the great and new Paradox which I have undertaken to demonstrate in this Treatise Wherefore in the entrance obstacles that are obvious and devious are to be removed And first of all they object the Text The Earth shall bring forth unto Thee Thistles and Thornes In the sweat of thy Face thou shalt eat thy Bread I will multiply thy Miseries and thy Conceptions In pain thou shalt bring forth thy Sons thy Husband shall rule over Thee Thou shalt die the Death And by consequence ye shall be afflicted with the Calamities of Diseases and old Age. All which things issued forth on Posterity from the curse of the Sin of Disobedience even unto the destruction of the World upon no account to be redeemed and by no act of sanctity to be expiated Because God had appointed a Law to Adam that he should not eat of the Fruit of the Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil the transgression whereof hath defluxed as into original Sin So also it stirred it up into the perpetuity of a Curse from our first Parents equally on all their Posterity These things have been thus diligently taught hitherto Whereunto under the peace and censure of the Church I will humbly sub joyn my own Conceptions First therefore I negatively affirme the contrary because the Words of the Text do not precisely containe any Curses except on the Serpent and Earth but not at all on Man Whom if he with whom there is no successive alteration or change had cursed he had truly and alwayes cursed like the Evil Spirit For it is a foolish thing to believe that God should now curse Man whom presently after Sin and without the intervening of contrition or act of repentance he forthwith blessed with much Fruitfulness gave him the whole Earth and placed all living Creatures under his Feet Yea in the midst of the Curse uttered or brought upon the Serpent he replenished the femal Sex with his blessing saying The Woman shall bruise thy Head I will put Enmities between Tree and the Woman and between thy Seed and her Seed The which seeing it is not understood of the Seed of Man it promiseth the Messias the Saviour of the World to come of the Seed of the Woman So far is it that he had there cursed Man In the second place I deny that a Law was given and by consequence also a contradiction or opposing of a Law For it follows wheresoever there is not a Law Transgression nor Disobedience doth not interpose and by consequence a Curse doth not there befall But I prove that there was not a Law by the very Words of the Text And he commanded him saying Of every Tree of the Garden eat Thou but of the Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil Thou mayest not eat The Word he commanded Seemes to include a Precept and so also a Law Yet that one only Word obtains no more the force of a Law or Precept for the affirmative of every Tree of Paradise eat Thou than for the negative Thou mayest not eat For it included not a Sin although he had not eat of every Tree of Paradise And therefore it did no more contain a Law for the forbidding of one Tree than for a Liberty of all the other Trees Therefore the Text contained a fatherly Liberty for the affirmative and likewise for the Grant as also a fatherly Admonition of Caution for the Negative no otherwise than as if a Country-man being expert of the way shall say to a Traveller If thou shalt go that way thou wilt Perish and die the Death So the Admonition of the Creator thou mayest not eat and in whatsoever day thou shalt eat thou shalt die the Death do shew not a Law but a Persuasion and Wish But the transgression and Act of the despised Admonition doth indeed contain a Sin but not of Disobedience and Disobedience as much differs from a despised Admonition as a Law doth from an Admonishment it self The Prohibition therefore thou mayest not eat sounds as an Admonition to wit least he should eat his own and posterities Death by an unextinguishable Guilt because that Death was placed in the Apple but not in the opposition of eating And therefore that Death from the eating of the Apple was natural being admonished of but not a Curse threatned by a Law For the threatnings of Death which was unknown to Adam could not terrifie the same Adam And therefore threatnings had been void but not an admonition For Adam had not as yet seen a dead Carcase and the which before he saw living Creatures was ignorant of their Names And much less could he know what Death should be And least of all by far could Eve know what it should be to die in Paradise Therefore with our first Parents Death was as yet a non-Being and unknown but of a non-Being and of that which is unknown no Conception answereth and there is no fear at all Therefore neither hath God foretold Death for the threats of Terrour or a Law but from his meer goodness That when they had eaten of the disswaded Apple they might know that God had not made Death but themselves for themselves Neither doth the Text in Chap. 3. hinder these things Because thou hast eaten of the Tree whereof I had commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat c For the Words do manifestly declare the goodness of the foregoing Admonition but not a Law For the Word I had commanded is the same which before in the second Chapter and he commanded him saying signifies an Admonition only and not a Law Otherwise under an equal original Sin they had been obliged from eating of every Tree of Paradise which none of a sound mind will ever affirme For the great Sin was in a suspition of deciet falshood and fallacy of God and that they gave more credit to the Serpent than unto God and that they despised a fatherly and kinde Admonition But there was not Disobedience because a Law was not given It was indeed an Act against Gratitude Love towards God and a due and rational Obligation Therefore God cursed them not because they by eating had contracted the Penalties of Diseases Death and Miseries on themselves for a Punishment But God speaketh not of Diseases after the Fall Because it was sufficient once to have foretold Death to come while he admonished them that they should not eat In the next place the crafty Serpent assaulted not the Woman as being the weaker but because the Admonition was given unto Adam from the Mouth of God but signified unto the Woman onely from the relation of the Man And therefore God first requires an account of Adam First of all it doth not containe a cursing of the Man that the Earth should be cursed in its Work and should bring forth Cockle and that he should in the sweat of his face eat his Bread all his Life But they containe a remembrance of the loving Admonition that went before the
Fall Again neither do these Words sound of a Curse that the Woman should be thenceforth obedient and subject to her Husband although therein the intent of the Creator doth clearly appear to wit that he had appointed the Woman to be the head top and ultimate Creature above the Man But now by reason of a double Sin that she ought to be subject to her Husband But that signifies rather a deserved Punishment than a Curse Even as a Superiour is not cursed who is laid aside for an Errour committed But whereas it is said In Pain shalt thou bring forth thy Sons the Text expresly confirmeth the mistery of the Paradoxal Position For from thence it manifestly appears 1. That Eve was not created nor appointed as that she had brought forth in Pain Wherefore this Message is not decleared unto her for a Curse But there is set before her eies how much Calamity she had caused unto her self that she should hereafter conceive and bring forth after the manner of Bruits in Pain For it is not to be doubted but that Bruit-beasts are not guilty of Sin yet do they bring forth in Pain Not indeed that they have sinned in Adam as their Father or that they are partakers of his Sin because they had brought forth in Pain whether Adam had sinned or not Neither also is it agreeable with divine goodness that Bruit-beasts should bear an undeserved Punishment while as they from a Faculty of Nature and from an appointment of Creation do bring forth in pain 2. If Bruits bring forth in Pain a likenesse of Conception and bringing forth in Bruits and in Woman after the Fall is denoted which Likeness seeing it was not before the Fall therefore this Text strengthens the Position 3. If Eve had not eaten the Apple and consequently from the Apple the concupiscence of the Flesh from the tickling of a corrupt Seed verily she had brought forth without Pain Where the Text promiseth a Virginity in conceiving and bringing forth and so a perpetual Virginity appointed in propagating To wit that she had conceived and brought forth her Womb being shut For what other thing is this than that which others think to be the Curse of Eve is in very deed only a commemoration of the good lost through the copulation of Man of Seed and of the concupiscence of the Flesh in the Flesh of Sin after the manner of Bruits henceforeward The hope I say was lost of conceiving by the holy Spirit after that she had conceived by the will of Man as every Mother in Sins doth For otherwise if Death had been of the punishment of a broken Law and not from the concupiscence of the Flesh there should be every day as many new Deaths as there are Transgressions or God should not make so much account of his Commands of the Decalogue as of the Admonition of the caution or avoiding from the Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil For he would not have those Laws to be alike