or the void within fill his desolate
world anew with the vivifying thought of a living God.

11. Among all the Jewish religious philosophers the highest rank must be
accorded to Jehudah ha Levi, the author of the _Cuzari_,(172) who makes
the historical fact of the divine revelation the foundation of the Jewish
religion and the chief testimony of the existence of God. As a matter of
fact, reason alone will not lead to God, except where religious intuition
forms, so to speak, the ladder of heaven, leading to the realm of the
unknowable. Philosophy, at best, can only demonstrate the existence of a
final Cause, or of a supreme Intelligence working toward sublime purposes;
possibly also a moral government of the world, in both the physical and
the spiritual life. Religion alone, founded upon divine revelation, can
teach man to find a God, to whom he can appeal in trust in his moments of
trouble or of woe, and whose will he can see in the dictates of conscience
and the destiny of nations. Reason must serve as a _corrective_ for the
contents of revelation, scrutinizing and purifying, deepening and
spiritualizing ever anew the truths received through intuition, but it can
never be the final source of truth.

12. The same method must apply also to modern thought and research, which
substituted historical methods for metaphysics in both the physical and
intellectual world, and which endeavors to trace the origin and growth of
both objects and ideas in accordance with fixed laws. The process of
evolution, our modern key with which to unlock the secrets of nature,
points most significantly to a Supreme Power and Energy. But this energy,
entering into the cosmic process at its outset, causing its motion and its
growth, implies also an end, and thus again we have the Supreme
Intelligence reached through a new type of teleology.(173) But all these
conceptions, however they may be in harmony with the Jewish belief in
creation and revelation, can at best supplement it, but can certainly
neither supplant nor be identified with it.

Chapter XII. The Essence of God

1. An exquisite Oriental fable tells of a sage who had been meditating
vainly for days and weeks on the question, What is God? One day, walking
along the seashore, he saw some children busying themselves by digging
holes in the sand and pouring into them water from the sea. "What are you
doing there?" he asked them, to which they replied, "We want to empty the
sea of