This view, which was shared by paganism, was accompanied by a higher conception, gradually growing in the thinking mind. As a father does not punish his child in anger, but in order to improve his conduct, so God chastens man in order to purify his moral nature. Good fortune tends to harden the heart; adversity often softens and sweetens it. In the crucible of suffering the gold of the human soul is purified from the dross. The evil strokes of destiny come upon the righteous, not because he deserves them, but because his divine Friend is raising him to still higher tests of virtue. This standpoint, never reached even by the pious sufferer Job, is attained by rabbinic Judaism when it calls the visitations of the righteous “trials of the divine love.”(525) Thus evil, both physical and spiritual, receives its true valuation in the divine economy. Evil exists only to be overcome by the good. In His paternal goodness God uses it to educate His children for a place in His kingdom. 3. According to the direct words of Scripture good and evil, light and darkness, emanate alike from the Creator. This is accentuated by the great seer of the Exile,(526) who protests against the Persian belief in a creative principle of good and a destructive principle of evil. The rabbis, however, ascribe the origin of evil to man; they take as a negation rather than a question the verse in Lam. III, 38: “Do not evil and good come out of the mouth of the Most High?” Thus they refer this to the words of Deuteronomy, “Behold, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil; choose thou life!”(527) Such medieval thinkers as Abraham Ibn Daud and Maimonides did not ascribe to evil any reality at all.(528) Evil to them is the negation of good, just as darkness is the negation of light, or poverty of riches. As evil exists only for man, man can overcome it by himself. Before God it has no essential existence. Unfortunately, such metaphysics does not equip man with strength and courage to cope with either pain or sin. The same lack is evident in that modern form of pseudo-science which poses as a religion, Christian Science, which has made propaganda so widely among both Jews and non-Jews. Christian Science declares pain, sickness, and all evil to be merely the “error of mortal mind,” which can all be dispelled by faith; such a view neither strengthens the soul for its real struggles nor convinces the mind by an appeal to facts.(529)