Christian and Mohammedan creeds; they
therefore met almost universal acceptance among the Jewish people, and
were given a place in the common prayerbook, in spite of their
deficiencies, as shown by Crescas and his school. Nevertheless, we must
admit that Crescas shows the deeper insight into the nature of religion
when he observes that the main fallacy of the Maimonidean system lies in
founding the Jewish faith on _speculative knowledge_, which is a matter of
the intellect, rather than _love_ which flows from the heart, and which
alone leads to piety and goodness. True love, he says, requires the belief
neither in retribution nor in immortality. Moreover, in striking contrast
to the insistence of Maimonides or the immutability of the Mosaic Law,
Crescas maintains the possibility of its continuous progress in accordance
with the intellectual and spiritual needs of the time, or, what amounts to
the same thing, the continuous perfectibility of the revealed Law
itself.(48) Thus the criticism of Crescas leads at once to a radically
different theology than that of Maimonides, and one which appeals far more
to our own religious thought.

10. Another doctrine of Judaism, which was greatly underrated by medieval
scholars, and which has been emphasized in modern times only in contrast
to the Christian theory of original sin, is that man was created in the
image of God. Judaism holds that the soul of man came forth pure from the
hand of its Maker, endowed with freedom, unsullied by any inherent evil or
inherited sin. Thus man is, through the exercise of his own free will,
capable of attaining to an ever higher degree his mental, moral, and
spiritual powers in the course of history. This is the Biblical idea of
God's spirit as immanent in man; all prophetic truth is based upon it; and
though it was often obscured, this theory was voiced by many of the
masters of Rabbinical lore, such as R. Akiba and others.(49)

11. Every attempt to formulate the doctrines or articles of faith of
Judaism was made, in order to guard the Jewish faith from the intrusion of
foreign beliefs, never to impose disputed beliefs upon the Jewish
community itself. Many, indeed, challenged the fundamental character of
the thirteen articles of Maimonides. Albo reduced them to three, viz.: the
belief in God, in revelation, and retribution; others, with more
arbitrariness than judgement, singled out three, five, six, or even more
as principal doctrines;(50) while