and the religion of
Moses was doubly mutilated. Besides the priests and great men, being
transported to Babylon and educated in the sciences of the Chaldeans,
imbibed, during a residence of seventy years, the whole of their
theology; and from that moment the dogmas of the hostile Genius (Satan),
the archangel Michael,* the ancient of days (Ormuzd), the rebel
angels, the battles in heaven, the immortality of the soul, and the
resurrection, all unknown to Moses, or rejected by his total silence
respecting them, were introduced and naturalized among the Jews.

* "The names of the angels and of the months, such as
Gabriel, Michael, Yar, Nisan, etc., came from Babylon with
the Jews:" says expressly the Talmud of Jerusalem. See
Beousob. Hist. du Manich. Vol. II, p. 624, where he proves
that the saints of the Almanac are an imitation of the 365
angels of the Persians; and Jamblicus in his Egyptian
Mysteries, sect. 2, c. 3, speaks of angels, archangels,
seraphims, etc., like a true Christian.

"The emigrants returned to their country with these ideas; and their
innovation at first excited disputes between their partisans the
Pharisees, and their opponents the Saducees, who maintained the ancient
national worship; but the former, aided by the propensities of the
people and their habits already contracted, and supported by the
Persians, their deliverers and masters, gained the ascendant over the
latter; and the Sons of Moses consecrated the theology of Zoroaster.*

* "The whole philosophy of the gymnosophists," says Diogenes
Laertius on the authority of an ancient writer, "is derived
from that of the Magi, and many assert that of the Jews to
have the same origin." Lib. 1. c. 9. Megasthenes, an
historian of repute in the days of Seleucus Nicanor, and who
wrote particularly upon India, speaking of the philosophy of
the ancients respecting natural things, puts the Brachmans
and the Jews precisely on the same footing.

"A fortuitous analogy between two leading ideas was highly favorable
to this coalition, and became the basis of a last system, not less
surprising in the fortune it has had in the world, than in the causes of
its formation.

"After the Assyrians had destroyed the kingdom of Samaria, some
judicious men foresaw the same destiny for Jerusalem, which they did not
fail to predict and publish; and their predictions had the particular
tu