Elizzar, and other learned men. Making a compilation of the whole,
they so produced the famous work called _Zohar_ (God's splendor). This
book proved an inexhaustible mine for all the subsequent Cabalists,
their source of information and knowledge, and all more recent and
genuine Cabalas were all more or less carefully copied from the
former. Before that, all the mysterious doctrines had come down in an
unbroken line of merely oral tradition as far back as man could trace
himself on earth. They were scrupulously and jealously guarded by the
wise men of Chaldea, India, Persia and Egypt, and passed from one
initiate to another, in the same purity of form as when handed down to
the first man by the angels, students of God's great Theosophic
seminary."

Many Free Thinkers, in their anxiety to crush everything belonging to
Christianity, often forget that, in throwing aside the Hebrew records as
utterly worthless, they are getting rid of one of the most ancient
literatures in the world. They also do not remember the history of a
peculiar nation, strangely preserved amid the fluctuations of time, the
purity and excellence of the Book of Job, the Psalms, and others which I
could name. They cast unmerited contempt on these compilations, when, at
the same time, they will throw themselves, with almost Fetish reverence,
and apparently rapt adoration, before the Institutes of Menu, the
Bhagvat-Geeta, the morals of Chaoung-Fou-Tszee, the Zend-Avesta, the
Rig-Veda, the Oracles of Zoroaster, the Book of the Dead, the Puranas,
the Shastras, and the like.

Well may the Sons of Israel be proud of their ancient descent. They
suffered through Christian persecutions uncomplainingly--the torture,
the rack, the _auto-da-fe_--and yet they bowed their heads in
submission to the will of Adonai. To-day they stand upright and