seriously observed which he would not have to be chastised with an equal Punishment Therefore it being as yet supposed that there had been a Law concerning the denyed eating of the Apple even as there is a Law of forbidden Worshipping of Idols Adultery c. But these Laws are not punished with a continued unpurgeable Impurity on Posterity in such a manner as the opposition of that eating is From hence therefore it most easily appeareth that original Sin was not so much from the force of disobeying a command as from the effect of a defiled divine Generation being changed into a beast-like one For else there is not an equality of distributive Justice nor therefore a conformity in the goodness of God whether we have respect unto the ingratitude of our first Parents or next unto the disobedience against a Law Because the first disobedience should pay a punishment derived on all even on the innocent Posterity rather than any tenths or hundreths afterwards and than innumerable and far more great or haynous Sins Indeed I think that there is the same rule of Justice with the same Lawgiver of every command preceptively and defensively given and pronounced that the breaking thereof ought alwayes to draw after it an equal Fault neither therefore to be punished in all the Posterity and those that are innocent and then that none of Mortals nor any one of them had been sufficient for the original punishments of their Ancestours and a hundred-fold of Deaths to wit if Death had taken its original effectively and immediately from the opposing of a Law or the unchangeable God had not appointed his future Commands to be alike observed as at first if Death should not have its root in Nature the application of which root had been onely from man Therefore If Death should be immediately from God alone from the curse of Sin Now God had made Death and so by Faith we should believe a Falshood In the next place if Death had proceeded from a Curse and had been from a supernatural Root So also neither should our Death find natural Causes in us or our Death should not be of the same kinde with the Death of Adam Yea which is far more absurd our Death should not proceed from the same primitive Beginning from which the Death of our first Parents began And by consequence our Death should not be the effect of original Sin And so unless Death do happen from elsewhere than from the punishment of a Law and the curse of Sin that is unless the Adamical or Beast-like Generation of the Flesh from the Concupiscence of the Flesh and its Copulation doth naturally containe Death in it like unto Beasts in very deed Innocent Children should pay an undeserved Punishment Again if Death should be immediately caused from a Curse or from Sin should not the Text unfitly say On the same Day thou shalt die the Death while as it should not say Presently in the same Moment thou shalt die For a Curse doth not want twenty four hours that it may operate as neither likewise doth Sin require an interval for the Guilt and deserved Punishment of the same which was expresly seen while an impure Man endeavouring to vindicate the reeling Cart wherein the Arke of the Covenant was carried from a fall payed the Punishment of his boldness by sudden Death But seeing Death consisted in the procreation of forbidden Seeds and of the Concupiscence of the Flesh it presupposeth the eating of the Apple and its Digestion And therefore those Words On the same Day thou shalt die the Death or shalt be made Mortal also thou shalt suffer punishment by Death doubled in thee and thy Posterity do strengthen the proposed Truth of our Position But there is no original Sin accounted of from the first afterwards or unremissibly derived on all Posterity but that which from the eating of the Apple thenceforth defiled the whole Nature because it tranferred the Propagation of mankinde on the Flesh
Life and Soul of soulâ—fied Creatures For in that those Words did differ to say Let it be made and to make For in the sixth or last day Adam was formed But on the seventh day God rested At length he afterwards translated Adam from the Earth into Paradise and deliberated to make Woman of the Rib of the Man but not of his Reins Thigh or Belly Therefore on the eighth day that it might be the Beginning of a new week for a new and super-natural Generation of an off-spring to come Wherefore it may be collected that Woman being wholly an Out-law ascended into a new heap of Choiceness as being a Vessel of Choiceness or Election But we may after some sort conjecture of the quality of humane generation in Eve a Virgin before the Fall by the most glorious Incarnation of our Lord For indeed the Father unto whom every name of Paternity is singularly and solely due and whom his Son as a Father doth alwayes adore hath indeed alwayes generated his Son from Eternity who yet is not read to be the Father of his Incarnation The which thing I even reverence for a vast mystery and the rather after that I understood the insinite goodness of the same as well from the first virginal conception of Creation as in the restoration by the regeneration of Man Indeed the Father Almighty would that the glorious incarnation of Christ should be conceived of the Person of the holy Spirit the which it self to wit therefore was not generated but proceeded from eternity from the Father and the Son For the Spirit of God had caused a humane conception of off-springs in the Arterial Blood of the Heart of the Virgin Eve it being the Image of the Divinity with all its free Gifts without the pleasure of the Flesh But the Mind being thus in the garment of Arterial Blood conceived in the Womb of the Virgin in a humane Shape had took an increase and full maturity from thence For he who the Womb being shut and the Gates being closed came into the World and unto his own also out of the Case of the Heart wherein he was conceived was by a foregoing consent brought unto the Womb of the Virgin and kept even unto the maturity of his Body For he piercing all Members was brought into the Womb For therefore our Lord's Incarnation happened altogether besides the order of Nature now accustomed For 1. The Incarnation of the Lord happened not first in the Womb but in the very Sheath of the Heart of the Virgin 2. Of the most pure and most lively Blood of the Heart but not of the Seed of the Virgin For truly the God-bearing Virgin in that singular respect was not only cleansed from Original Sin but was conceived altogether free from Sins to wit that she might be so much the more void of all Seed than a Child that is newly born For Seed is composed of a mixture of Venal and Arterial Blood or from a co-mixture of Bloods which mixture was no manner of way not so much as materially in the conception of the Son of God who was conceived not of Bloods nor of the Will of the Flesh or of Man but of God alone and born of a Virgin 3. He had not a Man to his Father nor a masculine Matter from whence he should be made which thing surely confirms that a feminine Matter was the more excellent governess or deputy and alone fore-elected from the Beginning 4. He fore-elected the most chast and unspotted Virginity of a Mother which he formed with a divine Hand 5. He was materially conceived onely and of most pure Arterial Blood To wit whereinto the seal of the holy Spirit inspired an humane Mind and a most pure Image of it self made or framed by his Father God 6. That conception was brought from the Heart into the Womb of the Virgin with a piercing of Dimensions 7. Lastly He exspected an increase and just maturity of Nativity as it were in the celebration of a Sabbath Furthermore that the knowledge of Good and Evil signifies nothing but the Concupiscence of the Flesh the Apostle doth manifestly testifie calling it the Law and Desire of Sin From whence to wit the first Bruital and Original Sin the fewel of the other Sins hath immediately issued and is hereafter to endure for a continued Seed of Mortals In the 8th to the Romans God sending his Son into the likeness of the Flesh of Sin hath also concerning Sin condemned Sin in the Flesh that the Righteousness of the Law might be fulfilled in us Original I say because it is the Beginning of the original of a humane Generation whereby all contagion of Impurity is derived on Posterity and Death became natural unto Man even as unto Beasts So that although the eating of the Apple did contain a note of distrust and ingratitude and the which also is a Companion unto every Sin Yet therefore even every Sin afterwards ought with the same Punishment of necessity also to descend unto Posterity unless the unwonted transgression of a loving Admonition should not so much consist in the disobedience of eating or abstaining as in the horrid Distrust of doubting and confidence of Faith given unto the Devil And so that the generation of the Flesh of Sin which is an effect of the Concupiscence of the Flesh hath of necessity defluxed into Death even unto all Posterity For it pleased the Lord of things to insert in the Apple an incentive of the Concupiscence of the Flesh to wit from which he was able safely to abstain by not eating the Apple therefore diswaded from For otherwise he had never at any moment been tempted by the Flesh or his genital Members the which I will hereafter shew to be therefore called the North in the holy Scriptures Therefore the Apple being eaten Man presently from a natural property of the Apple conceived the lust of being luxurious and from thence was made an Animal Seed which hastening into the previous or foregoing Dispositions of a sensitive Soul and undergoing the Law of other Causes reflexed it self into the vital Spirit of Adam which therefore like an ignis fatuus or foolish fire presently receiving an Archeus or ruling Spirit and animal Air I say a houshold Thief it conceived a Power of propagating an Animal and mortal Seed ending into Life At the arrival whereof at length the immortal Mind putting off the Rains of the Life and government of the Body substituted the sensitive Soul as its Chamber-maid From hence therefore we are conceived born and do die after the manner of Beasts For the day before the immortal Mind acted all in all and was the very immortal Life it self in the whole Body because it was solely and wholly immortal in the whole Body But that very so great Beauty of Nature was presently vitiated in our first Parent after that he was cloathed with the similitude of a bruital generation For then the immortal Mind being moved
