one will embrace his own with rapture, and this intoxication of love will last fifty years without interruption. Each couple will obtain an enchanting palace for a dwelling, where they will eat and drink and enjoy all sorts of pleasure for ever and ever.[36]" This description is beautiful; but how sensuous! The rabbis, on the other hand, say, "Above (in the blessed abode of the pious) there is neither eating nor drinking, but the pious sit crowned, and delight themselves with the vision of the Godhead." Eisenmenger seeks, in his _Entdecktes Judenthum_ (Theil 1., Kap. 8), by a crass exposition to throw ridicule on the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence, which the rabbis maintain; but what may not be made ridiculous in the same way? He also makes sport, with equal injustice, of other rabbinical teachings. With the Stoics, for example, the rabbis call wise men _Kings_; they say, that God does nothing without previously taking counsel with his angels, that is, Omnipotence works upon nature not immediately, but by means of the natural forces; they teach, that everything is predestined by God, except the practice of virtue. These are the subjects of Eisenmenger's mockery; but does any reasonable theologian find in these anything ridiculous or impious? I should be obliged to write a whole book, if I were to answer all the unjust charges and jeers which have been brought against the Talmudists, not by Christian writers alone, but even by Jews who wished to pass for _illuminati_. To be just to the rabbis it is necessary to penetrate into the true spirit of the Talmud, to become thoroughly familiar with the manner in which the ancients generally, but especially the Orientals, deliver theological, moral, and even physical truths in fables and allegories, to become familiar also with the style of Oriental hyperbole in reference to everything that can be of interest to man. Moreover, the rabbis should be treated in the spirit in which they themselves excused Rabbi Meïr who had a heretic for his teacher,--the spirit expressed in a passage already quoted. If justice is thus dealt to the rabbis, the Talmud will certainly not show all the absurdities which its opponents are disposed too readily to find.