commandments of the law, and study in its wisdom, in order to obtain the blessings written therein, or to be worthy of the life of the world to come: and I abstain from the transgressions against which it warns, in order to be delivered from the curses written in the law, or that I may not be cut off from eternal life. It is not right to serve God in this way, for he that serves thus, serves from fear, and that is not the degree to which the prophets and wise men attained. No one serves God in this way, except unlearned men (Amharatzin), women, and children, whom they accustom to serve from fear, until their understanding increases, so that they may serve from love." (Hilchoth T'shuvah, c. x. 1.) Here Maimonides sinks women down to the level of children, and even classes their moral and intellectual faculties with those of the despised Amharatzin. We saw in No. 1 that an amhaaretz is of so little value, that his life is not considered more precious than that of a fish, and such it appears was Rambam's estimate of the value of a woman. This most learned rabbi considered it impossible for a woman to love God or to serve him aright; and when he wished to warn the Jews against serving God in an erroneous manner, he actually tells them not to serve Him as the women do. A more debasing imputation cannot be cast upon a human being than this, that he is physically incapable of loving God or serving him aright. If he had asserted that since the fall of Adam, the whole human race is far gone from original righteousness, and that therefore the love of God is not in them, he would have said what is asserted in Scripture: but the opinion that women, that is, one half of the human species, have a physical incapacity to love and serve God; and that we are to regard them as a sort of finger-post for pointing out error, or a notorious example of that irreligion which we are to avoid, is to blaspheme the Creator, and to hold up the whole female sex to the universal scorn of their sons, their brothers, and their husbands. It may be said, in palliation of so foul a libel, that Rambam lived amongst Mahometans, and that he insensibly imbibed the opinions of the followers of the false prophet. Now it is most true that he could never have learned this sentiment from Christians. The New |