_Wisdom_, the first emanation of En-Soph; the Protogonos, the Hypostasis; the Adam Kadmon of the kabalist, the Brahma of the Hindu; the Logos of Plato, and the “_Beginning_” of St. John--is the Rasit--ראשית, of the _Book of Genesis_. If rightly interpreted it overturns, as we have remarked, the whole elaborate system of Christian theology, for it proves that behind the _creative_ Deity, there was a HIGHER god; a planner, an architect; and that the former was but His executive agent--a simple POWER! They persecuted the Gnostics, murdered the philosophers, and burned the kabalists and the masons; and when the day of the great reckoning arrives, and the light shines in darkness, what will they have to offer in the place of the departed, expired religion? What will they answer, these pretended monotheists, these worshippers and _pseudo_-servants of the one living God, to their Creator? How will they account for this long persecution of them who were the true followers of the grand Megalistor, the supreme great master of the Rosicrucians, the FIRST of masons. “For he is the Builder and Architect of the Temple of the universe; He is the _Verbum Sapienti_.”[51] “Every one knows,” wrote the great Manichean of the third century, Fauste, “that the Evangeliums were written neither by Jesus Christ, nor his apostles, but long after their time by some unknown persons, who, judging well that they would hardly be believed when telling of things they had not seen themselves, headed their narratives with the names of the apostles or of disciples contemporaneous with the latter.” Commenting upon the subject, A. Franck, the learned Hebrew scholar of the Institute and translator of the _Kabala_, expresses the same idea. “Are we not authorized,” he asks, “to view the _Kabala_ as a precious remnant of religious philosophy of the Orient, which, transported into Alexandria, got mixed to the doctrine of Plato, and under the usurped name of Dionysius the Areopagite, bishop of Athens, converted and consecrated by St. Paul, was thus enabled to penetrate into the mysticism of the mediæval ages?”[52] Says Jacolliot: “What is then this religious philosophy of the Orient, which has penetrated into the mystic symbolism of Christianity? We answer: This philosophy, the traces of which we find among the Magians, the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Hebrew kabalists and the Christians, is none other than that of the Hindu Brahmans, the sectarians of the _pitris_, or the spirits of the invisible worlds which surround us.”[53]