All that can be said with any degree of certainty with regard to this belief is that it did exist amongst the Zoroastrians of Persia as well as amongst the Jews. D'Herbelot, quoting Abulfaraj, shows that five hundred years before Christ, Zerdascht, the leader of the Zoroastrians, predicted the coming of the Messiah, at whose birth a star would appear. He also told his disciples that the Messiah would be born of a virgin, that they would be the first to hear of Him, and that they should bring Him gifts.[58] Drach believes that this tradition was taught in the ancient synagogue,[59] thus explaining the words of St. Paul that unto the Jews "were committed the oracles of God"[60]: This oral doctrine, which is the Cabala, had for its object the most sublime truths of the Faith which it brought back incessantly to the promised Redeemer, the foundation of the whole system of the ancient tradition.[61] Drach further asserts that the doctrine of the Trinity formed a part of this tradition: Whoever has familiarized himself with that which was taught by the ancient doctors of the Synagogue, particularly those who lived before the coming of the Saviour, knows that the Trinity in one God was a truth admitted amongst them from the earliest times.[62] M. Vulliaud points out that Graetz admits the existence of this idea in the Zohar: "It even taught certain doctrines which appeared favourable to the Christian dogma of the Trinity!" And again: "It is incontestable that the Zohar makes allusions to the beliefs in the Trinity and the Incarnation."[63] M. Vulliaud adds: "The idea of the Trinity must therefore play an important part in the Cabala, since it has been possible to affirm that 'the characteristic of the Zohar and its particular conception is its attachment to the principle of the Trinity,'"[64] and further quotes Edersheim as saying that "a great part of the explanation given in the writings of the Cabalists resembles in a surprising manner the highest truths of Christianity."[65] It would appear, then, that certain remnants of the ancient secret tradition lingered on in the Cabala. The _Jewish Encyclopædia_, perhaps unintentionally, endorses this opinion, since in deriding the sixteenth-century Christian Cabalists for asserting that the Cabala contained traces of Christianity, it goes on to say that what appears to be Christian in the Cabala is only ancient esoteric doctrine.[66] Here, then, we have it on the authority of modern Jewish scholars that the ancient secret tradition was in harmony with Christian teaching. But in the teaching of the later synagogue the philosophy of the earlier sages was narrowed down to suit the exclusive system of the Jewish hierarchy, and the ancient hope of a Redeemer who should restore Man to the state of felicity he had lost at the Fall was transformed into the idea of salvation for the Jews alone[67] under the ægis of a triumphant and even