which was impossible so long as he was excommunicated. Hence he at last yielded to the urgency of his relatives to become reconciled with the community. He was willing, as he said, "to be an ape among apes." He confessed Judaism with his lips at the very time when he had in his heart thoroughly fallen away from it. Da Costa, in his philosophical inquiries, had come upon a new discovery. Judaism, even in its pure biblical form, could not have been of divine origin, because it contradicts nature in many points, and God, the Creator of nature, can not contradict Himself in revelation. He cannot command a principle in the Law, if He has implanted in nature an opposing principle. This was the first step to the deistic tendency then appearing in France and the Netherlands, which acknowledged God only in nature, not in the moral law, and in religious and political development. Da Costa's theory supposed a religion of nature inborn in man, which produced and built up the moral law, and culminated in the love of members of a family to one another. The best in Judaism and other revealed religions is borrowed from the religion of nature. The latter knows only love and union; the others, on the contrary, arm parents and children against one another on account of the faith. This theory was the suggestion of his bitterness, because his relatives avoided him, and showed him but little consideration. Da Costa appears to have put forward as the religion of nature what the Talmud calls the Noachian commandments.