the feebler echoes of calumny.  He corresponded with his brethren far and near, answered questions as Rabbi, explained passages in his Commentary on the Mishnah or his other writings, entered heartily into the controversies of the day, discussed the claims of a new aspirant to the dignity of Messiah, encouraged the weaker brethren who fell under disfavor because they had been compelled to become pretended converts to Islam, showed common-sense and strong intellectual grasp in every line he wrote, and combined in his dealings with all questions the rarely associated qualities, toleration and devotion to the truth.  Yet he felt that his life’s work was still incomplete.  He loved truth, but truth for him had two aspects:  there was truth as revealed by God, there was truth which God left man to discover for himself.  In the mind of Maimonides, Moses and Aristotle occupied pedestals side by side.  In the “Strong Hand,” he had codified and given orderly arrangement to Judaism as revealed in Bible and tradition; he would now examine its relations to reason, would compare its results with the data of philosophy.  This he did in his “Guide of the Perplexed” (Moreh Nebuchim).  Maimonides here differed fundamentally from his immediate predecessors.  Jehuda Halevi, in his Cuzari, was poet more than philosopher.  The Cuzari was a dialogue based on the three principles, that God is revealed in history, that Jerusalem is the centre of the world, and that Israel is to the nations as the heart to the limbs.  Jehuda Halevi supported these ideas with arguments deduced from the philosophy of his day, he used reason as the handmaid of theology.  Maimonides, however, like Saadiah, recognized a higher function for reason.  He placed reason on the same level as revelation, and then demonstrated that his faith and his reason taught identical truths.  His work, the “Guide of the Perplexed,” written in Arabic in about the year 1190, is based, on the one hand, on the Aristotelian system as expounded by Arabian thinkers, and, on the other hand, on a firm belief in Scripture and tradition.  With a masterly hand, Maimonides summarized the teachings of Aristotle and the doctrines of Moses and the Rabbis.  Between these two independent bodies of truths he found, not contradiction, but agreement, and he reconciled them in a way that satisfied so many minds that the “Guide” was translated into Hebrew twice during his life-time, and was studied by Mohammedans and by Christians such as Thomas Aquinas.  With general readers, the third part was the most popular.  In this part Maimonides offered rational explanations of the ceremonial and legislative details of the Bible.