This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
156
SPINOZA.

teries it was that he yearned for incessantly, and here the Cabbala taught that all physical and spiritual life was but an imitation of the original in heaven, and a chain of existence and action leading up to God. This is the heavenly ladder which God showed to the Patriarch Jacob in a dream, on which the powers of the created world as angels, after their spiritual emancipation or material concentration, mount and descend; the graduated ladder of all existing things rests on earth and reaches to heaven; there is the heavenly Jerusalem, there the temple, the model of the earthly one, there all is spiritual that on earth is bound up in matter. From the Hebrew word Ruach (soul) it is shown by the numbers which the letters give that, the same being found in the various Hebrew words for God, the soul must be a part of God. The Hebrew word for Messiah contains the same number as the Hebrew word for Serpent, in which image Satan seduced Eve; the Messiah will therefore bruise the head of the Serpent, and banish sin and death from the earth. To the Adam on earth corresponds a threefold Adam in heaven; thus are derived the three different expressions in the accounts of the creation of the first parents (Genesis i. 27); the original of the earthly Adam is the Adam Kadmon in heaven, the image of God, and his first born Son. There are four worlds, which are spiritual or material according to their