to be sensitive doth not shew the unseperable Essence of an Animal And seeing otherwise the definition of every thing is from the Essence of the thing as they will have it but man according to his Essence was made in a full possession of Immortality and henceforth of an Eternal Duration according to his Soul the Schools could not believe that man by reason of a sensitive Soul alone was essentially an Animal Especially while they believed his Essence to depend on an Eternal Duration and an uncorruptible Soul or Form All which absurdities I acknowledge to have crept into and to have remained in the Schools by reason of the truth of our Position being unknown Even hitherto I have established the Position out of the holy Scriptures Now again the same by the Authorities of Fathers which matter B. Augustine hath seemed to have understood before others saying After what manner had it shamed Man of the Transgression of a Law when as his very Members had not known shame As if he should say His Members were stirred up unto the Concupiscence of the Flesh and acts of his Privie Parts presently after the Eating of the Apple Their Eyes were opened but for this they were not opened that they might know what might be performed by them through the cloathing of Grace when as their Members knew not how to resist their will And dost thou not blush at that Disease or that thou although shamefac'd dost confess that that Lust entred into Paradise And to impute it unto Husbands and Wives before Sin He who was to be without Sin would be born without the Concupiscence of the Flesh not in that Flesh of Sin but in the likeness of sinful Flesh As if he should say whatsoever is born from Copulation although it had been born in Paradise and before Sin would have been and is the Flesh of Sin Seeing that alone which is not born of Copulation is not the Flesh of Sin Whatsoever off-spring is born from Concupiscence or of the Flesh of Sin is obliged unto Orignal Sin unless it be born again in him whom the Virgin conceived without Concupiscence The Flesh of Christ drew a mortality from the mortality of his Mothers Body because she found not the Concupiscence of a Copulatresse For indeed as Original Sin is not derived on the Posterity any other way than by the Concupiscence of the Flesh So it must needs be that in the Apple was included the Concupiscence from whence the humane stock degenerated and was vitiated in generating For truly if off-springs could have been generated any otherwise than by carnal Copulation the Matrimonial act had been unlawful Whereunto this every-way convincing Argument serveth That act before the Apple was eaten was either unlawful and not thought of or it was lawful If it were unlawful now our Position is proved But if lawful therefore whatsoever I have above described out of Augustine is false Seeing therefore they had now actually felt the effect of the eaten Apple or the Concupiscence of the Flesh in their Members in Paradise presently it shamed them because their Members which before they could rule at their pleasure were afterwards moved by a proper incentive of lust At length how greatly Virginity hath alwayes pleased the Bridegroom of the Soul doth clearly enough appear out of divers Histories of the Saints And indeed in Cana of Galilee the Bridegroom having left his Bride followed the Lord Jesus and it is that Disciple whom Jesus therefore so greatly loved The same thing was familiar unto Alexius Aegidius and to very many others especially with poor Women-Virgins For indeed the infinite goodness from the proper motion of its good pleasure from Eternity created Man and fore-loved him with so great a love that he determined to co-knit his own Divinity unto him and to enlighten him with the Light which enlightneth every man that cometh into this World and to Adopt him for the Son of God giving him Power to become the Son of God by the new Birth which new Birth before Sin was not necessary Seeing therefore he requireth People to be re-born of God therefore before Sin they were all born of God which thing Lucifer with his own Spirits seeing through a long-since Pride of his Beauty and since his fall being wholly become Envious supposed that he was wiser than God who had raised up a vile creature unto that height wherefore he aspired to exceed God whom he had not yet seen and to throw him down from his Seat of Majesty Presently afterwards he after that he had paid the punishment of his Sins being more cruelly wroth saw also that Eve being a Virgin was by the onely Goodness of God without all desert and freely now appointed for the aforesaid Instrument of that Adoption and Mother of Men Therefore he endeavoured to hinder the Love of God through the Eating of the Apple Because as seeing that the Lasciviousness and Concupisence of the Flesh implanted in the same was Diametrically opposite unto Gods intention Therefore the Eating of the Apple was not forbidden unto man by a Law but by a fatherly Admonition neither is Original Sin from the Transgressions of a Law from the Eating of the Apple as being forbidden food but by Reason of the effect arising from the Apple and the properties inserted in the Apple After another manner the Transgression or Eating did offend onely in a Voluntary Act but not for Posterity unless Naturally and by the second Causes of a brutal Copulation following from thence otherwise in our first Parents impossible it had inverted the intention of Divine Generation Yea Original Sin fell not so properly on the guiltless Posterity as the effect of Generation the which indeed hath brought forth an Adulterous Beast-like Devilish Generation and plainly uncapable of the Kingdom of God and of Union with and Enjoyment of God By Reason of the Similitude whereof those that were born in Adultery were excluded from the Participation of Heaven But let us feign the opposite thing to wit that our Parents were conscious that there was a Law declared by God the Creator of the Universe touching the forbidden Apple and that upon such an account Death was foretold unto him and all his Posterity and undoubtedly came unto them but at least-wise an irregular Sin being so bold and so ungodly and cruel a Wickedness on all their Posterity could not be forgiven without a great note of Contrition Neither had God how Merciful and Good soever straightway so suddenly made that man fruitful with so great a Blessing and substituted the other living Creatures under his Feet he not being ignorant that neither of them did Grieve Repent Pray but only it shamed them and that they endeavoured as Fools to hide themselves from God and to cover their privy Parts with Leaves Therefore I collect from thence that on the same day not only Mortality entred through Concupiscence But moreover that it presently
something concerning the first Intent of God in Man At length in the last place the Sophistical Atheists do oppose themselves by the Text of Genesis That God overthrew the World by a Deluge Because the Sons of God had chosen and taken Wives of the Daughters of Men which were fair and because these had generated Gyants being strong and famous Men in their Age And that thing is there reckoned for much Wickedness the which notwithstanding literally is seen to be none in the Words of the Text after that Matrimony was now established and lawful Yea especially because Concubine-ship was a good while after dissembled in the Law the which by reason of that Impurity especially they named the Mosaical Law but not the Law of God For truly the Text doth not mention the Sin of David but in the Death of Uriah the Adultery of Bathsheba and the proud numbring of the People Wherefore they are wont to refer this Text of Genesis unto the religious Sons of God and the free Daughters of Men. But it hath seemed a vain thing to me to have fled unto a single Life and monastick Vows and Evangelical Counsels while as a plurality of men was required from the Command Increase ye and be ye Multiplyed and Replenish the Earth which Words indeed did excuse Concubine-ship Then in the next place seeing Virgins are far more prone unto a single Life Bashfulness likewise unto Chastity and Monastick Vows than Men The Floud had rather happened from the Sex being inverted or turned on the opposite Part and it hath been Written because the Daughters of God had taken the Sons of Men for their Husbands And moreover neither can there be any thought or project of