“At five years of age,” says the Mishnah, “let the child begin to study the Scriptures; let him continue so doing till the age of ten, when he may begin to study the Mishnah; at the age of fifteen let him begin the Gemara” (T. Aboth, chap. v.). This passage in the “vast work or ocean of learning,” as some call it, could not but be distasteful to Christianity. The tone adopted in speaking of the Almighty is anthropomorphic and anthropocentric in the extreme.[71] God spends a fourth part of the day in studying the Law. At every watch of the night He sits and roars like a lion, saying, “Woe is Me that I have laid desolate My house and burned My sanctuary, and sent My children into captivity among the nations of the world” (Berachoth). He plays for three hours every day with the leviathan. And bear in mind there are far more objectionable representations than these in the writings of the Rabbis. It revels more than any known faith in the degradation of women; the Rabbinic court declares women “disqualified by the Law from giving testimony”; the Talmud excludes them from the public worship of God, and teaches that they are under no obligation to learn the revealed will of their Creator,--peculiarly antipathetic doctrines to those who believe in an Immaculate Virgin and in a St. Mary Magdalen. Moreover, the large space given to cursing the Jew and the non-Jew, and to the unhallowed practices of magic and necromancy, the summoning and conversing with devils and spirits, the advocacy of astrology, charms, and philters, served as a pretext for Pope and Inquisition to attack it. In A.D. 553 Justinian proscribed it by Novella 146 as a “tissue of puerilities, of fables, of iniquities, of insults, of imprecations, of heresies, and of blasphemies”; it was destroyed by Gregory IX. in A.D. 1230; it was burnt in Paris by Innocent IV. (A.D. 1244); and it was proscribed by Clement IV., by Honorius[72] IV., and by John XXII. The first printed edition (Venice, 1520) saved it, and not until the third had appeared (Basle, 1578) did it come under the eye of the censor. In 1553 and 1555 Julius III. promulgated a proclamation against what he called grotesquely the Talmud Gulnaroth; and this proceeding was repeated by Paul IV. in 1559, by Pius V. in 1566, and by Clement VIII. in 1592 and 1599.