All the previous stories and legends pale into insignificance by the side of the endless miracles spun out by the Khassidim and ascribed to the founder of the sect and his disciples.[32] Nothing is too absurd for them. There seems to be a conscious desire in these stories to outdo all previous records, in order to throw the largest halo on their Bal-schem-tow, or Bescht, as he is called by his initials. Bal-schem-tow was neither the miracle-worker that his adherents would have him, nor the impostor that his opponents imagine him to have been. He was a truly pious man who sought a refuge in mysticism against the verbalism of the Jews of his days, in the middle of the eighteenth century. His followers, unfortunately mistaking the accidental in his teachings for the essentials of the new doctrine, have raised the Cabbalistic lucubrations of his disciples to the dignity of religious books, and have opened wide the doors for superstitions of all kinds. The realities of this world hardly exist for them, or are at best the temporal reflexes of that mystic sphere in which all their thoughts soar. Their rabbis are all workers of miracles, and Bescht is adored by them more than Moses and the Biblical saints. His life and acts have been so surrounded by a legendary atmosphere that it is now, only one hundred and fifty years after his life, not possible to disentangle truth from fiction and to reconstruct the real man. A large number of books relate the various miraculous incidents in his life, but the one entitled 'Khal Chsidim' surpasses them all in variety, and attempts to give as it were a chronological sequence of his acts.