But true as the above words may be, when coming from one who has re-discovered, more completely than anyone else has done during the past centuries, one of the keys to the universal Mystery Language, it is impossible for an Eastern Occultist to agree with the conclusion of the able author of The Source of Measures. He “has set out to find the truth,” and yet he still believes that:
The best and most authentic vehicle of communication from [the creative] God to man ... is to be found in the Hebrew Bible.
To this we must and shall demur, giving our reasons for it in a few words. The “Hebrew Bible” exists no more, as has been shown in the foregoing pages, and the garbled accounts, the falsified and pale copies we have of the real Mosaic Bible of the Initiates, warrant the making of no such sweeping assertion and claim. All that the scholar can fairly claim is that the Jewish Bible, as now extant—in its latest and final interpretation, and according to the newly-discovered key—may give [pg 188] a partial presentment of the truths it contained before it was mangled. But how can he tell what the Pentateuch contained before it had been re-composed by Esdras; then corrupted still more by the ambitious Rabbis in later times, and otherwise remodelled and interfered with? Leaving aside the opinion of the declared enemies of the Jewish Scriptures, one may quote simply what their most devoted followers say.
Two of these are Horne and Prideaux. The avowals of the former will be sufficient to show how much now remains of the original Mosaic books, unless indeed we accept his sublimely blind faith in the inspiration and editorship of the Holy Ghost. He writes that when a Hebrew scribe found a writing of any author he was entitled, if he thought fit, being “conscious of the aid of the Holy Spirit,” to do exactly as he pleased with it—to cut it up, or copy it, or use as much of it as he deemed right, and so to incorporate it with his own manuscript. Dr. Kenealy aptly remarks of Horne, that it is almost impossible to get any admission from him
That makes against his church, so remarkably guarded is he [Horne] in his phraseology and so wonderfully discreet in the use of words that his language, like a diplomatic letter, perpetually suggests to the mind ideas other than those which he really means; I defy any unlearned person to read his chapter on “Hebrew characters” and to derive any knowledge from it whatever on the subject on which he professes to treat.[356]
And yet this same Horne writes:
We are persuaded that the things to which reference is made proceeded from the original writers or compilers of the books [Old Testament]. Sometimes they took other writings, annals, genealogies, and such like, with which they incorporated additional matter, or which they put together with greater or less condensation. The Old Testament authors used the sources they employed (that is, the writing of other people) with freedom and independence. Conscious of the aid of the Divine Spirit, they adapted their own productions, or the productions of others, to the wants of the times. But in these respects they cannot be said to have corrupted the text of Scripture. They made the text.[357]
But of what did they make it? Why, of the writings of other persons, justly observes Kenealy:
And this is Horne's notion of what the Old Testament is—a cento from the writings of unknown persons collected and put together by those who, he says, were divinely inspired. No infidel that I know of has ever made so damaging a charge as this against the authenticity of the Old Testament.[358]
This is quite sufficient, we think, to show that no key to the universal language-system can ever open the mysteries of Creation in a work in which, whether through design or carelessness, nearly every sentence has been made to apply to the latest outcome of religious views—to Phallicism, and to nothing else. There are a sufficient number of stray bits in the Elohistic portions of the Bible to warrant the inference that the Hebrews who wrote it were Initiates; hence the mathematical coördinations and the perfect harmony between the measures of the Great Pyramid and the numerals of the Biblical glyphs. But surely if one borrowed from the other, it cannot be the architects of the Pyramid who borrowed from Solomon's Temple, if only because the former exists to this day as a stupendous living monument of Esoteric records, while the famous temple has never existed outside of the far later Hebrew scrolls.[359] Hence there is a great distance between the admission that some Hebrews were Initiates, and the conclusion that because of this the Hebrew Bible must be the best standard, as being the highest representative of the archaic Esoteric System.