ustice for the frail and failing mortal, they included also God's
long-suffering and mercy. These attributes are thus supposed to intercede,
so that the final decision is left in suspense until the Day of Atonement,
the great day of pardon. Some Tannaitic teachers(509) find it more in
accord with their view of God to say that He judges man every day, and
even every hour.

Of course, the philosophic mind can take this whole viewpoint in a
figurative sense alone. All the more must we recognize that this sublime
religious thought of God liberates morality from the various limitations
of the ancient pagan conception of Deity and the more recent metaphysical
view. In place of these it asserts that there is a moral government of the
world, which must be imitated in the moral and religious consciousness of
the individual.

6. The belief in a moral government of the world answers another question
which the medieval Jewish philosophers and their Mohammedan predecessors
endeavored to solve, but without satisfying the religious sentiment, the
chief concern of theology. Some of them maintain that God's foreknowledge
does not determine human deeds.(510) Maimonides and his school, however,
say that it is impossible for us to comprehend the knowledge and power of
God, and that therefore such a question is outside the sphere of human
knowledge. "Know that, just as God has made the elements of fire and air
to rise upwards and water and earth to sink downward, so has He made man a
free, self-determining being, who acts of his own volition."(511) The
Mohammedans would often give up human freedom rather than the omniscience
and all-determining power of God; but the Jewish thinkers, significantly,
with only the possible exception of Crescas,(512) laid stress upon the
divine nature which man attains through moral freedom, even at the risk of
limiting the omniscience of God.

7. The philosophers failed, however, to emphasize sufficiently a point of
highest importance for religion, God's paternal care for all His
creatures. Indeed, God ceases to be God, if He has not included our every
step in His plan of creation, thus surrounding us with paternal love and
tender care. Instead of the three blind fates of heathendom who spin and
cut the threads of destiny without even knowing why, the divine Father
himself sits at the loom of time and apportions the lot of men according
to His own wisdom and goodness. Such a belief in divine Providence is
in