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Nor is it an altogether baseless conception which sees that the reverence and love of at least a large proportion of earnest Christian folk for the Old Testament books, a reverence and a love that for more than eighteen hundred years has undergone no diminution or change, are in large measure due to the reverential handling, to the patient tireless studies of the great Rabbinical schools of the early Christian centuries—to the passionate, possibly exaggerated, love of the Jew for his precious book.

Though men guess it not, surely echoes from those strange Jewish schools of Tiberias and Sura, whose story we are about to relate, have reached the hearts of unnumbered Christians to whom the Jewish schools in question and their restless toil, all centring in the Holy Books in question, are but the shadow of a name?