The versatility, the mental agility, of the children is as remarkable as their activity.
The employers of labour in the neighbourhood of Utopia will tell you that there are no slackers or loafers in the yearly output of the school.
The plain truth is that legalism is precluded, by its own first principles from appealing to any motive higher than that instinctive desire for pleasure which has as its counterpart a quasi-physical fear of pain.
The ultra-legalism of the Pharisee in the days of Christ finds its exact counterpart in the ultra-legalism of the child who has been taught arithmetic by the methods which the yearly examination fostered, and which are still widely prevalent.
Hence it is that in the atmosphere of legalism an excessive deference is wont to be paid to public, and even to parochial, opinion.
This reductio ad absurdum of legalism is exactly paralleled, in many of our elementary schools, in the answers to arithmetical questions given by the children.
The tendency of legalism to externalise life has another aspect.
As is the life that legalism expects us to lead, so is the scheme of rewards and punishments by which (as we have already seen) it constrains us to lead it.
The whole structure of legalism would collapse if men were allowed to absolve themselves from obedience to the letter of the Law, out of regard for what they conceived to be its spirit.
It is to his animal instincts, then, thatlegalism must appeal in its endeavour to influence his conduct.
The generous type of religion represented by the book of Ruth is a much needed and very attractive complement to the stern legalism of Ezra.
To preach the cross was to declare legalism abolished: to preach circumcision was to declare the cross and its offence abolished.
On the ruins of confuted legalism he builds up an impregnable fortress for Christian liberty, an immortal vindication of the gospel of the grace of God.
And if works of law actually justify men, and circumcision is allowed to make a difference between Jew and Greek before God, the principle of legalism is admitted, and the intolerable consequence ensues which Paul denounces.
In all these vital truths Paul's gospel was traversed by the Legalism countenanced by Peter at Antioch.
Only one who had imbibed the spirit of legalism as Saul of Tarsus had done, could justly appreciate the hostility of its principles to the new faith, and the sinister motives actuating the men who pretended to reconcile them.
To rest human salvation on self-improvement and social reform, is legalism over again.
Henceforth--for the struggle with Legalism was the crisis of Paul's ministry.
This was the condition to which Legalism would reduce the Galatians.
Legalism and licence were the Scylla and Charybdis on either hand, between which it needed the most firm and skilful pilotage to steer the bark of the Church.
Legalism and Paulinism, the true and the false gospel, stand front to front, reduced to their barest form, and weighed each in the balance of its practical result.
When the Fathers of the Church in the second and third centuries began to write about "the new law" and to identify the Christian ministry with the Aaronic priesthood, it was evident that Legalism was regaining its ascendancy.
Through them the Holy Spirit uttered His protest against the mechanicallegalism to which the religion of the temple and the priesthood was already tending.
And so, on the one hand, Legalism impugns the grace of God.
Legalism guards the mouth, the hands, the senses, and imagines that through these it can drill the man into the Divine order.
He points out to them the narrow but sure path that leads between the desert of legalism on the one hand, and the gulf of anarchy and licence on the other.
Only, men who had not passed like Paul from the extreme of trust in legalism to a corresponding extremity of despair might be pardoned for some insensibility to this inconsistency.
The Pharisaic legalism of the synagogue became only the stronger when the hollow Sadducean priesthood collapsed, and temple ceremonial became simply a ceremonial on paper, the affair no longer of priest and Levite, but of scribe and Pharisee.
Neither Gnostic heresy could dissipate it, nor reactionary Christianized legalism absorb it.
That aspect of Judaism which was most conspicuous to the outsider in Paul's day was not the legalism of the scribes and the Palestinian synagogue, perpetually embalmed in the Talmud and orthodox rabbinism of to-day.
Pauline anti-legalism to the extreme of an entire rejection of the Old Testament.
As we have seen, the settlement is as far from that of Mark and the Pauline churches on the one side, as from the thoroughgoing legalism of Jerusalem on the other.
Acts no relation to the controversy--for the demonstration of Paul's exemplarylegalism in the temple is merely incidental.
He pleads in tenderness and love with both religious parties, Catholics and Evangelicals, to leave the outgrown legalism of Moses and go to the Gospels for a religion which leads into truth and freedom.
For a criticism of thelegalism of the Anabaptists see ibid.
True piety more and more disappeared in a punctilious legalism and ceremonialism, in a conceited self-righteousness and boastful confidence in their own good works.
Upon these Jews, all the fetters oflegalism are still rivetted, and to them, tradition and revelation are one and the same.
It is true, of course, that in the end Pharisaic legalism perverted the new forms of worship, as heathen externalism had perverted the old.
For if one thing be more clear than another about “Malachi’s” teaching, it is that the spirit of prophecy is not yet crushed by the legalism which finally killed it within Israel.
That Israel remained Israel, in spite of Greek arms and the Greek mind, was due to the legalism of Ezra and Nehemiah, and to what we call the narrow enthusiasm of Joel.
The people, tired of churchly routine on the one hand and of legalism on the other, thronged to hear such divines "filling the doores and windows.
That the new party should be called Antinomian was plausible; the road they had chosen for escape from Puritan legalism certainly lay in that direction.
Her doctrine was, at bottom, an insurrection against the vexatious legalism of Puritanism.
Ethics in the stifling grip of myth and legalism is not convincing enough to exercise controlling influence.
How if in the labyrinth of possibilities that sheer Legalism can construct over the grave of Fair Play there was really hidden a possible indictment for bigamy?
This legalism contrasts strikingly with the efforts of pagan philosophy to exhibit virtue as its own reward; and the contrast is triumphantly pointed out by more than one early Christian writer.
I am not arguing that the prisoner should have been hanged or imprisoned, for I think both procedures are bad; I merely point out that in the eyes of legalism the soldier was guilty, yet the jury threw legalism overboard.
Another instance of the emotional factor over-ruling legalism is seen in the trial of the man who shot Jaures.
The school of Shammai in its rigorous legalism opposed proselytism in general, and its chief representative, Eliezer ben Hyrcanos, distrusted proselytes altogether.
This would prove that legalismmeant something more than tithes and sacrifices for the benefit of the priests.
Nor can it be proved that legalism or nomism has ever tended to suppress the spiritual side of religion, either in respect of consciousness of sin, or of individual love and devotion.
The legalism of the Pharisees might indeed seem to possess one advantage as a preparation for the gospel of Paul; it might seem likely to produce the consciousness of sin and so the longing for a Saviour.
A low view of law leads tolegalism in religion; a high view of law makes a man a seeker after grace.
The legalism of the Pharisees, with its regulation of the minute details of life, was not really making the Law too hard to keep; it was really making it too easy.
For even if Peter was not an advocate of legalism the appeal of the Judaizers to him can be explained.
They were not the master of any legalism or dialectic which would justify the slaughter of millions for the good of a system.
They had to abandon legalism and bring forth an ideology capable of serving as the new foundation for a just and effective system of government in China.
They retained legalism in practice but turned more and more to Confucianism.
The chilling mists of legalismmay enwrap his spirit.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "legalism" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word. Other words: jurisdiction; justice; lawfulness; legitimacy; pedantry; preciosity; scope; validity
