9. The assumption of all these intermediaries aimed chiefly to spiritualize the conception of God and to elevate Him above all child-like, anthropomorphic views, so that He becomes a free Mind ruling the whole universe. At the same time, it became natural to ascribe material substance to these intermediaries. As they filled the chasm between the supermundane Deity and the world of the senses, they had to share the nature of both matter and mind. Hence the Shekinah and the Holy Spirit are described by both the rabbis and the medieval philosophers as a fine, luminous, or ethereal substance.(627) The entire ancient and medieval systems were modeled after the idea of a ladder leading up, step by step, from the lowest to the highest sphere; God, the Most High, being at the same time above the highest rung of the ladder and yet also a part of the whole. 10. Our modern system of thought holds the relation of God to nature and man to be quite different from all this. To our mind God is the only moral and spiritual power of life. He is mirrored in the moral and spiritual as well as intellectual nature of man, and therefore is near to the human conscience, owing to the divine forces within man himself. Not the world without, but the world within leads us to God and tells us what God is. Hence we need no intermediary beings, and they all evaporate before our mental horizon like mist, pictures of the imagination without objective reality. Ibn Ezra says in the introduction to his commentary on the Bible that the human reason is the true intermediating angel between God and man, and we hold this to be true of both the intellect and the conscience. For the theologian and the student of religion to-day the center of gravity of religion is to be sought in psychology and anthropology. In all his upward striving, his craving and yearning for the highest and the best, in his loftiest aspirations and ideals, man, like Isaiah the prophet, can behold only the hem of God’s garment; he seeks God above him, because he feels Him within himself. He must pass, however, through the various stages of growth, until his self-knowledge leads to the knowledge of the God before whom he kneels in awe. Then finally he feels Him as his Father, his Educator in the school of life, the Master of the universal plan in which the individual also has a place in building up the divine kingdom of truth, justice, and holiness on earth. For centuries he groped for God, until he received a Book to serve as “a lamp to his feet and a light to his path,” to interpret to him his longing and his craving. Israel’s Book of Books must ever be re-read and re-interpreted by Israel, the keeper of the book, through ages yet to come. Well may we say: the mediator between God and the world is _man_, the son of God; the mediator between God and humanity is _Israel_, the people of God. PART II. MAN Chapter XXXIII. Man’s Place in Creation