beyond all contradiction, the devil himself confessed it. Certainly it is not a warrantable curiosity to examine the verity of Scripture by the concordance of human history, or seek to confirm the chronicle of Hester or Daniel, by the authority of Magasthenes or Herodotus. I confess I have had an unhappy curiosity this way, till I laughed myself out of it with a piece of Justin, where he delivers that the children of Israel for being scabbed were banished out of Egypt. And truly since I have understood the occurrences of the world, and know in what counterfeit shapes and deceitful vizards times present represent on the stage things past, I do believe them little more than things to come. Some have been of my opinion, and endeavoured to write the history of their own lives; wherein Moses hath outgone them all, and left not only the story of his life, but as some will have it, of his death also.

XXX. It is a riddle to me, how this story of oracles hath not wormed out of the world that doubtful conceit of spirits and witches; how so many learned heads should so far forget their metaphysicks and destroy the ladder and scale of

* In his oracle to Augustus.

creatures, as to question the existence of spirits ; for my part I have ever believed, and do now know, that there are witches; they that doubt of these do not only deny them, but spirits; and are obliquely and upon consequence a sort, not of infidels, but atheists. Those that to confute their incredulity desire to see apparitions, shall questionless never behold any, nor have the power to be so much as witches; the devil hath them already in a heresy as capital as witchcraft, and to appear to them were but to convert them. Of all the delusions wherewith he deceives mortality, there is not any that puzzleth me more than the legerdemain of changelings; I do not credit those transformations of reasonable creatures into beasts, or that the devil hath a power to transpeciate a man into a horse, who tempted Christ (as a trial of his divinity) to convert but stones into bread. I could believe that spirits use with man the act of carnality, and that in both sexes; I conceive they may assume, steal, or contrive a body wherein there may be action enough to content decrepit lust, or passion to satisfy more active veneries; yet in both without a possibility of generation; and therefore that opinion that Antichrist should be born of the tribe of

Dan by conjunction with the devil is ridiculous, and a conceit fitter for a rabbin than a Christian. I hold that the devil doth really possess some men, the spirit of melancholy others, the spirit of delusion others; that as the devil is concealed and denied by some, so God and good angels are pretended by others, whereof the late detection of the maid of Germany hath left a pregnant example.

XXXI. Again, I believe that all that use sorceries, incantations, and spells are not witches, or as we term them, magicians; I conceive there is a traditional magick, not learned immediately from the devil, but at second hand from his scholars; who having once the secret betrayed, are able, and do empirically practise without his advice, they both proceeding upon the principles of nature, where actives aptly conjoined to disposed passives will under any master produce their effects. Thus I think at first a great part of philosophy was witchcraft, which being afterward derived to one another, proved but philosophy, and was indeed no more but the honest effects of nature; what invented by us is philosophy, learned from him is magick. We do surely owe the discovery of many secrets to the discovery of good and bad angels.

I could never pass that sentence of Paracelsus without an asterisk or annotation;* Ascendens constellatum multa revelat quærentibus magnalia naturæ, i. e. operi Dei. I do think that many mysteries ascribed to our own inventions have been the courteous revelations of spirits, for those noble essences in heaven bear a friendly regard unto their fellow natures on earth; and therefore believe that those many prodigies and ominous prognosticks which forerun the ruins of states, princes, and private persons, are the charitable premonitions of good angels, which more careless inquiries term but the effects of chance and nature.

XXXII. Now besides these particular and divided spirits there may be (for aught I know) an universal and common spirit to the whole world. It was the opinion of Plato, and it is yet of the Hermetical philosophers; if there be a common nature that unites and ties the scattered and divided individuals into one species, why may there not be one that unites them all? However, I am sure there is a common spirit that plays within us, yet makes no part of us; and that is the Spirit of God,

* Thereby is meant our good angel, appointed us from our nativity.

Ι

the fire and scintillation of that noble and mighty essence, which is the life and radical heat of spirits, and those essences that know not the virtue of the sun; a fire quite contrary to the fire of hell. This is that gentle heat that brooded on the waters, and in six days hatched the world; this is that irradiation that dispels the mists of hell, the clouds of horrour, fear, sorrow, despair; and preserves the region of the mind in serenity; whosoever feels not the warm gale and gentle ventilation of this spirit (though I feel his pulse) I dare not say he lives; for truly without this, to me there is no heat under the tropick, nor any light though I dwelt in the body of the sun.

As when the labouring sun hath wrought his track

Up to the top of lofty Cancer's back,

The icy ocean cracks, the frozen pole

Thaws with the heat of the celestial coal;
So when thy absent beams begin t' impart
Again a solstice on my frozen heart,
My winter's o'er, my drooping spirits sing,
And every part revives into a spring.

But if thy quickening beams a while decline,
And with their light bless not this orb of mine,

A chilly frost surpriseth every member,
And in the midst of June I feel December.