The same may be said of the necromancers, who obtain no answer on the Sabbath-day. It is nothing more than a clever fiction. By the law of Moses necromancy is forbidden to the Jews, and therefore the inventor well knew that no pious Jew would ever make the experiment, either on the Sabbath or the other days. The story of Turnus Rufus, and his father, as told in the Bereshith Rabba, is plainly contrary, even to the assertions of the oral law itself. The father is made to say, “Whosoever will not keep the Sabbath voluntarily in your world, must keep it here, in spite of himself;” which implies that all, who do not keep the Jewish Sabbath, must be punished in the flames of hell; whereas the oral law says that the observance of the Sabbath is not required of the sons of Noah. When this prayer was introduced into the Liturgy of the synagogue we know not, but there it now stands, and in one short paragraph contains three downright falsehoods. David Levi himself points us to R. Akiva as the author of the last two; and accordingly the Talmud records the original reference to the business of the necromancers and the river Sambation, as proceeding from the mouth of that great Rabbi. This brings us back to the time immediately succeeding the rejection of Jesus of Nazareth, and shows us the superstition and the falsehood of those who rejected him. Either R. Akiva invented these things himself, and then he is guilty of deliberate falsehood, or he received these accounts from others who went before him, and then he was a superstitious man, and the guilt of inventing falsehood is thrown back on the earlier rabbies. What is to be thought then of the wisdom of those men who were weak enough to believe, or wicked enough to invent, such absurd fables? Yet these are the men who opposed Christianity, and this is the system which a large portion of the Jewish nation has preferred for 1700 years. That the Rabbinical Jews have firmly believed these legends is plain. They occur in the Talmud, whose authority is regarded as divine. They are repeated by Rashi, Ramban, Bechai, and a whole host of the most esteemed Jewish writers. They have formed a part of the synagogue service for centuries, and are still found in the Prayer-books of the English Jews, to testify that they are not yet emancipated from the chains of superstition. If they had been, if any considerable number of Jews had been convinced of the falsehood of these stories, they would never have suffered them to remain in the worship of God. It is utterly impossible to suppose that men would sanction the solemn propagation of falsehood, and yet whenever the Pentecost prayers are read or printed, there the fables of Behemoth and Leviathan, Adam and the Sabbath, Turnus Rufus and the Sambation, are solemnly accredited to the world as worthy of all belief and honour. The fact that they constitute a part of a solemn address to Almighty God, and that not from