1875.| Human Levitation. 43 
peculiar dicta, namely, that “ All things whatever are to be 
hoped for, because all are possible to the Gods.” ‘This is 
evidently identical with Christ’s most enigmatical doctrine 
of receiving ‘‘ whatsoever ye ask believing ;” and is a senti- 
ment that, true or faise, could never enter the head of a 
person not familiar with thaums, and these of manifold 
kinds and sorts. Moreover, the followings gathered by this 
old man, as well as by the short public career of Christ, 
could not be accounted for by mere eloquence, however 
great. And surely it needed a prophet, in the fullest sense, 
to teach, 2000 years before any other European would be- 
lieve, that the earth is a planet, and turns on its axis; as 
well as to develop that psychologic and religious creed, of 
plural incarnations of the same soul at long intervals, and 
suspension of memory during each earthly life, but restora- 
tion after it, which, though the creed for the last twenty 
centuries of a majority of our race, is barely now penetrating 
Europe: and of which, by the way, we may remark that if 
Christians oppose it, they have to make their own Master 
(‘‘ whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlast- 
ing”), a mendacious witness, alike in saying Abraham had 
seen his day and rejoiced to see it; or that Nicodemus and 
similar men, must be born again before they could even see his 
kingdom ; or repeatedly affirming his young cousin John to 
be Elias, when it is plain that the son of Elizabeth could 
not be Elias if there be no “‘ resurrection of (or in) the 
flesh.” 
Passing over apocryphal stories, chronology brings us 
next to the Author of Christianity and his opponent ; for all 
the accounts we have of the most public prodigy —unless 
that of feeding the 5000 were more so—and apparently the 
first quite public one wherein Jesus figured, represent this 
wonder as not his spontaneous act, if his at all, but pro- 
voked, or rather wrought, by his adversary, ‘‘the devil” of 
the first and third gospels; who, according to the Jewish 
legends, was the same Judas who afterwards compassed his 
capture and death. Among the six legends extant, four 
coming to us by tradition of his church, and two by that of 
his enemies, only one, the gospel of John—a treatise pro- 
fessedly supplementary to others—omits this event; and 
in that very document, out of three times that Jesus 
Mentions a AvaGoroc, in the first he refers simply to the said 
man; as the writer himself informs us after recording the 
speech, “‘ Have not I chosen you twelve? and one of you is 
Auforoc.” In the other gospels it is used but thrice by Him, 
always in parables; and nine times by the narrators, solely 
