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Updated: May 9, 2025
He is to stand "when he can sit erect and draw himself up," not to walk till he "can creep, rise freely, maintain his balance and proceed by his own effort." He is not to be hindered by swaddling bands such as are in use in Continental countries nor, later on, to be "spoiled by too much assistance," words which every mother and teacher should write upon her phylacteries.
"You don't know what you may have lost through not becoming a minister," suggested Esther slily. "Ah, but I know what I've gained. Do you think I could stand having my hands and feet tied with phylacteries?" asked Leonard, becoming vividly metaphoric in the intensity of his repugnance to the galling bonds of orthodoxy. "Now, I do as I like, go where I please, eat what I please.
All remedies working as it were sympathetically, and plainly unequal to the effect, may be termed amulets; whether used at a distance by another person, or carried immediately about the patient. By the Jews, amulets were called kamea, and by the Greeks phylacteries. The latins called them amuleta or ligatura; the catholics agnus dei, or consecrated relics; and the natives of Guinea fetishes.
I give due credit to the censorial brow, to the broad phylacteries, and to the imposing gravity, of those magisterial rabbins and doctors in the cabala of political science. I admit that "wisdom is as the gray hair to man, and that learning is like honourable old age." But, at a time when liberty is a good deal talked of, perhaps I might be excused, if I caught something of the general indocility.
The majority bore with them nothing but their phylacteries and praying shawls, and a good-natured contempt for Christians and Christianity. For the Jew has rarely been embittered by persecution. He knows that he is in Goluth, in exile, and that the days of the Messiah are not yet, and he looks upon the persecutor merely as the stupid instrument of an all-wise Providence.
With some it was a religion of ceremony, of prayers and fastings, tithes and boastful alms, fringes and phylacteries. But Joseph and Mary belonged to the simpler folk, who, while they reverenced the scribes as teachers, knew not enough of their subtlety to have substituted barren rites for sincere love for the God of their fathers and childlike trust in his mercy.
They measure the universe by the reflection in their muddy mill-pond. Nasty pious people is what I always call them; nasty pious people: little narrow souls, trying hard to be Christians after their lights, and only attaining, after all, to a sort of second-hand diluted Judaism, a religion of cup-washing, and phylacteries, and new moons, and sabbaths, and daily sacrifices.
The great lesson of duty inculcated by this answer of the Divine Teacher has been too long overlooked by individuals and communities professedly governed by His maxims. The phylacteries of our modern Pharisees are as broad as those of the old Jewish saints.
In the measure of its control by the scribes it was concerned chiefly with the Sabbath, with the various ablutions needful to the maintenance of ceremonial purity, with the distinctions between clean and unclean food, with the times and ways of fasting, and with the wearing of fringes and phylacteries. These lifeless ceremonies seem to our day wearisome and petty in the extreme.
We paid our shillings and ascended with others to an upper room, bare of every disturbing object, in which a strong top-light raked the large and uncompromising picture. We looked at it for some time in silence, and then my Father pointed out to me various details, such as the phylacteries and the mitres, and the robes which distinguished the high priest.
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