dd to the old belief the idea that the under
world was a place of purification, wherein souls were purged from
all traces of sin."40 Of this belief in a subterranean purgatory
there are numerous unmistakable evidences and examples in the
Rabbinical writings.41

These notions and others the Pharisees early adopted, and wrought
into the texture of what they called the "Oral Law," that body of
verbally transmitted legends, precepts, and dogmas, afterwards
written out and collected in the Mischna, to which Christ
repeatedly alluded with such severity, saying, "Ye by your
traditions make the commandments of God of none effect." To some
doctrines of kindred character and origin with these Paul refers
when he warns his readers against "the worshipping of angels,"
"endless genealogies," "philosophy falsely so called," and various
besetting heresies of the time. But others were so woven and
assimilated into the substance of the popular Judaism of the age,
as inculcated by the Rabbins, that Paul himself held them, the
lingering vestiges of his earnest Pharisaic education and
organized experience. They naturally found their way into the
Apostolic Church, principally composed of Ebionites, Christians
who had been Jews; and from it they were never separated, but have
come to us in seeming orthodox garb, and are generally

37 Schroder, p. 385.

38 Yacna, Ha 411. Kleuker, zweit. auf. s. 198.

39 Die Heiligen Schriften der Parsen, von Dr. F. Spiegel, kap. ii.
ss. 32-37. Studien and Kritiken, 1885, band i., "Ist die Lehre von
der Anferstehung des Leibes nicht ein alt Persische Lehre?" F.
Nork, Mythen der Alten Perser als Quellen Christlicher
Glaubenslehren und Ritualien.

40 Die Zoroastrischen Glaubenslehre, von Dr. Eduard Roth. s. 450.

41 See, In tom. i. Kabbala Denudata, Synopsis Dogmatum Libri Sohar
pp. 108, 109, 113.

retained now. Still, they were errors. They are incredible to the
thinking minds of to day. It is best to get rid of them by the
truth, that they are pagan growths introduced into Christianity,
but to be discriminated from it. By removing these antiquated and
incredible excrescences from the real religion of Christ, we shall
save the essential faith from the suspicion which their
association with it, their fancied identity with it, invites and
provokes.

The correspondences between the Persian and the Pharisaic faith,
in regard to doctrines, are of too arbitrary and peculiar a
character to allow us for