ts, "the messengers of God who fulfilled His
word."(457) Both the hosts of heaven and the creatures of the earth do His
bidding; their every act, great or small, is as He has ordered. Yet of
them all man alone is made in God's image, and can work self-consciously
and freely for a moral purpose. Indeed, as the rabbis express it, he has
been called as "the co-worker with God in the work of creation."(458)

5. The conception of a world-order also had to undergo a long development.
The theory of pagan antiquity, echoed in both Biblical and post-Biblical
writings, is that the world is definitely limited, with both a beginning
and an end. As heaven and earth came into being, so they will wax old and
shrink like a garment, while sun, moon, and stars will lose their
brightness and fall back into the primal chaos.(459) The belief in a
cataclysmic ending of the world is a logical corollary of the belief in
the birth of the world. In striking contrast, the prophets hold forth the
hope of a future regeneration of the world. God will create "a new heaven
and a new earth" where all things will arise in new strength and
beauty.(460)

This hope, as all eschatology, was primarily related to the regeneration
of the Jewish people. Accordingly, the rabbis speak of two worlds,(461)
this world and the world to come. They consider the present life only a
preliminary of the world to come, in which the divine plan of creation is
to be worked out for all humanity through the truths emanating from
Israel. This whole conception rested upon a science now superseded, the
geocentric view of the universe, which made the earth and especially man
the final object of creation. For us only a figurative meaning adheres to
the two worlds of the medieval belief, following each other after the
lapse of a fixed period of time. On the one hand, we see one infinite
fabric of life in this visible world with its millions of suns and
planets, among which our earth is only an insignificant speck in the sky.
With our limited understanding we endeavor to penetrate more and more into
the eternal laws of this illimitable cosmos. On the other hand, we hold
that there is a moral and spiritual world which comprises the divine
ideals and eternal objects of life. Both are reflected in the mind of man,
who enters into the one by his intellect and into the other by his
emotions of yearning and awe. At the same time both are the manifestation
of God, the Creator and Ruler of al