While doing this, I was aware that the Positions, in the first paragraph of the preceding Aphorism, to which the numerical _marks_ are affixed, will startle some of my Readers. Let the following sentences serve for the notes corresponding to the marks:
1 _Be you holy: even as God is holy._--_What more does he require of thee, O man! than to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with the Lord thy God?_[87] To these summary passages from Moses and the Prophets (the first exhibiting the closed, the second the expanded, Hand of the Moral Law) I might add the Authorities of Grotius and other more orthodox and not less learned Divines, for the opinion that the Lord's Prayer was a _selection_, and the famous passage [The hour is now coming, &c., John v. 28, 29.] a _citation_ by our Lord from the liturgy of the Jewish Church. But it will be sufficient to remind the reader, that the apparent difference between the prominent _moral_ truths of the Old and those of the New Testament results from the latter having been written in Greek; while the conversations recorded by the Evangelists took place in Hebrew or Syro-Chaldaic or Aramaic.--Hence it happened that where our Lord cited the original text, his biographers substituted the Septuagint version, while our English version is in _both_ instances immediate and literal--in the Old Testament from the Hebrew Original, in the New Testament from the freer Greek translation. The text, _I give you a new commandment_, has no connection with the present subject.
2 There is a current mistake on this point likewise, though this article of the Jewish Belief is not only asserted by St. Paul, but is elsewhere spoken of as common to the Twelve Tribes. The mistake consists in supposing the Pharisees to have been a distinct _sect_, and in strangely over-rating the number of the Sadducees. The former were distinguished not by holding, as matters of religious belief, articles different from the Jewish Church at large; but by their pretences to a more rigid orthodoxy, a more scrupulous performance. They were, in short (if I may dare use a phrase which I dislike as profane, and denounce as uncharitable), the _Evangelicals_ and strict _professors_ of the day. The latter, the Sadducees, whose opinions much more nearly resembled those of the _Stoics_ than the Epicureans (a remark that will appear paradoxical to those only who have abstracted their notions of the Stoic Philosophy from Epictetus, Mark Antonine, and certain brilliant inconsistencies of Seneca), were a handful of rich men, _Romanized_ Jews, not more numerous than infidels among us, and holden by the People at large in at least equal abhorrence. Their great argument was: that the belief of a future state of rewards and punishments injured or destroyed the purity of the Moral Law for the more enlightened classes, and weakened the influence of the Laws of the Land for the people, the vulgar multitude.