keeping Chastity probably taught which had then separated the Sons of God from Virgins nor any Apostasie in those Ages which had provoked the Indignation of God unto Floud Yet if that be so the which I can in no wise through a Dream perswade my self of at least-wise it is from thence proved in behalf of my Position that Chastity alone doth distinguish the Sons of God from the Daughters of Men and that therefore the deflowring of Virginity hath procreated Original Sin But seeing that before the Floud there was no promise of a single Life or Chastity and that a Monastick or Monkish Life came not as yet into their Mind so long as Multiplying stood in a Command and Blessing I have conjectured under a humble censure of the Church that the Sons of God were the Posterity and begotten of a Man and a Woman having the true Image of God but that the Daughters of Men were Daughters procreated by the Sons of Adam and Nymphs the Satanical-birth whereof God alwayes very much abhorred But there was an incredible Multitude of these in the Desart one whereof was sent unto B. Anthony Also in the Dayes of Constantine a live Satyr was carried about to be shewn and afterwards was shewn being seasoned with Salt So once there were also diverse Monsters drawn out from the Ocean which spake were instructed in divers Arts and therefore rational they also lived among our Country-men Indeed rational living Creatures were conceived as well in the Waters as in Wildernesses from a detestable Copulation Seeing therefore the first Monsters had begotten Off-springs by the Sons of Adam of the Female Sex they distinguished the Sons of Adam by the name of the Sons of God and these kind of Monsters they name the Daughters of men And these Nymphs Heathenism thence-forward after the Floud named Dryades Nereides Naides c. The which seeing they were fair to look upon and men had taken them to be their Wives God from so great a Filthiness and destruction of the humane kind which the Text cals much Wickednesse in every Season or Age abhorring them determined to wash away the World with a Deluge From that Copulation of Monsters and Nymphs they generated strong Gyants and those famous men of their Age and the which therefore Heathenism long worshipped as Gods and Heroes For otherwise there seem to be frivolous reasons of the Floud according to the Letter To wit because men were married with women and these had generated Gyants that were strong and famous men of their Age. Therefore the Text ought to contain the Indignation of God and a suitable Cause of the Floud The monstrousness is not only in the Figure and Forming of their Body even as in the beginning of Degenerations but their Deformity being by degrees withdrawn and diminished the monstrousness stood in the sensitive Soul the which an immortal Mind did not accompany however outwardly they were Animals using Reason At least-wise it is manifest from the aforesaid Text that the true Posterity of Adam were not Gyants but of the Stature of Christ the Lord and framed by the same Statuary But the Copulation of diverse Species hath alwayes been execrable in the sight of the Lord least Man should follow it by imitation The Law therefore forbad that many Seeds should not be sown in the same Field nor that Webs of Linnen and Wollen should be combined To wit it being mindful of that most Ample and much Wickedness for which God ought to destroy the World But the co-mixture of those Men before the Floud with Nymphs was so usual and ordinary and likewise the copulation of Faunes with Maids that a few only being excepted and saved into the Ark the whole Stock of Adam was defiled and therefore passed by in silent Therefore God decreed to destroy every living Creature that he might likewise extinguish the guilty rational Monster For besides a few which the Ark shut up there was not he who had not contracted a consanguinity with that devilish Progeny For the B. Prophetess Hildegard writeth for she is the Prophetess of this Book which was canonized in the Synod of Trevirum or Triers unto the Clergy of Triers For very many People arose from the Sons of Adam who had a forgetfulnesse of God so that they would not know themselves to be Men From whence they by shamefully Sinning lived according to the manners of Beasts except the Sons of God who separated themselves from those same Men and their Loves of whom Noah was born These things she who acknowledgeth the Sons of God in both Sexes and clearly approveth of my Interpretation of this Text. For Satan had tried by this Mean to overthrow Mankinde and to hinder the immortal Soul that there might not be He from whence the Son of God should be born Therefore there was need of the Floud not only for the Correction of Sins but for the Salvation of the whole humane kind For otherwise Cham had not been saved by the Ark for he was now wholly perverse from Atheism Wherefore I interpret the Text yet under the humble Censure of the Church to wit that the Sons of God who did bear the Image of God in their immortal Soul and in their Body Took the Daughters of Men which
is a Body mixt from a reall Wedlock of the aforesaid Elements how can it come to passe that Gold doth exceed water in weight sixteen times at least For if there be in Gold parts of Air and fire mixt by an undissolvable and equall tempering for that thing they affirm to be altogether necessary seeing they assign the perpetuall remaining of Gold in the greatest torture of the fire to be from an equall mixture of the four Elements Therefore Water and Earth in Gold being constituted shall two and thirty times out-weigh their own matter from whence the Gold ariseth Shall therefore Earth pierce it self two and thirty times at least while Gold is made of it Therefore seeing the weight it self doth bewray infallibly a ponderous Body neither doth weight wholly consist of nothing they must resolve me of this question before they shall draw me to their own opinion concerning the mixtures of the Elements In the mean time shall be room for me to shew by way of Handicraft-operation that solid and ponderous or weighty Bodies do afford out of them water of an equall weight deprived of all manner of taste Neither that an Element in nature is as neither that the Elements can ever by any skill or endeavour of nature be knit together into a formall unity these things already more largely above Therefore it is a deaf kinde of Doctrine that there are four contrary Elements which flow together to the co-mixture of other Bodies which hitherto are deceitfully supposed to be mixt and that they fight also in such mixt Bodies wherein they are enclosed no otherwise than as in their own simplicity by reason of contrarieties and that therefore they do mutually slay each other by an uncessant War and that they do as oft rise again immediately by privation that they devour and again vomit up each other That stupidity of the Schooles is not to be borne whereby they do without scruple subscribe to each other in these trifles not enquiring what that appetite in an Element of enlarging it self should be or what the motion beyond the bound once appointed for it by the Creator For first of all there is not any hunger thirst penury or any the like defective thing to which they should be subject from their Creation Neither also do they suffer defects much lesse an actuall feeling of defects Seeing every one is in it self a first and simple Being neither doth it admit of VVedlocks neither is it wasted by nourishments and through the exchange of it self hath it or doth it cast out excrements nor doth it suffer rust neither doth it by waxing weary or declining degenerate into any Body more pure than it self more former than it self more simple than it self Therefore a necessity is wanting whereby the Elements may consume each other after a hostile manner For God saw that whatsoever things he had made were good If therefore two good things should fight against each other that fight at least could not but be a great and continuall evill the authour whereof should be the Creator himself For from thence it would follow that such a property of the Elements should not be from God as neither from sin therefore from some greater than God is But if the Elements are said to be so created by God that one should continually change another into its own nature not indeed by reason of mutuall Hostility but for the necessity of nourishment Although that presupposeth a ridiculous thing yet I have what I wished to wit the taking away of contraries Therefore it is a vain privy shift and a false devlse For truly that supposition cannot subsist together with the position it self For that excuse being supposed it must needs be that there should be a fight and resistance Else one Element should presently convert all the other that co-toucheth with it into it self Because there is no difficulty of overcoming where there is no necessity of fight or resistance Because every part of an Element should have the same passion motion and desire to consume its Neighbour such things as are supposed to be in parts akinne to themselves And so that therefore those activities should be heightned into a hugeness that it should easily and presently convert the Element subjected unto it into its own nature without a re-acting And these being thus converted afterwards uncessantly others and successively others At leastwise that uppermost Air and that which is at the farthest remote distance from the