into a solemn covenant with thee, to dedicate myself to thee. Show me what thou wouldst have me to be and do, and I will pray earnestly for thy assistance, that I may fulfil thy will. O, that thou wouldst arise, and by thy glorious beams scatter my spiritual darkness. Grant me thy aid, that I may not swerve from my resolution. Enlarge and bless my soul; and let me be happy from a constant walking in thy fear. Amen."

We have every reason to suppose that at this period Leila's belief in her religion was unshaken; yet from this her earliest record of thoughts and imaginings, written at the time she felt them, we may see that she was now earnestly in pursuit of that in which she afterwards found solid happiness. We can perceive an enthusiastic longing of the spirit, and a deeply wrought effort of the soul, which when the veil fell from her eyes, abundantly prepared her to press into the liberty of the children of God.

Although the children of Israel profess to receive the Old Testament Scriptures as divine, yet they greatly neglect their study, and as a consequence are involved in gross darkness. But while they have cast Moses and the Prophets into the shade, they have introduced an enormous rival to divine revelation, under the pretence that it is a comment upon the Law of Moses. This they call the Mishna, or oral law.

The Mishna is divided into six orders :-the first order treats of the vegetable world; the second of feasts; the third of women; the fourth of damages; the fifth of holy things; and the sixth of purifications.

The Mishna was published to the world in 1698, in six folio volumes, by Surenhusius, of Amsterdam. The

principal part of these volumes is occupied by the comments of translators and rabbis.

We will give an account of the Mishna by Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon. This Moses Ben Maimon was one of their ablest doctors. He was physician to the Sultan of Egypt, lived in the twelfth century, and was enthu siastically engrossed in the philosophy of Aristotle. From the initials of his name the Jews call him Rambam: he is the writer of their creed and liturgy; and they have a saying, that from Moses to Moses there is no one like Moses. Of the Mishna he gives the following account :-" All the precepts of the law were given by God to Moses, our master, together with an interpretation of what the authentic text signified. Moses, going into his tent, first related to Aaron the text and the interpretation; he rising and going to the right hand of Moses. Eleazar and Ithamar, the sons of Aaron, came and heard the same that had been before dictated to their father; so that he heard it twice. Then came the seventy elders, and at last the whole people heard the same. They all committed to memory the text and the interpretation, which Aaron had heard many times, and hence arose the written law, and the oral law-613 precepts together with their interpretations: the precepts inscribed in the books-the interpretations handed down by word of mouth.

"Moses dying left these interpretations to Joshua, and he again to the elders, and they to the prophets, who handed them down from one to another without any dissent, till the time of the men of the great synagogue, who were Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah, Ezra the scribe, Nehe

miah, Hacaliah, Mordecai, and Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, with others to the number of one hundred and twenty. But the last of the men of that sacred company was the first of the wise men mentioned in the Mishna, Simeon the Just, at that time high priest. After whom it came in process of time to our Rabbi, the holy, who was the phoenix of his age and the unique glory of that time, a man in whom God had accumulated such virtues that he merited to be called by his contemporaries, our Rabbi, the holy, whose name was Judah, so that it was said, 'From the days of Moses to the Rabbi, we have never seen law and nobility together, and from the time that he died, humility and the fear of sin ceased;' and so rich was he that it used to be said, 'The groom of the stables of Rabbi was richer than Sapor king of the Persians.' He, tracing his doctorial genealogy up to Moses, composed the Mishna, partly from the traditions from the lips of Moses, partly from consequences elicited by argument in which there is unanimous consent, partly from conclusions in which there is a difference arising from two modes of interpretation (for they have thirteen modes of interpreting); so that sometimes our Rabbi says, 'Such a one affirms this, such another says that.'

There being such various modes of interpretation has given rise to numberless dissensions among the Jews. From Simeon the Just to the year 150 of the Christian era, Judah mentions ninety-one wise men, as handing down to him their decisions.

The Mishna is said to be an oral law, received from the lips of God, and intended as an exponent of his written law. But we should transgress the purity

which religion demands, were we to quote some of its puerile and absurd follies. If those who penned it set about their work with an intention to shock common sense, and load the Jewish religion with contempt, they could scarcely have acquitted themselves better. And let no one suppose that our strictures are unkind: any one at all acquainted with the Mishna, will at once perceive them to be within the bounds of that charity and pity, which we owe to those who err. Indeed, it were but too easy to quote passages which would justify our

severest censures.

But withal, the Mishna is surrounded with a degree of obscurity and hardness, owing to its orientalisms, and a considerable pervasion of a sort of Hebræo-Grecism in its structure. This obscurity has given rise to another commentary, called the Gemara, or completion. One Gemara, written in Palestine, forms with the Mishna, the Jerusalem Talmud, and another, written at Babylon, composes the Babylonish Talmud. Thus the Mishna, which the Jews declare to be God's own interpretation of his law, requires interpretation from man, and the whole together forms a mighty work of twelve folio volumes. These are the volumes which contain the whole of the Jewish divinity; for, dishonouring to God, they have almost completely withdrawn the Jews from the study of Moses and the Prophets.

In common with the rest of her nation, the Talmud formed the basis of Leila's religious education. Of the Old Testament she knew comparatively little. It is far from certain, indeed, that she knew a great deal of the Talmud. For this there were causes :-first, she did not like its study: she tells us in her Reflections, that

while believing in its divinity, as she was instructed, she experienced a smothered dislike to many of its forms, observances, and precepts. "I felt it," she says, "smouldering at the bottom of my heart long before I had moral courage to permit a single thought upon it. I shuddered at my suspicions as blasphemous, yet I could not conquer them. But as the Spirit of God opened my eyes, I felt no difficulty in fully avowing my severest thoughts upon the inane, absurd, debasing studies of the Talmud. I felt no compunction while I openly declared to my own heart that it was an impure, stupid fabrication, composed by fallen and sinful man." What a volume is contained in these few thrilling sentences! Would the sons of Jacob speak out, how many would tell us the same story? Impossible it is but that among them there are thousands who, while they dare not repudiate the Talmud, are conscious of a feeling of offence at its impurities, and absurdities. Secondly, her father, although strictly a Jew in belief and profession, gave himself little trouble about their requirements and observances, and, therefore, was very far from pressing them upon his daughter.

But a mind constituted like that of Leila, eagerly thirsting after truth, could not be always content without strictly examining the Old Testament Scriptures; those Scriptures which all her nation believe in, as the pure word of God. Her first intentions to study them (for certainly she had previously read them, especially the Psalms) are expressed among the earliest entries in her diary, and bear date when she was about seventeen years old. We extract the passage; "I have read the Talmud, and have dipped into the learning of the East, and