226 MRS. WALTER MAUNDER, ON ASTRONOMICAL 



The report that prophecy had once again been heard in the 

 Temple of the Lord was carried back by " the Parthians and 

 Medes and Elamites and the dwellers in Mesopotamia " ; and, 

 so far as we know, this was the last time that prophecy was 

 uttered in the Temple ; but the Jews of the Dispersion must 

 have known that it continued to be spoken in the Christian 

 Churches which arose in all the nations, though they knew they 

 themselves had it not in their own synagogues. 



Then came the great catastrophe which destroyed the Holy 

 Temple, and has made them, since then, a nation without 

 Temple or priest. Then, and afterwards, arose, I think, the 

 great mass of apocalvptic literature. For the Jew, it was 

 still 



" Is there among us any that knoweth how long 1 11 



but the faithful Jew devoted himself to the study of the Law 

 and the Mishna and the Talmud was the result ; the unfaithful 

 Jew sought for the answer " in the si<_ms of the heavens," or 

 in pseudo-prophecy. 



For one inevitable result of this restoration of prophecy to the 

 Christian Church was the uprising of a fraudulent imitation 

 of it. Just as Saul, when he found that " the Lord answered 

 him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets," 

 sought for a woman that had a familiar spirit, so was it with 

 unbelieving Jews and heretics amongst the Christians ; having 

 lost the true, they manufactured the false. 



It is a very slight thread which I have been able to follow 

 through these " sacred books of the East," the thread of the 

 astronomical allusions ; but a thread may be as effective a 

 guide through a labyrinth as a cable, and this thread has 

 proved most important. It has shown that it was in Parthia, 

 not in Palestine, that these apocalyptic books had their source, 

 and that they were written under Magian, not Maccabsean, 

 influences. It has shown also that they were not pre-Christian, 

 but post-Christian — in one case, at least, many centuries 

 post-Christian. They could not, therefore, have influenced 

 in any way the origin of Christianity, nor do they represent 

 the background of the Ministry of our Lord or of His 

 Apostles. 



Discussion. 



The Chairman expressed his appreciation of the value of the 

 paper and general sympathy with its results. He pointed out that 

 an example of a purely lunar calendar was to be found in that 