water being pressed with a most tiresome and long thirst had long agoe perished or at least should languish through wearisomness or grief as being deprived of its naturall nourishment Therefore however these things may be excused the Creatures at least should be ordained by God with a desire of troubling the order and Harmony of the Universe and of their first constitution to wit of bringing in the first dissolution and disproportion by overcoming slaying and transcnanging their Neighbour into themselves Truly humane frailties are the inventers of these fables brought in by the Paganish Schooles Because through ignorance of nature it self the common people have brought in Lawes confusions contrarieties fights hostilities reducements and repeated Resurrections that men might excuse their own angry contrariety and might apply it to things that want it Indeed the Schooles and also the common people who have been deceitfully thorowly instructed by these have esteemed that in nature it is a greater more glorious and better thing to overcome than to be overcome to subdue equalls than to be subdued But God hath taught us otherwise To wit that in the top of perfection of nature it is more glorious to suffer than to do wrong that it is a more blessed thing to be overcome of a stronger than to have cast down a weaker And seeing God cannot erre in his judgements hence the judgements of the Schooles and common people have sprung not from the truth of nature but indeed from our animosity and frailty And therefore they are erroneous and abusive as as being opposite to the divine judgements Neither also shall those which God hath despised in man be able to praise him in the simplicity of a Law and necessity of Nature if they were glorious But if there were any true contrariety in things that want sense they had rightly judged that that doth necessarily arise and presuppose a conception of hatred and hostility being radically sealed in their own first and formall beginnings by reason whereof the Agent from its own self-love should stir up to it self a hatred against the Patient or it should have that hatred singularly put into it by nature for resistance unlikeness and an endeavour of successive alteration And that which way soever it may be taken is to confess Radicall Seminal and most inward contrarieties in substantial forms And so substances themselves to be immediately contrary to each other unlesse they had rather deny forms to be substances But I am provided to teach That
doth Grasse contain Cowes Milk Therefore he bewraies his own Idiotisme because he will have every coagulable Body of what sort soever to be Tartar That is whole Nature to be Tartar for the introducing of the cause of Diseases also out of the most refined Liquors For even as if he had been to have said that the matter of a Disease is taken from created Bodies but what then had he made himself besides ridiculous doth he not the same thing now while he tieth up every Body as well that which is coagulated as that ever congulable under Tartar to finde out the cause of a Disease For what new thing doth he bring which before was not known besides the name of Tartar Hath not Galen known that the material cause of Diseases is coagulated or coagulable Therefore by the name of Tartar he hath at least dazled the eyes Seeing coagulable Bodies do not assume a hardness elsewhere than from the appointment of their own seed but not after the manner wherein vvine and Lee do strain themselves together in acting First of all these things do resist the holy Scriptures and his very own position which teach that Diseases have come into man from sin and the position that Tartar was sprinkled on the Virgin Nature And by consequence that before transgression Bodies had their Creams in them and not from Tartar For he had found in the History of Nature if not an Idiot that no Liquor doth undergoe a coagulation by virtue of Tartar but from the intention of the Creator shining forth in the seeds And therefore whatsoever is condensed is a new Generation but not the ripening of a fore-existing Tartar For else there had been Tartar not onely in meats before sin but whole nature had been nothing but a Disease and the cause of death a punishment before an offence and death had arisen from the Creator For Paracelsus elsewhere thorowly weighing that favours do remain in the thing transchanged wandering as yet farther off thought that Essences do not die that they are not corrupted lastly that they are not transchanged but that they remain safe in the dungs of living Creatures and he perswaded himself that where no or perhaps the slender footsteps of favours did remain that their antient Essences also remained safe being badly instructed by the Schools that the same accident did not wander from subject into subject And so if he had been pressed he had denied also the the transmutations of things For he would have fruitful fields dunged because that the Essences of Vegetables being safe in the mud as knowing no death should sub-enter into the Roots of things sowed Being no more mindful of his own Doctrine wherein the dung of living Creatures is deprived of every property of the composed Body and is onely the last matter of Salts But elsewhere he will have the dung to contain the most especial matter of the Tartar and that in this respect the undunged fields of Bohemia do yield lesse tartarous fruits than those which were fattened with a stony or earthy juyce or food or at length with the dung of living Creatures wherein indeed abroad in the Air in a long race of years this earthy Sumen or fattening juyce doth voluntarily melt Because this Sumen-soil should produce a Tartar in Herbs more wild and Rockie than dung so often reâ—cocted and refined into the matter of Salts In which respect some filths do wash out of Towels like Soap And Paracelsus hath grown to that insolency with his Tartar that as oft as any thing did gnaw the Bladder or bring on the Strangury or pissing by drops he presently nameth that thing a Chalk or Lime a frosty Tartar or any such like thing As if Lime and Tartar were now Sunonymalls as though any thing could be calcined in the middle of the Urine without burning as if Lime did not presuppose the matter whereof the Stones consist Seeing there is not ashes which was not before a Coal Finally he acknowledgeth also the Tartar of Marrow not to be coagulable But how knew he this Tartar which he could never see For he will have himself believed in all things who knew most perfectly the Beings and all the properties of the Microcosme But why doth he now call Tartar a Being not coagulable but that all Diseases will they nill they may obey his fiction of Tartars For I being a Christian could not admit of Microcosmical Dreams as they have been delivered by Paracelsus That is by literally and not metaphorically understanding them which sense or meaning doth alwayes banish it self from the History of natural things Neither do I suffer his Tartarers but according to the same Paracelsus I will say we must believe no man in that which he cannot prove by the fire And therefore I may not consent that Lime is burnt in us as neither that Tartar is bred in us because Tartar is not to be acknowledged but in Winy Liquors but that the matter of Tartar doth remain from Generation to Generation through the Shops of the digestions I reject it as a Fable CHAP. XXXII Nourishments are guiltless or innocent of Tartar 1. Physitians at this day do by little and little accustom themselves to the Doctrine of Tartar 2. An Argument against Tartar 3. The Tartar of a Disease should not be a Creature 4. The Thistles and Thorns not to signifie Tartar 5. Two womb Sisters in nature 6. By what means the transmutations of solid things may be 7. An unbelieving invention 8. An impossibility some impertinences 9. The unconstancy of Paracelsus 10. A frivolous thing 11. Absurd Consequences upon the Position of Tartar 12. The Archeus prepares matter for himself while he doth not finde the same 13. The Errour of Paracelsus about the Idea of the Microcosme in Bread about Anatomies declared in meats and Medicines 14. Other absurdities 15. Some notable things against the Tartar of meat 16. Manly Age is lesse subject to Worms 17. A stone growing to a Tooth hath deceived Paracelsus 18. Hence another fiction hath sprung 19. The aforesaid assertion and some absurdities are discovered 20. Some absurdities concerning the Stone of a Tooth 21. A frivolous thing of Paracelsus 22. What a dental or Tooth-stone is 23. It s Birth and manner of making 24. The Family Government of the Teeth 25. Teeth have their Age. 26. Why Cold is an enemy to a Tooth 27. An Errour about the hardness of Stones in us 28. Why the Stone of the Reins doth at length arise pale 29. The unconstancy of Paracelsus 30. The neglect of the same man 31. An instance brought on a Maxim THE more refined Physitians do so by degrees go back from the Humorists the Schools that with Paracelsus they now ascribe almost all Diseases unto the one thing Tartar wherefore it hath behoved me to decypher the beginnings of my repentance and how far youthful and inconsiderate credulity hath in times past seduced me In the mean time seeing the counsel
