ascribed to him; the earthly life was etherialised and much of the sacred
literature reinterpreted in the light of an added belief in immortality;
God, in the early literature a tribal non-moral deity, was in the later
literature a righteous ruler who with Amos and Hosea loved and demanded
righteousness in man. Judaism took over as one indivisible body of sacred
teachings both the early and the later literature in which these varying
conceptions of God were enshrined; the Law was accepted as the guiding
rule of life, the ritual of ceremony and sacrifice was treasured as a holy
memory, and as a memory not contradictory of the prophetic exaltation of
inward religion but as consistent with that exaltation, as interpreting
it, as but another aspect of Micah's enunciation of the demands of God:
'What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with thy God?'

Judaism, in short, included for the Jew all that had gone before. But
for St. Paul's attitude of hostility to the Law, but for the deep-seated
conviction that the Pauline Christianity was a denial of the Jewish
monotheism, the Jew might have accepted much of the teaching of Jesus as
an integral part of Judaism. In the realm of ideas which he conceived as
belonging to his tradition the Jew was not logical; he did not pick and
choose; he absorbed the whole. In the Jewish theology of all ages we find
the most obvious contradictions. There was no attempt at reconciliation
of such contradictions; they were juxtaposed in a mechanical mixture,
there was no chemical compound. The Jew was always a man of moods, and
his religion responded to those varying phases of feeling and belief
and action. Hence such varying judgments have been formed of him and his
religion. If, after the mediaeval philosophy had attempted to systematise
Judaism, the religion remained unsystematic, it is easy to understand
that in the earlier centuries of the Christian Era contradictions
between past and present, between different strata of religious thought,