جزییات کتاب
The old cabala per gematriam, as it was technically spoken of, is well known to Biblical scholars everywhere. The new cabala is scarcely mentioned in any books of reference, and the works containing specimens of it are rare in the highest degree; this latter fact accounting for the general want of knowledge on the subject. Excerpt: Mystical And Cabalistic Numbers In The Ancient Scriptures Of The Old And New Testament. This curious branch of theological science has been investigated and discussed by many writers, ancient and modern, and quite recently two writers, Dr. Bullinger and Mr. J. H. Weldon, have gone deeply into the matter and added many curious coincidences not before noticed. The instances given by them are by no means of equal value, and some are not very convincing. But their cabalistic deductions from some of the numbers of the Bible, notably 8, 13, and 153, are so remarkable and novel that I have included the best of them in my survey of the cabalistic numbers in the appendix. To readers not conversant with gematria they will be a surprise, and, taken in connection with other instances adduced, will, I think, be sufficient to show that there may very possibly be something more than mere random fancy in the way many special numbers and names of Holy Writ are used by the original writers. Personally, I claim no more from my inferences than this, although many professed students go much farther. Anyhow, the following statement is unobjectionable: "The symbolical meaning of numbers in Holy Scripture deserves more study and attention than it has received in recent times." This is a remark of Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, a learned and judicious scholar, who was the very reverse in every way of an extreme man. It was made some years ago, and since then the science of theology has made such rapid progress, in this as well as in other directions, that nowadays one can venture boldly to say that even the cabala of the Bible deserves more study than it has received. It has been dismissed almost universally as the vainest and most unproductive of literary follies. All educated men of evenly balanced minds were virtually in agreement in their view that there was not and could not be any magic power or significance in gematria or the counting of a name or text, and all people who took interest in such puerile fancies were either stupidly superstitious or grossly ignorant in their conceptions of what true knowledge was. As so often happens in the matter of literary judgments, and other judgments as well, these cultivated and judicious men were both right and wrong. They were right according to the lights and knowledge of their age, and their judgment was sane according to the evidence before them. But there was a great deal of evidence not before them, which has since come to light and made their opinion, which was once relatively right, become now relatively wrong. In days gone by, no one thought of looking upon a Primitive Christian in the light of an initiate with mysterious knowledge carefully conveyed and concealed. To all Churchmen, High or Low, Primitive Christians became "wise unto salvation" by about the same or some what similar means as Primitive Methodists become converted men nowadays. This was the current idea true enough in a certain sense, of course, but withal very misleading, for how much of importance was overlooked or unknown! The various complicated ways in which the earliest Christianity was brought into connection with the Greek, Mithraic, and other mysteries, is almost a study of the last half-century, and has a by no means unimportant connection with mystic names and numbers.