We scoff at the Augurs. It is so easy to scoff, and so difficult well to comprehend. Did the Deity leave the whole world without Light for two score centuries, to illuminate only a little corner of Palestine and a brutal, ignorant, and ungrateful people? Why always calumniate God and the Sanctuary? Were there never any others than rogues among the priests? Could no honest and sincere men be found among the Hierophants of Ceres or Diana, of Dionusos or Apollo, of Hermes or Mithras? Were these, then, all deceived, like the rest? Who, then, constantly deceived them, without betraying themselves, during a series of centuries?--for the cheats are not immortal! Arago said, that outside of the pure mathematics, he who utters the word "impossible," is wanting in prudence and good sense. The true name of Satan, the Kabalists say, is that of Yahveh reversed; for Satan is not a black god, but the negation of God. The Devil is the personification of Atheism or Idolatry. For the Initiates, this is not a _Person_, but a _Force_, created for good, but which _may_ serve for evil. _It is the instrument of Liberty or Free Will_. They represent this Force, which presides over the physical generation, under the mythologic and horned form of the God PAN; thence came the he-goat of the Sabbat, brother of the Ancient Serpent, and the Light-bearer or _Phosphor_, of which the poets have made the false Lucifer of the legend. Gold, to the eyes of the Initiates, is Light condensed. They style the sacred numbers of the Kabalah "golden numbers," and the moral teachings of Pythagoras his "golden verses." For the same reason, a mysterious book of Apuleius, in which an ass figures largely, was called "The Golden Ass." The Pagans accused the Christians of worshipping an ass, and they did not invent this reproach, but it came from the Samaritan Jews, who, figuring the data of the Kabalah in regard to the Divinity by Egyptian symbols, also represented the Intelligence by the figure of the Magical Star adored under the name of _Remphan_, Science under the emblem of Anubis, whose name they changed to _Nibbas_, and the vulgar faith or credulity under the figure of _Thartac_, a god represented with a book, a cloak, and the head of an ass. According to the Samaritan Doctors, Christianity was the reign of _Thartac_, blind Faith and vulgar credulity erected into a universal oracle, and preferred to Intelligence and Science. Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemaïs, a great Kabalist, but of doubtful orthodoxy, wrote: "The people will always mock at things easy to be misunderstood; it must needs have impostures."