able to do nothing, in comparison of their forefathers:--the Cabala of
the Jews, therefore, is nothing else, but a most pernicious
superstition, the which by collecting, dividing, and changing several
names, words, and letters, dispersed up and down in the bible, at their
own good will and pleasure, and making one thing out of another, they
dissolve the members of truth, raising up sentences, inductions, and
parables of their own, apply thereto the oracles of divine scripture to
them, defaming the scriptures, and affirming their fragments to consist
of them, blaspheme the word of God by their wrested suppositions of
words, syllables, letters and numbers; endeavouring to prop up their
villainous inventions, by arguments drawn from their own delusions."


FOOTNOTES:

[2] Antonio de Haen, S.C.R.A. Majestate a consiliis anticis, et
Archiatri, medicinae in alma et antiquissimo universitate professoris
primarij, plurium eruditorium societatem socii, de magia liber. 8vo.
Vienna.

[3] Many significations have been attached to the word miracle, both by
the ancients and moderns. With us a miracle is the suspension or
violation of the laws of nature; and a miracle, which can be explained
upon physical principles, ceases to be such. Whatever surpassed their
comprehension was regarded by the ancients as a miracle, and every
extraordinary degree of information attained by an individual, as well
as any unlooked-for occurrence, was referred to some peculiar
interposition of the deity. Hence among the ancients, the followers of
different divinities, far from denying the miracles performed by their
opponents, admitted their reality, but endeavoured to surpass them; and