The eighth item needs to be specially insisted upon. It is frequently asserted that nothing in the nature of a heteroclite cult could subsist continuously in Jewry; that there were no religious ideas in the Jewish world save those of the Sacred Books of the Rabbis. [168] This is a historical delusion. The historical and prophetic books of the Old Testament affirm a constant resort to pagan rites and Gods before the Exile. There is official record of bitter strife and sunderance between those of the Return and the people they found on the soil. Malachi sounds the note of strife, lamenting popular lukewarmness, sacrilege and unbelief. The simple fact that after the Exile Hebrew was no longer the common language, and that the people spoke Aramaic or "Chaldee," tells of a highly artificial relation between hierarchy and populace. Never can even Judæa have been long homogeneous. "Neither in Galilee nor Peræa must we conceive of the Jewish element as pure and unmixed. In the shifting course of history Jews and Gentiles had been here so often, and in such a variety of ways, thrown together, that the attainment of exclusive predominance by the Jewish element must be counted among the impossibilities. It was only in Judæa that this was at least approximately arrived at by the energetic agency of the scribes during the course of a century." [169] The assumption commonly made is that all Jews and "naturalized" Jews were of one theistic way of thinking, like orthodox Christians, and, like these, could not imagine any other point of view. If for that entirely one-sided conception the inquirer will even substitute one in terms of the mixed realities of life in Christendom he will be much nearer the truth. Over and above the hatreds between sects and factions holding by the same formulas and Sacred Books, there were in Jewry the innovators, then as now: the minds which varied from the documentary norm in all directions, analogues of the devotees of "Christian Science," Bâbists, British Buddhists, Swedenborgians, Shakers, Second Adventists, Mormons, and so on, who from a more or less common basis radiated to all the points of the compass of creed. What faces us in the rise of Christianity is the development of one of those variants, on lines of adaptation to popular need, with an organization on lines already tested in the experience of Judaism.