of judgement doth spring forth from the understanding through the Grace of God with a free choyce of the assenting will I will not compel any one Every one may uncompelledly choose as much as the free gifts received of the truth shall shew themselves in the understanding I likewise being also greedy of the truth of Nature although a dull searcher began to meditate if there be any Tartar in us with a property of subsisting to wit all or every digestion being neglected and finished in us by the retentive faculty of re-assuming a Cream against our will that shall be either miraculous or supernatural or plainly natural or deceitful or divelish which although it be not above Nature yet by reason of its unaccustomed order in Nature it is sequestred into a peculiar rank But whatsoever doth subsist onely by art seeing essential Forms are secluded from the power of Artificers the artificial Being thence arising doth not fall under a Medicinal Consideration Therefore from a sufficient numbring up of parts the aforesaid division of Tartar is commended Again although Tartar were diseasie and thus far besides the intent of humane Nature yet it should not be in its own entity besides nature seeing every material Being is enclosed in the bosom of Nature therefore whether Tartar be supernatural or meerly natural at least it should be a Creature therefore Tartar should be created from the beginning seeing none is read to be created forthwith after sin neither any matter to be formally transchanged by the curse Therefore the Creator had made the punishment before the fault and death in the matter which resisteth the truth and Text. After what manner soever therefore Tartar be taken it was not created by God And therefore it is not any wise created Indeed the seeds of Thistles and Thorns were promised to the first Husbandmen not that thenceforth through the curse a new Creature in all nourishments should be transchanged or immingled into or with Tartar which it had not been before the fall for the curse had gone before the sin and the punishment had been brought in before the guilt For Paracelsus ought to have known that there are in nature two Sisters of the same womb or Mother among tangible things To wit resolving and coagulating which do mutually receive each other by course For a Liquor waxeth solid and solid things do likewise melt Because that successive change is a Law written in the Stamp of Bodies For truly a solid Body is never transchanged into another Body but it is first reduced by resolving into its first matter which is the Liquor to wit which it had before it was coagulated neither must we believe that there is any Body at this day whose matter was not created from the beginning neither was there after the first six dayes any void thing in the Body which by a new Creation of Tartar following after sin was supplyed And much lesse that God had created Tartar in us for Thistles and Thorns which our first Parent and capital transgressor had not much more principally originally and capitally felt and by consequence likewise all Diseases which Paracelsus deviseth to arise from thence Seeing God is not an excepter of persons but a just and severe revenger for every one their deserts Lastly very many things do hinder me to believe that any Tartar doth traiterously enter into us and that although it be rightly subdued and transchanged by our digestion yet that being afterwards mindful of its malignity it severeth it self from the company of the good nourishment doth retain its antient inclination of hurting and its antient Hostilities of coagulating For indeed although Adam had not sinned yet Wine had not therefore been without Tartar Milk without Cheese Rivers without Stones and Meats without excrements Surely the emunctories of dungs were before sin neither appointed that onely after the fall they should serve for their uses Surely the Tartar of Wine it self hath deluded this first inventer of Tartars being ignorant that that Tartar had proceeded from its Creation as a profitable and good Creature having proper ends according to the intention of God By how much the more that the inventer of the Tartar of a Disease doth confess Tartar to be more excellent than Wine but excrements are not more excellent than the Bodies whose superfluities they are At leastwise it is not reasonable that a Being should possess a great virtue which it had drowned in Nature from the curse of sin But if a Body in as much as it is coagulable is Tartar now the whole Universe shall not be free from this guilt but it is the Son of cursing and not of Creation In the next place Tartar of Wine is resolved by the boyling of water and the water being evaporated it again groweth together into a Powder which is now called a Cream But it being once subdued by our digestion it is no more afterwards coagulated into a Powder For even as there is need of boyling water to dissolve so there is need of the digestive faculty to transchange Therefore he should be a Physitian of wicked Counsel who should give Tartar to drink if it might again be coagulated within and should traiterously adhere to the Vessels For if after absolute digestion any thing should retain its antient force of coagulating and thereby should bring forth some Centuries of Diseases that thing by all prerogative should be the very Tartar of Wine it self under whose Banner the others have given their names in the power of Paracelsus But besides the Tartar of Wine is not any more coagulated into its antient state but it layes aside all hope of hardening so that it cleanseth the stomach of muckinesses or filths therefore much lesse could the Tartars of meats do that Furthermore if any Tartar having entred out of the Earth into meats should again retake the drawn Counsels of a Cream in us surely that Tartar first undergoing in Herbs and lesser Cattel and so in meats themselves the same Lawes of transmutation it being banished and separated from the same had either been like Tartar or otherwise it had lost in them the wild nature of coagulating But seeing it shall not exercise in meats that treason of hardening neither shall it retain or hath it the properties of Tartar after what sort I pray shall it resume that in us which at first when it was made an Herb or afterwards when the flesh of Cattel For how shall it forget its treachery in its first transmutation into an Herb and afterwards in its second into a Beast and should at first repeat it in us by its third transmutation with Pot-herbs with Milk But if it had been formally transchanged and had lost the essence and property of Tartar while it did put on the vital Spirit and substance of a Cabbage Grasse Milk and flesh and was truly made vital in these the bruitishness of Tartar being laid aside how I say and whence shall it finde
in it unless in a corporeal manner of Adamical propagation that is in manner of a figure Wherefore it also afterwards understandeth willeth loveth all things by a blinde apprehension alwayes addicted unto it For it hath known its own immortality as it feels or perceives its damnation and it complains that that is done to it as an injustice Because the love of it self is onely to excuse its excuses in sins as it were committed in the dayes of ignorance and innocency with much frailty layings in wait of enemies and a want of sufficient grace neither that an eternal punishment is deservedly due for a momentary transgression Therefore it is mad and hateth God especially because it knoweth the Arrest of the losse to be unchangeable and a liberty of escaping to be prevented for ever Therefore its hope being cut off it passeth into a finall and enduring desperation from the very beginning of its entrance unto place where there is no piety compassion consolation or revoking And because the understanding doth naturally transform it self into the Idea of the thing understood which was known to the Heathens and deciphered by the figure of Protheus that is into the similitude of evil Spirits its objects From hence there is alwayes within a present hatred of God and of the Blessed desperation cursing damnation and the raging torments of infernal Spirits The Almighty vouchsafe out of his own goodness to break the Snares extended in the way for us by hellish hatred Amen Let these things suffice concerning the Soul for the natural knowledge of its own self Now therefore I enter unto Nature that I may make manifest the Seat of the Soul in the Body CHAP. XXXVI A mad or foolish Idea 1. A doubt of the Authour about mortal poysons 2. The ignorance of the Authour from the Idea unknown 3. A very powerful force of those Idea's 4. Ignorance is the guide of Physitians 5. Another Ignorance 6. The doubting of the Authour 7. The confession and acknowledgement of the same 8. A Prayer of the Authour 9. The existence of the minde in us 10. The floating of the Authour 11. A History of the Authour about the examination of poysons 12. What hath incited the Authour hereunto 13. What he hath learned from thence 14. That the understanding is of the Essence of the Soul 15. That our will and memory dwells in the frail life and why love is required from the whole 16. How the understanding shakes its Beams into the Head 17. A distinction of some Lights 18. A certain act of feeling of the Powers of the Duumvirate and the proper manner of the Soul in its own state of Lights 19. A difference of Knowledges in respect of place 20. A clearing up of Remedies for the Head 21. What the Schools do well teach concerning these Remedies and what defectively 22. There is a diversity of understanding in the state of innocency and now 23. The difficulties of the Authour 24. The knowledge of