Page:The old paths, or The Talmud tested by Scripture.djvu/415

 shows of how little real importance all these precepts about slaughtering are. If it be a sin to eat meat not properly killed, then it is also a sin to eat meat, when there is no satisfactory evidence of this fact. Whenever a man doubts about the right or wrong of any particular action, he is certainly wrong if he does it. But if it be certain that he may either do it or leave it undone without guilt, then that action cannot be sinful. And as the rabbies here affirm, that men may lawfully eat meat, concerning which they have no satisfactory evidence that it has been lawfully slaughtered, it follows that the rabbinic art cannot be of much value. Why then should a poor man be starved if he does not eat, or flogged if he does eat, meat slaughtered by a Gentile, when, if he had money to send a beast to be killed, he might eat what was sent back, even though he had no proof that the laws were kept? Indeed how are the poor and unlearned ever to know, that they eat lawful meat? If they were even to stand by, and see the operation performed, still, as being ignorant of the rabbinic laws, they could not understand, and must therefore take the matter entirely upon trust: and thus the mass of the nation, the unlearned and the women, are made the blind slaves of laws which they neither understand nor know; or rather of those who expound those laws, for how can it be said that a man transgresses that of which he does not know the right or wrong?

If the rabbies were all unanimous in their statement of what is and is not lawful, the unanimity might in some degree excuse the Jews for submitting to a yoke so grievous, and holding it that round the necks of their brethren. They might urge the uniformity of the tradition as a proof of its genuineness. But this cannot be pretended in the present case. To this very hour the rabbies themselves are not agreed as to what is, or what is not the oral law. We have just seen that if a man send a messenger to have a beast slaughtered, and afterwards find it slaughtered, that he may eat of it without asking any more questions. This is the general principle, but as soon as it comes to be applied in detail the rabbies differ. The Baal Turim thus states the difference:—

"Rambam has written expressly, In case that it should be found in the house; but, if he find it in the street, or on the dunghill in the house, it is forbidden. The Baal Haittur has given the same judgment: but my lord my father of blessed