murmur, as God himself is also suffering, and, as the Talmud expresses it, “It is enough for the slave to be in the position of his master.”(192) This thought of the compassion—in its strictest sense of fellow‐ suffering—of God with His creatures becomes a new motive for avoiding sin. “Woe to the wicked,” exclaims a Rabbi, “who by their bad actions turn the mercy of God into strict justice.”(193) And the later mystics explain distinctly that the great crime of sin consists in causing pain, so to speak, to the Shechinah. One of them compared it with the slave who abuses the goodness of his master so far as to buy with his money arms to wound him. But, on the other hand, it becomes, rather inconsistently, also a new source of comfort; for, in the end, God will have to redeem Himself from this suffering, which cannot be accomplished so long as Israel is still under punishment.(194) Most interesting is the noble prayer by a Rabbi of a very late mystical school: “O God, speedily bring about the redemption. I am not in the least thinking of what I may gain by it. I am willing to be condemned to all tortures in hell, if only the Shechinah will cease to suffer.”(195) If we were now to ask for the attitude of the Synagogue towards these two main views, we should have to answer that—as already hinted at the opening of this paper—it never decided for the one or the other. R. David Rocca Martino dared even to write a whole book in Defence of Adam proving that he committed no sin in eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge against the literal sense of the Scriptures, which were also taken by the Rabbis literally.(196) By this he destroyed the prospects of many a theodicy, but it is not known to me that he was severely rebuked for it. It has been said by a great writer that the best theology is that which is not consistent, and this advantage the theology of the Synagogue possesses to its utmost extent. It accepted with R. Ammi the stern principle of divine retribution, in as far as it makes man feel the responsibility of his actions, and makes suffering a discipline. But it never allowed this principle to be carried so far as to deny the sufferer our sympathy, and by a series of conscious and unconscious modifications, he passed from the state of a sinner into the zenith of the saint and the perfectly righteous man. But, on the other hand, the Synagogue also gave entrance to the very opposite view which, abandoning every attempt to account for suffering, bids man do his duty without any hope of reward, even as God also does His. Hence the remarkable phenomenon in the works of later Jewish moralists, that, whilst they never weary of the most detailed accounts of the punishments awaiting the sinner and the rewards in store for the righteous, they warn us most emphatically that our actions must not be guided by these unworthy considerations, and that our only motive should be the love of God and submission to His holy will.