the faculties of the minde is far different from that of any other whatsoever 25. The difficulty of searching for madness and the manner proposed by the Authour 26. A co-knitting of the minde with the sensitive Soul 27. Why the minde is not in the heart as neither in the Head 28. A convincing Argument proveth that it is in the Duumvirate 29. The glory of divine compassion doth shine forth in our griefs or weaknesses 30. The first degree of madness 31. The second is in a drowsie sickness 32. The inward obstacles of the sensitive Soul 33. The memory doth first fail 34. The following arrivals or commings of defects 35. The conceits as well of a sound man as of a mad man are made with Idea's 36. Some mad Idea's are alwayes and every where equal others not 37. The implanted Spirit of the Midriffs being hurt madnesses do remain for life 38. Things worthy to be noted 39. The Confessions of mad men being cured 40. What conceptual Idea's may do for a mad man 41. Excentrical and poysonous Idea's wherein they may co-agree 42. The power in a mad man which overcometh Colds 43. The immortality of the minde is proved from hence 44. Whence the Treatise concerning madness may be derived 45. An extinguishing of a mad Idea is intended 46. The manner of extinguishing the allied blot and a double manner against madness 47. Some Histories of the thing done 48. The Remedy of a Hydrophobia or a Disease causing a fear of water and of the biting of a mad Dog before a Hydrophobia 49. A repeated History of a mad man 50. Considerations of plungings under water 51. A ridiculous thing in an added Remedy of Galen 52. A miraculous curing of madness COncerning the action of Government and likewise concerning the Duumvirate or Sheriff-dom in office even as becometh a natural Philosopher I have written that I might discover the Seat of the phansie or imagination and might describe the strife about the 〈◊〉 or Seat of the faculties of the minde Notwithstanding I being long since in doubt knew not after what manner an understanding man might degenerate into a mad man I knew indeed that in sordid and poysonous things there were certain natural endowed powers not indeed understanding ones but those which might answer in affinity to those So as that they might seduce our understanding against our wills into their own obediences as the biting of a mad Dog the stroke of the Tarantula the eating of Night-shade c. For I thought that in Feverish filths their own co-like faculties did inhabit wherein the dance presently troubled me To wit because in the same Fever cruel raging madnesses had succeeded ridiculous ones I from thence perswading my self that in the agreement of madness there were not disagreeing effects For neither at the first view did I sufficiently heed that poysons do wax mild or are exasperated by ripening And then I looked back on a Lunacisme because it did invade and go back together with its own conjunction of a Star without all Society of poyson Also that madness did return and was silent without any vice of the life running between I wholly doubted being ignorant as yet that besides corporal poysons there were also poysonous images impressions the most absolute and most efficacious Mistresses of the vital Spirits the which our intellectual Powers do as willingly as readily obey as long as we are enclosed in the prison of our Body In the mean time I have known by Faith that the minde is immortal and that by the same right it s own understanding doth remain unpolluted by the contagious of the Body because it was not meet that that which was immortal and infinite or without end should be diminished or hurt by frail or mortal things On the one side therefore I did willingly confess humbly my own ignorance but on the otherside I did contemplate on the miserable and never narrowly searched into condition of a mad man and the so scanty Remedies in the
of all in the book of long Life I have demonstrated at large that the entrance of Death into humane nature had its own causes in nature by means for bidden without the intent of the thrice Glorious Creatour that death being once crept in and admitted although that was not from the Creators intention yet that it was afterwards continued and un-intreatable from a necessity of nature and thereupon not only to have been permitted and consented to by the Creatour but also that the style of Nature being changed it was admitted yea and also as it were commanded under a better state being introduced in regenerating through the Divine Grace of Baptisme In which Treatise I have demonstated a necessity of the Sensitive Soul which else under immortality had been in vain whence indeed a Law in the Members was introduced contradicting the Laws of the immortal mind And a Total and unexusable corruption of the whole central nature was received Which new unheard of Doctrine to former ages I presuppose is therefore from thence to be fetched or required if so be that the knowledge of our Mind be desired For as it is now thus stranged from its own self from its own Beginning because it now seems to hearken unto the commands of the Sensitive Soul which notwithstanding in its own essence Substance and reality is unchangeable so indeed unto those who make a beginning or do repent as it addeth the knowledge of the means whereby it fell and became wholly degenerate so also it presupposeth the same Doctrine to be as it were the foundation of the knowing of it self In the next place concerning the Birth of forms I have likewise shewn how far this fraile sensitive and mortal Soul in us may differ from the immortal Mind the which surely that it is made to do no less than after an infinite manner is undoubtedly true seeing the mind indeed is a Substance not mortal but the sensitive Soul is neither a Substance as neither an accident But a neither Mortal Creature and perishing into nothing and of the nature of Lights Which Doctrine is in part that of the Gospel which speaketh concerning the Eternal Life and Death of Souls or that which reckoneth the Soul of man to be the Image of God and not hereafter to Die for the distinguishing of it from the Soul of a Beast which indeed together with the Life it self is returned into nothing no otherwise than as the light of a Candle But as to the other part the present Doctrine is plainly Paradoxal in as much as the Sensitive Soul is banished out of the predicament of a Substance or an accident For first of all I have demonstrated that the Sensitive and Beast-like Soul as well in bruits as that which is in us is not infinite and immortal yet it must needs be so seeing none doubteth but that every natural thing that is born is also Subject unto Corruption by the Law of Nature But we are obliged by Faith to believe that the mind of man is immortal hereafter And so that the mind of man is an abiding substance or a Spirit subsisting and Living in it self after Seperation from the body should not be to be pressed or demonstrated to a Christian whose understanding is subdued into the obedience of Faith but that a most prevalent Atheism had lately arose in the midst of us and in Hypocrites of the Church which by an every way renouncing of the Faith doth shake it self off from the Principles whereby such insolent rashness might be appeased And especially of them who deny all divine Power otherwise neither is it my part to Treate of the immortality of the mind it being written and demonstrated by Augustine and piously copied out word for word by Lessius and by him re-delivered because they are those who have sufficiently proved the same But not yet against those which deny all Divine Power Therefore I might desist by treading the same under foot to re-meditate of it if it had been sufficiently demonstrated by them against the first sort of Atheists and unless I had put a difference of the mind in nature from every Soul of living Creatures unless I say the integrity or entireness of the same should have repect unto the knowledge of nature and that integrity should require a designed difference of man from any other Created things whatsoever and that â—ingly and Principally only according to its cheif and lively part without which man is nothing but a stinking dead Carcase more vile then a Flint and sooner destroyed and broken than any Glass Otherwise Christianity standing the immortality of the Mind standeth and the Substance of that Substander oâ—â—emainer even as also likewise the Mortality of other Souls or their reducement into nothing which is annihilation of a Proper Name And from thence is the true and properly said difference of the same CHAP. XLVI Of the Immortality of our Soul 1. Atheism and that worse than Idolatry 2. Religious Atheists are the worst of all 3. The Life of new Religious persons which prefer themselves before others hath introduced Atheism anew under the Doctrine of the Pâ—lagiam 4. Hypocrites abuse the Scriptures 5. The Argument of perfect Atheists 6. That modern Atheism was foreseen in times past 7. The foolishness of their Argument 8 Of what the Faith of Atheists is 9. Some Arguments against Atheists from things granted 10. Every thing understood is a Lyer while it is equalized with things understood by Faith 11. It is further demonstrated by the authority of Scripture 12. The Bread which comes down from Heaven Prophesied of 13. The remainder out of blessed Augustine 14. The mind cannot be generated by the disposition of Bodies 15. A neutrality of Beings unknown to the Schools THe Jewes of old presently after the Cessation of miracles were straightway hurried unto Idolatry a mad worshiping of Idols But the modern Age being more wicked then they of the Circumcision slideth voluntarily by degrees into Atheism For Lay-men being exsecrably involued in daily Sins do not only neglect God the invisible Fountaine of all good But also some that are bound or engaged to the Church eating up in the midst of us the Sins of the people do â—coffe at God and protest that they are indebted nothing unto him Because they believe nothing Accounting the Faith it self to be a meer politick apparitions Imagination and so that all Religions are indifferent Because they are those which they believe he introduced only to restrain people under a civil Law of living and that the are therefore almost every where different and alike just they being divulged by the Statute Law of Princes or right of customes received For else it might be a free thing to believe and do any thing if the commerces of men should not perish thereby For there are those who do believe and foolishly utter these things because Priests and Religious men themselves do privily profess unto
