The writer claims that such a discovery has been made, and that the same embraces rational science of sober and great worth. He claims that it will serve to clear up and take away very much of the mysticism which up to this time has been an unexplainable part of religious systems,—especially the Hebrew or Jewish, and the Christian, so much so that the supernatural in those systems will have to give place to the rational, to a very great extent. He claims that that sublime science upon which Masonry is based, is in fact, the substance of Cabbalah,—which last is the rational basis of the Hebrew text of Holy writ. Cabbalah is inseparably connected with the text of the Scriptures, and an exposition of the inner sense of the same is as John Reuchlin claimed necessary to a right and full understanding of the Sacred Text. But he saw vaguely, being taught only in a mystic phraseology which was really a blind, and he did not come into possession of the solid, rational grounds of it which he could formulate and impart. For this reason, though he was right in his general assertion, his scheme failed, and his works in this regard, passed away from the common sense world, and have ever since lived only among the mystics and dreamers. Like all other human productions of the kind, the Hebrew text of the Bible was in characters which could serve as sound signs for syllabic utterance, or for this purpose what are called letters. Now in the first place, these original character signs were also pictures, each one of them; and these pictures of themselves stood for ideas which could be communicated,—much like the original Chinese letters. Gustav Seyffarth shows that the Egyptian hieroglyphics numbered over six hundred picture characters, which embraced the modified use, syllabically, of the original number of letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The characters of the Hebrew text of the Sacred Scroll were divided into classes, in which the characters of each class were interchangeable; whereby one form might be exchanged for another to carry a modified signification, both by letter, and picture and number. Seyffarth shows the modified form of the very ancient Hebrew alphabet in the old Coptic by this law of interchange of characters. This law of permitted interchange of letters is to be found quite fully set forth in the Hebrew dictionaries, such as Fuerst’s and others. Though recognized and largely set forth it is very perplexing and hard to understand, because we have lost the specific use and power of such interchange. In the second place, these characters stood for _numbers_—to be used for numbers as we use specific number signs,—though, also, there is very much to prove that the old Hebrews were in possession of the so-called Arabic numerals, as we have them, from the straight line 1 to the _zero_ character, together making 1 + 9 = 10. The order of these number letters run from 1 to 9, then 10 to 90, then 100 upward. In the third place it is said, and it