So much for the Pharisaic conception of God. We will now consider another set of beliefs of theirs upon which a comparison with New Testament teaching is possible and instructive--the Pharisaic ideas about Retribution, reward and punishment, merit. There is no consistent Pharisaic doctrine upon the subject, but rather a comment upon the facts of human experience from different points of view. That man's will is free is one of the axioms of Pharisaism. It was stated by R. Akiba, "Everything is foreseen, and freedom is given, and the world is judged, and all is according to the amount of work" (M. Aboth. iii. 15). Man is therefore a moral agent, cognisant of the distinction between right and wrong, capable of acting upon that distinction, and liable to be judged accordingly. "All is in the hand of Heaven except the fear of Heaven," said another teacher (b. Ber. 33^b). If, then, man serves God, he does so not on compulsion. He is therefore subject to the approval or disapproval of God for what he does. Experience, interpreting life, discerns evident tokens of such approval and disapproval; and Scripture clearly teaches that God distinguishes between the righteous and the sinner in His treatment of them. Whatever form His approval or disapproval may take, they are His certain judgment on human actions, to be looked for as the consequence of doing those actions. The Pharisees, like other moralists, expressed this by saying that God rewarded the good and punished the bad. And they used that principle as a clue to the meaning of providence, as shown in human suffering and happiness. They pondered on the problem why suffering should be inflicted on the apparently innocent? and why the obviously sinful seemed often to prosper? And they suggested various partial solutions of the problem, but wisely left it an open question. It might be that there was no suffering without previous sin, or it might be that suffering was sometimes the chastisement imposed on the righteous through the love of God, as it is said: "Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth." It might be that material prosperity and adversity were the signs by which the divine approval and disapproval were shown, the reward or the punishment for human actions; or it might be that these were manifested only inwardly, in the soul and not in the outward lot. All these different views find varied expression in the utterance of Pharisaic teachers, and there is no attempt to set up one as true to the exclusion of the rest. And when the Pharisee spoke of reward and punishment, he meant to indicate his belief that in some way it went well with the man who did good, and ill with the man who did wrong, and both by the divine appointment.