The title of the ten-years book is הַיָּד הַחֲזָקָה, ‘The Strong Hand.’ It consists of an introduction and fourteen sections or books. In the introduction he describes the chain of tradition from the time of Moses till his own days, and the rest is a religious code, containing the Jewish laws――written and oral――systematically arranged and presented to the reader without discussion or argument. This work was published in 1180, when Maimonides was forty-five years old, and it was well received by most of the people who were wise enough to understand it. In 1191 a very important book was brought out by Maimonides, which, under the name of מוֹרֶה נְבוּכִים, ‘a Guide to the Perplexed,’ attracted an immense amount of attention, but not altogether of a favourable sort, to the author. The book deals with the perplexities of religious belief, and tries to solve some of the many puzzles in life and in religion to which God Himself gives and withholds the key, when He says to the children of men, ‘My ways are not your ways, neither are your thoughts My thoughts.’ Maimonides, in a reverent but still in a philosophising spirit, tried to reconcile these ‘thoughts and ways,’ and to lift the lower to a comprehension of the higher. His efforts were not always, nor altogether, understood. In the then debased state of the Jews, the pressing need of a God who should be ‘near’ to them, had led, in many instances, to an ideal of divinity something a little different from, something a little lower than, what ‘the Lord, the Spirit of all flesh,’ should mean. There was a tendency, here and there, to materialise God, to localise His favours, and to dogmatise concerning His doings. Against all this, Maimonides patiently and persistently strove. To take as an instance a very famous chapter in this book, which has excited much controversy. The theme is the Jewish code concerning sacrifice. Maimonides argues that the blood of ‘cattle on a thousand hills’ could never have been, at any time, a desirable, or even an acceptable, offering to a loving and merciful God. He ‘guides the perplexed’ to the conclusion that the sacrificial system of the Jews was designed as an education, with the object of weaning a people living in the midst of idolatrous nations from worse, and of leading them to better, things. He considered the laws on sacrifice as designed against idolatry. But, in his view, the value of sacrifice, like the value of prayer, lay in the fact that it was a means to an end, and not an end in itself. He held that ‘sacrifice’ was designed to teach self-denial and practical repentance, and that the especial form, through which, in the world’s early history, such lessons were taught, was suited to the conditions under which it was given. Such reasoning sounded to many, not the loving argument it really was in favour of a spiritual idea of God, but a reasoning away of old received and literal renderings of time-honoured texts.