is concerned with what the Act distinctly formulates in set terms. In
this sense Judaism never was a Legal Religion. It did most assiduously
seek to get to the underlying motives of the written laws, and all the
expansions of the Law were based on a desire more fully to realise the
meaning and intention of the written Code. In other words, the Law was
looked upon as the expression of the Will of God. Man was to yield to
that Will for two reasons. First, because God is the perfect ideal of
goodness. That ideal was for man to revere, and, so far as in him lay,
to imitate. 'As I am merciful, be thou merciful; because I am gracious,
be thou gracious.' The 'Imitation of God' is a notion which constantly
meets us in Rabbinic literature. It is based on the Scriptural text:
'Be ye holy, for I the Lord am holy.' 'God, the ideal of all morality,
is the founder of man's moral nature.' This is Professor Lazarus'
modern way of putting it. But in substance it is the Jewish conception
through all the ages. And there is a second reason. The Jew would not
have understood the possibility of any other expression of the Divine
Will than the expression which Judaism enshrined. For though he held that
the Law was something imposed from without, he identified this imposed
Law with the law which his own moral nature posited. The Rabbis tell us
that certain things in the written Law could have been reached by man
without the Law. The Law was in large part a correspondence to man's moral
nature. This Rabbinic idea Lazarus sums up in the epigram: 'Moral laws,
then, are not laws because they are written; they are written because
they are laws.' The moral principle is autonomous, but its archetype is
God. The ultimate reason, like the highest aim of morality, should be
in itself. The threat of punishment and the promise of reward are the
psychologic means to secure the fulfilment of laws, never the reasons for
the laws, nor the motives to action. It is easy and necessary sometimes
to praise and justify eudemonism, but, as Lazarus adds, 'Not a state to
be reached, not a good to be won, not an evil to be warded off, is the