y by the
rabbis, and only partisan and prejudiced writers, entirely lacking in a
sense of humor, could point to such passages to prove that a theology of
the Synagogue carried out a "Judaization of God."(420)

C. God In Relation To The World

Chapter XXIV. The World and its Master

1. In using the term world or _universe_ we include the totality of all
beings at once, and this suggests a stage of knowledge where polytheism is
practically overcome. Among the Greeks, Pythagoras is said to have been
the first to perceive "a beautiful order of things" in the world, and
therefore to call it _cosmos_.(421) Primitive man saw in the world
innumerable forces continually struggling with each other for supremacy.
Without an ordering mind no order, as we conceive it, can exist. The old
Babylonian conception prevalent throughout antiquity divided the world
into three realms, the celestial, terrestrial, and the nether world, each
of which had its own type of inhabitants and its own ruling divinities.
Yet these various divine powers were at war with each other, and
ultimately they, too, must submit to a blind fate which men and gods alike
could read in the stars or other natural phenomena.

With the first words of the Bible, "In the beginning God created the
heavens and the earth," Judaism declared the world to be a unity and God
its Creator and Master. Heathenism had always beheld in the world certain
blind forces of nature, working without plan or purpose and devoid of any
moral aims. But Judaism sees in the world the work of a supreme Intellect
who fashioned it according to His will, and who rules in freedom, wisdom,
and goodness. "He spoke, and it was; He commanded, and it stood."(422)
Nature exists only by the will of God; His creative _fiat_ called it into
existence, and it ceases to be as soon as it has fulfilled His plan.

2. That which the scientist terms nature--the cosmic life in its eternal
process of growth and reproduction--is declared by Judaism to be God's
creation. Ancient heathen conceptions deified nature, indeed, but they
knew only a cosmogony, that is, a process of birth and growth of the
world. In this the gods participate with all other beings, to sink back
again at the close of the drama into fiery chaos,--the so-called "twilight
of the gods." Here the deity constitutes a part of the world, or the world
a part of the deity, and philosophic speculation can at best blend the two
into a pantheistic