original of God’s covenant, stamped with His own seal, namely, the idea of Himself, as it were, with the image of His Godhead” (iv); or, again, “The supreme reward for keeping God’s Word is that Word itself.”  Spinoza knew no Greek, but, master as he was of Christian theology, he may have studied Philo in a Latin translation, and caught some of his phrases.  With or without influence, he developed, as Philo had done, a system of philosophy, starting from the Hebrew conception of God and blending Jewish tradition with scientific metaphysics.  The Unity of God and His sole reality were the fundamental principles of his thought, as they had been of Philo’s.  He rejected, indeed, with scorn the notion that all philosophy must be deduced from the Bible, which was to him a book of moral and religious worth, but free from all philosophical doctrine.  Theology, the subject of the Bible, according to him, demands perfect obedience, philosophy perfect knowledge.[345] Both alike are saving, but the spheres of the two are distinct:  and Moses and the prophets excel in law and imagination, not in reason and reflection.  Hence Spinoza approached the Bible from the critical standpoint; and, on the other hand, he approached philosophy with a free mind searching for truth, independent of religious dogmatism, and he was, therefore, the founder of modern philosophy.  None the less his view of the universe is an intellectual expression of the Hebraic monotheism, which unites a religious with a scientific monism.  He regards God as the only reality, sees and knows all things in Him, and deduces all things from His attributes, which are the incomplete representations that man makes of His true nature; he explains all thought, all movement, and all that seems material as the working of His modes; and, finally, he places as the end of man’s intellectual progress and the culmination of his moral life the love of God.  In truth, Jewish philosophy has its unity and its special stamp, no less than Jewish religion and tradition, from which it receives its nurture.  Thrice it has towered up in a great system:  through Philo in the classical, through Maimonides in the mediaeval, through Spinoza in the modern world.  In the Renaissance of Jewish learning during the nineteenth century, Philo was at last studied and interpreted by scholars of his own people.  The first modern writer to reveal the philosophy of Jewish history was Nachman Krochmal (1785-1840), and his posthumous Hebrew book, “The Guide of the Perplexed of the Time,” edited by Zunz, contained the first critical appreciation of the Hellenistic Jewish culture by a rabbinic scholar.  He knew no Greek, but he studied the works of German writers, and in his account of Philo gives a summary of the remarks of the theologian Neander, himself a baptized Jew.  In his own criticism he discerns the weakness and strength of Philo from the Jewish aspect.  “There are,” he says, “many strange things in Philo’s exegesis, not only because he draws far-fetched allegories from the text, but also because he interprets single words without a sure foundation in Hebrew philology.  He uses Scripture as a sort of clay which he moulds to convey his philosophical ideas.  Yet we must be grateful to him because many of his interpretations are beautiful ornaments to the text; and we may apply to them what Ibn Ezra said of the teachings of the Haggadah, ’Some of them are fine silks, others as heavy as sack-cloth.’”