Origen, Clemens Alexandrinus, Chalcidius, Methodius, and Maimonides, on the authority of the _Targum_ of Jerusalem, the orthodox and greatest authority of the Jews, held that the first two words in the book of _Genesis_--B-RASIT, mean _Wisdom_, or the _Principle_. And that the idea of these words meaning “_in the beginning_” was never shared but by the profane, who were not allowed to penetrate any deeper into the esoteric sense of the sentence. Beausobre, and after him Godfrey Higgins, have demonstrated the fact. “All things,” says the _Kabala_, “are derived from one great Principle, and this principle is the _unknown_ and _invisible_ God. From Him a substantial power immediately proceeds, which is the _image of God_, and the source of all subsequent emanations. This second principle sends forth, by the _energy_ (or _will_ and _force_) of emanation, other natures, which are more or less perfect, according to their different degrees of distance, in the scale of emanation, from the First Source of existence, and which constitute different worlds, or orders of being, all united to the eternal power from which they proceed. _Matter is nothing more than the most remote effect of the emanative energy_ of the Deity. The material world receives its form from the immediate agency of powers far beneath the First Source of Being[49].... Beausobre[50] makes St. Augustine the Manichean say thus: ‘And if by _Rasit_ we understand the _active Principle_ of the creation, instead of its _beginning_, in such a case we will clearly perceive that Moses never meant to say that heaven and earth were the first works of God. He only said that God created heaven and earth _through the Principle_, who is His Son. It is not the _time_ he points to, but to the immediate author of the creation.’ Angels, according to Augustine, were created _before_ the firmament, and according to the esoteric interpretation, the heaven and earth were created after that, evolving from the _second_ Principle or the Logos--the creative Deity. “The word _principle_,” says Beausobre, “does not mean that the heaven and earth were created before anything else, for, to begin with, the _angels_ were created before that; but that God did everything through His Wisdom, which is His _Verbum_, and which the Christian _Bible_ named the _Beginning_,” thus adopting the exoteric meaning of the word abandoned to the multitudes. The _Kabala_--the Oriental as well as the Jewish--shows that a number of _emanations_ (the Jewish Sephiroth) issued from the _First_ Principle, the chief of which was _Wisdom_. This Wisdom is the Logos of Philo, and Michael, the chief of the Gnostic Eons; it is the Ormazd of the Persians; _Minerva_, goddess of wisdom, of the Greeks, who emanated from the head of Jupiter; and the second Person of the Christian Trinity. The early Fathers of the Church had not much to exert their imagination; they found a ready-made doctrine