I am, I confess, greatly disappointed. I had expected, I scarce know why, to have had some light thrown on the existence of the Cabala in its present form, from Ezekiel to Paul and John. But Mr. Oxlee takes it as he finds it, and gravely ascribes this patch-work of corrupt Platonism or Plotinism, with Chaldean, Persian, and Judaic fables and fancies, to the Jewish Doctors, as an original, profound, and pious philosophy in its fountain-head! The indispensable requisite not only to a profitable but even to a safe study of the Cabala is a familiar knowledge of the docimastic philosophy, that is, a philosophy, which has for its object the trial and testing of the weights and measures themselves, the first principles, definitions, postulates, axioms of logic and metaphysics. But this is in no other way possible but by our enumeration of the mental faculties, and an investigation of the constitution, function, limits, and applicability

ad quas res

, of each. The application to this subject of the rules and forms of the understanding, or discursive logic, or even of the intuitions of the reason itself, if reason be assumed as the first and highest, has Pantheism for its necessary result. But this the Cabalists did: and consequently the Cabalistic theosophy is Pantheistic, and Pantheism, in whatever drapery of pious phrases disguised, is (where it forms the whole of a system) Atheism, and precludes moral responsibility, and the essential difference of right and wrong. One of the two contra-distinctions of the Hebrew Revelation is the doctrine of positive creation. This, if not the only, is the easiest and surest criterion between the idea of God and the notion of a

mens agitans molem

. But this the Cabalists evaded by their double meaning of the term, 'nothing', namely as nought = 0, and as no

thing

; and by their use of the term, as designating God. Thus in words and to the ear they taught that the world was made out of nothing; but in fact they meant and inculcated, that the world was God himself expanded.

[It]

is not, therefore, half a dozen passages respecting the first three

proprietates