As to Mr. Oxlee's 'abstract intelligences,' I cannot but think 'abstract' for 'pure,' and even pure intelligences for incorporeal, a lax use of terms. With regard to the point in question, the truth seems to be this. The ancient Hebrews certainly distinguished the principle or ground of life, understanding, and will from ponderable, visible, matter. The former they considered and called 'spirit', and believed it to be an emission from the Almighty Father of Spirits: the latter they called 'body'; and in this sense they doubtless believed in the existence of incorporeal beings. But that they had any notion of immaterial beings in the sense of Des Cartes, is contrary to all we know of them, and of every other people in the same degree of cultivation. Air, fire, light, express the degrees of ascending refinement. In the infancy of thought the life, soul, mind, are supposed to be air--'anima, animus', that is, [Greek: ánemos], spiritus, [Greek: pneuma]. In the childhood, they are fire, 'mens ignea, ignicula', and God himself [Greek: pur noeròn, pur aeízôon]. Lastly, in the youth of thought, they are refined into light; and that light is capable of subsisting in a latent state, the experience of the stricken flint, of lightning from the clouds, and the like, served to prove, or at least, it supplied a popular answer to the objection;--"If the soul be light, why is it not visible?" That the purest light is invisible to our gross sense, and that visible light is a compound of light and shadow, were answers of a later and more refined period. Observe, however, that the Hebrew Legislator precluded all unfit applications of the materializing fancy by forbidding the people to 'imagine' at all concerning God. For the ear alone, to the exclusion of all other bodily sense, was he to be designated, that is, by the Name. All else was for the mind--by power, truth, wisdom, holiness, mercy. Prop. II. ch. ii. p. 36. I fear I must surrender my hope that Mr. Oxlee was an exception to the rule, that the study of Rabbinical literature either finds a man 'whimmy', or makes him so. If neither the demands of poetic taste, nor the peculiar character of oracles, were of avail, yet morality and piety might seem enough to convince any one that this vision of Micaiah, (2 'Chron'. c. xviii. 18, &c.) was the poetic form, the veil, of the Prophet's meaning. And a most sublime meaning it was. Mr. Oxlee should recollect that the forms and personages of visions are all and always symbolical. Ib. pp. 39-40. It will not avail us much, however, to have established their incorporeity or spirituality, if what R. Moses affirms be true * * *. This impious paradox * *. Swayed, however, by the authority of so great a man, even R. David Kimchi has dilapsed into the same error, &c.