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mulgation about the seventeenth or eighteenth century before Christ.
"To me be Nature’s volume broad display’d;
And to peruse its all instructing page,
My whole delight."
By a careful perusal of the Scriptures of the Old Testament, (but there are few that read, and fewer that consider what they do read) and consulting the learned and candid Philo; they may also, if their patience allow them, cast their eyes over a volume or two of the tedious and partial Josephus,—from these it will appear evident, that the Jews knew nothing of the Soul farther than as the intellect or mind, till their return from Babylon. It was there they imbibed the idea of aerial beings. The Babylonians having personified the names of their months into beings or angels with wings at their backs, in imitation of the twelve Decans of the Egyptians, who are said to have created the World in twelve months; this furnished the Jews with an addition to their theology, and no doubt they were eager not to lose the main chance of carrying away a few of those gentry, like a bundle of old clothes in a bag (and of the same value too, we may suppose,) dressing them out afterwards, Jews a-la-mode, only retaining their names, that they might not be thought ungrateful to their Mamas and Papas
