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4 prohibited the competence of those laws for the functions which the Rabbis attributed to them.

There is an old proverb that "the good is enemy of the best," and the history of the Mosaic law provides a striking illustration of its truth. Relatively good the laws were; but they soon fell behind the prophetic conscience, and came to represent an inferior and discarded morality. At the time when Christ fulfilled His ministry there was a wide gulf between the morals of the earlier books of the Old Testament and the accepted moral standard of the Jewish people, but the existence of this gulf was screened by the hedge of superstitious reverence with which the sacred literature was surrounded. The Old Testament was, of course, read in a temper of unquestioning acceptance, and although it was not possible even so to evade the grand and pervading conflict between the primitive ideas illustrated by patriarchal practice, and incorporated in the Mosaic law on the one hand