Who was Raphael?
He found Raphael that was an angel and he said unto him, Canst thou go with me? To whom the angel said, I will go with thee and I know the way well. In one of the Other Degrees of Freemasonry a character is introduced with these words (right): This is Raphael who conducts the candidate through an important part of the ceremony. The words are obviously a quotation, but you will look for them in vain in the Old and New Testaments; they come in fact from the Apocrypha, a collection of books which may be used for instruction of manners but are not included in the canonical Holy Scriptures. The book quoted here is Tobit, a curious tale which might well have come from the Arabian Nights, yet contains some wonderful prayers and thanksgivings that lift it to a higher plane altogether. The man Tobit is one of the Jews removed from Galilee by Shalmaneser after the Assyrian invasion and is now settled in Nineveh with his wife Anna and his adolescent son Tobias. Many of the Jews apparently adopted
