s to this teaching, making Wisdom a
Being. "According to Maurice, 'The first Sephira, who is denominated
Kether the Crown, Kadmon the pure Light, and En Soph the Infinite,[258]
is the omnipotent Father of the universe.... The second is the
Chochmah, whom we have sufficiently proved, both from sacred and
Rabbinical writings, to be the creative Wisdom. The third is the Binah,
or heavenly Intelligence, whence the Egyptians had their Cneph, and
Plato his _Nous Demiurgos_. He is the Holy Spirit who ... pervades,
animates, and governs this boundless universe.'"[259]

The bearing of this doctrine on Christian teaching is indicated by Dean
Milman in his _History of Christianity_. He says: "This Being [the Word
or the Wisdom] was more or less distinctly impersonated, according to
the more popular or more philosophic, the more material or the more
abstract, notions of the age or people. This was the doctrine from the
Ganges, or even the shores of the Yellow Sea, to the Ilissus; it was the
fundamental principle of the Indian religion and the Indian philosophy;
it was the basis of Zoroastrianism; it was pure Platonism; it was the
Platonic Judaism of the Alexandrian school. Many fine passages might be
quoted from Philo on the impossibility that the first self-existing
Being should become cognisable to the sense of man; and even in
Palestine, no doubt, John the Baptist and our Lord Himself spoke no new
doctrine, but rather the common sentiment of the more enlightened, when
they declared 'that no man had seen God at any time.' In conformity with
this principle the Jews, in the interpretation of the older Scriptures,
instead of direct and sensible communication from the one great Deity,
had interposed either one or more intermediate beings as the channels of
communication. According to one accredited tradition alluded to by S.
Stephen, the law was delivered 'by the disposition of angels'; according
to another this office was delegated to a single angel, sometimes called
the Angel of the Law (see Gal. iii. 19); at others the Metatron. But the
more ordinary representative, as it were, of God, to the sense and mind
of man, was the Memra, or the Divine Word; and it is remarkable that the
same appellation is found in the Indian, the Persian, the Platonic, and
the Alexandrian systems. By the Targumists, the earliest Jewish
commentators on the Scriptures, this term had been already applied to
the Messiah; nor is it necessary to observe the man