The “Christ,” then, and the “Logos” existed ages before Christianity; the Oriental Gnosis was studied long before the days of Moses, and we have to seek for the origin of all these in the archaic periods of the primeval Asiatic philosophy. Peter’s second _Epistle_ and Jude’s fragment, preserved in the _New Testament_, show by their phraseology that they belong to the kabalistic Oriental Gnosis, for they use the same expressions as did the Christian Gnostics who built a part of their system from the Oriental _Kabala_. “Presumptuous are they (the Ophites), self-willed, they are not afraid to speak evil of DIGNITIES,” says Peter (2d Epistle ii. 10), the original model for the later abusive Tertullian and Irenæus.[384] “Likewise (even as Sodom and Gomorrah) also these _filthy_ dreamers defile the flesh, despise DOMINION and speak evil of DIGNITIES,” says Jude, repeating the very words of Peter, and thereby expressions consecrated in the _Kabala_. _Dominion_ is the “Empire,” the _tenth_ of the kabalistic sephiroth.[385] The _Powers_ and Dignities are the subordinate genii of the Archangels and Angels of the _Sohar_.[386] These emanations are the very life and soul of the _Kabala_ and Zoroastranism; and the _Talmud_ itself, in its present state, is all borrowed from the _Zend-avesta_. Therefore, by adopting the views of Peter, Jude, and other Jewish apostles, the Christians have become but a dissenting sect of the Persians, for they do not even interpret the meaning of all such _Powers_ as the true kabalists do. Paul’s warning his converts against the worshipping of angels, shows how well he appreciated, even so early as his period, the dangers of borrowing from a metaphysical doctrine the philosophy of which could be rightly interpreted but by its well-learned adherents, the Magi and the Jewish Tanaïm. “Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and _worshipping of angels_, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind,”[387] is a sentence laid right at the door of Peter and his champions. In the _Talmud_, Michael is Prince of Water, who has _seven_ inferior spirits subordinate to him. He is the patron, the guardian angel of the Jews, as Daniel informs us (v. 21), and the Greek Ophites, who identified him with their Ophiomorphos, the personified creation of the envy and malice of Ilda-Baoth, the Demiurgus (Creator of the _material_ world), and undertook to prove that he was also Samuel, the Hebrew prince of the evil spirits, or Persian devs, were naturally regarded by the Jews as blasphemers. But did Jesus ever sanction this belief in angels except in so far as hinting that they were the messengers and subordinates of God? And here the origin of the later splits between Christian beliefs is directly traceable to these two early contradictory views.