r the entire mystic lore. Thus the Babylonian master
Rab enumerates ten creative principles: Wisdom, Understanding, and
Knowledge, Might and Power, Rebuke, Justice and Righteousness, Love and
Mercy.(625) It is hard to say whether the ten attributes of the Haggadah
are at all connected with the ten _Sefiroth_ (cosmic forces or circles) of
the Cabbalah. These last are hardly the creation of pure monotheism, but
rather emanations from the infinite, conceived after the pattern of
heathen ideas.(626)

9. The assumption of all these intermediaries aimed chiefly to
spiritualize the conception of God and to elevate Him above all
child-like, anthropomorphic views, so that He becomes a free Mind ruling
the whole universe. At the same time, it became natural to ascribe
material substance to these intermediaries. As they filled the chasm
between the supermundane Deity and the world of the senses, they had to
share the nature of both matter and mind. Hence the Shekinah and the Holy
Spirit are described by both the rabbis and the medieval philosophers as a
fine, luminous, or ethereal substance.(627) The entire ancient and
medieval systems were modeled after the idea of a ladder leading up, step
by step, from the lowest to the highest sphere; God, the Most High, being
at the same time above the highest rung of the ladder and yet also a part
of the whole.

10. Our modern system of thought holds the relation of God to nature and
man to be quite different from all this. To our mind God is the only moral
and spiritual power of life. He is mirrored in the moral and spiritual as
well as intellectual nature of man, and therefore is near to the human
conscience, owing to the divine forces within man himself. Not the world
without, but the world within leads us to God and tells us what God is.
Hence we need no intermediary beings, and they all evaporate before our
mental horizon like mist, pictures of the imagination without objective
reality. Ibn Ezra says in the introduction to his commentary on the Bible
that the human reason is the true intermediating angel between God and
man, and we hold this to be true of both the intellect and the conscience.
For the theologian and the student of religion to-day the center of
gravity of religion is to be sought in psychology and anthropology. In all
his upward striving, his craving and yearning for the highest and the
best, in his loftiest aspirations and ideals, man, like Isaiah the
prophet, can beho