EDUCATION: JEWISH INFLUENCE 13 Atonement as a general expiation for the whole community. The efficacy of these meritorious acts and means of expiation is not, however, confined to the sole person of the doer, but is also communicable to others ; there are vicarious merits and penances of the righteous on behalf of sinners, there is a store of mercy, an accumulation of merit which belongs as a hereditable possession to individual families and to the whole people. Thus, above all, the merits of the holy Fathers of Israel constitute a national fund in which every true Israelite has a share in virtue of his birth. But even the merits of contemporary righteous men can be credited to their whole generation, and deliver them from the divine sentence of punishment, since their intercession is efficacious with God. Most powerful of all, however, in the atoning and saving influence which it exerts on behalf of the whole community, is the martyr-death suffered by the righteous for no sin of their own. Its saving power is esteemed equal to that of the Day of Atone- ment, since it effects, as that does, a general atonement for living and dead—as is implied indeed by the descriptions applied to it, “atoning sacrifice” and “ransom price.” The well-known Isaian interpreta- tion of the suffering of the righteous as a means of salvation and a ransom for the sinful multitude (Isa. liii.) is obviously influential in this Pharisaic doctrine of the vicarious suffering of the righteous for sinners; but it must not be overlooked that the ethical communication of this saving influence implied by the prophet, was coarsened in Pharisaism into a purely juridical substitution, more like the discharge of debts by one for another which civil law