their wicked abuses who thinking that they have reached unto the bottom of Truth they boast of their most polished and sublimed wits and therefore they laugh at other good or honest persons who implore the Grace of God in Faith Hope and Charity as simple men and almost foolish and as those that roast themselves as a broiled Fish in vain And they wax daily worse and worse the Devil stirring them up Who goes about as a roaring Lyon seeking daily whom he may devour But especially the evil examples of some Preachers and Vowers of voluntary Poverty Obedience Humility and Charity do nourish Atheisms who notwithstanding are wholly without Humility Charity being altogether Ambitious Envious Couetous they over flow in Wealth they follow their own Profits that not only their Belly but they themselves wholly may be a God to themselves For truly under a Cloak of Hypoâ—â—â—ie they wrest aside the Almes appointed and to be appointed for the Poor to themselves So as their life being diverted into a Scorn of Religion hath driven for that cause even the more Judicious and also the weaker Sort into Atheism But the Holy Spirit shall at sometime Reforme this Madness of Errour on both sides who is able only to cleanse and sweep away the Intestine filth from his Church In the next place the Scripture it self entering into that evil mind it is wrested in a wrong sense and hath confirmed Atheism which otherwise ought to moue to filial obedience and due love towards God For first they argue distinctiuely and presently after they conclude copulatively for Atheism To wit they say that Bibles do profess one only and eternal Power Omnipotent and Unchangeable Therefore either the Chronicles of Bibles are the meer Fables of the Hebrewes or the God or Power which the Christians do at this day Worship or the Turks is far different from the God of the Jewes For if we know a Tree by his Fruits and a man by his Works the God also may be a doubtful God which the Christians with the Turks do adore and believe together with the Jewes as one only God remaining always Immortal he shall be to be known and believed by his own works and that such as beseeme him For as many enemies as in times past are read to have rushed on the people of Israel were overthrown by a small number and were slain through the Astonishment of their minds by Terrour or by a mutual Slaughter or killing of each other although the Camps of the same enemies were numerous like the â—o casts and the Camels of the same in numerable as the sand of the Sea shore Yet through a panick fear they run away howling from three hundred Hebrews founding Hornes and now and then they slay each other with their own Sword so as there was not one that surviued who might carry home news of all that Slaughter Yea without the help of Warriours one only Angel destroyed 180 thousand by Death and that with one only Sword For if those things are true which are them read and esteemed and the power be at this day the same which he was in times past and alike powerful he ought alike powerfully to help the Christians now his own people against their enemies by whom they are surrounded and subdued or enthralled daily For at this day publick Idolatry ceaseth which was In times past accused for the cause of overthrow and the cause of the Divine power himself is at this day managed if the Church the Spouse of the same and the Sacraments of his Body be disgracefully trampled on and the daily Sacrifice or Host be hung up and mocked with great reproach The disjunctive of both which howsoever it be taken doth at least convince that that antient Deity hath failed in manner in Being or essence and in power and that the new one or that which the Christians do now worship of which powers as well as of believers there are great discords in the whole World hostily spoiling each other is not alike powerful or alike bountiful to his faithful ones as the antient Deity was to his own Israel in times past Because at this day Angels nor Swords do no longer appear neither do huge Camps any longer kill each other with a mutual slaughter As neither being affrighted in crying out do they run away from Christians armed with Chariots on Horse-back and with fiery Engines from hence our Atheists conclude that as many as do believe an Immortal and Omnipotent Being that is a God do live deceived And from thence consequently they do further rightly inferre If any Divine power doth at length die or fail much more the mind of man which sprung from Mortal Parents For these Arguments are those which withdraw the people of Christ first unto a neglect of Divine worship and at length unto the toplof Atheism After that the Devil took notice that worshipping of Idols and a multiplicity of Starry Gods among the Judicious were despised as being loose and friuoâ—us meanes whereby he might allure people unto his own Hook he more subtilly spreads this Net of Atheism and collected a more numerous Prey which future Atheism God foretold by his Servants the Prophets The Foole hath said in his heart there is no God the Atheists are corrupted and become Abominable in Iniquities there is none that can do good God hath looked down from Heaven upon the Sons of men to see if there be one that understandeth or seeketh after Gods For the Atheist hath said in his heart if I might see God an Angel or evil Spirit Yea or the Spirit of a man I would verily believe that they were But I will not believe what I do not see or hear all things are unaccustomed unto me and therefore they seem incredible But I think with Aristotle that all knowledge and all intellective Learning is made only from a fore-existing knowledge of the Senses To whom the Devil answereth it is good for him so to remain And God faith for he that to this end desireth to see that he may believe is now guilty of sin but the spirit of Truth entereth not into a Soul guilty of sin and therefore it is not convenient that thou shouldest see those things which thou desirest to see that thou maiest believe For neither is sin a Meanes for the attaining of Faith It is a Blasphemous and wicked Judgment to have denied a God or a Devil because it was not granted to him to have seen either of the two neither whereof is to be seen unless in an assumed Form In the next place it is a rotten and childish Argument God doth not perform to Christians at this day those things which he sometimes of old performed to the Jewes therefore he is not the the same as in times past or is diminished from his antient power For truly the matter is changed not so much from the power as from the will of God But why he will not
not Spiritual substances of a proper Name but only the living vital lights of Soulified Creatures The which notwithstanding are Created by God the Father only and are dispensed according to the requirance of Seminal dispositions I knew thirdly that every frail and Sensitive Soul did issue from the seeds occasionally and dispositively only and therefore that it did partake of nothing of likeness or unity with the Mind of man For although both were Created by God yet that they were both divided a sunder no otherwise than as a frail or Mortal Being from a future Immortal one or as Light that is to perish by blowing out from a substance which should be the shining Image or likeness of the God-head I knew in the fourth place that in the seed of Man dispositions and hopes lay hid unto such a frail or Mortal Soul no less than in the seed of a Dog unto a living Whelp Fiftly I knew that the Sensitive Soul even as I have proved concerning long Life in the Treatise of the entrance of Death into humane nature arose in us from sin and that it doth naturally remain afterwards through a successive coupling of the Sexes neither that the Mortal mind could be made by nature Man or any natural means 1. Because it was a Substance 2. Because that it was permanent or durable and therefore 3. That it could never be made from a perishing Being 4. That the mind therefore ought to be made of nothing after the manner of all Substances without the aid of Co-operating nature 5. And that therefore the Sensitive Soul before sin was not in us as neither necessary Next I knew in the sixth place that forthwith after transgression the mind was fast tied to the Sensitive Soul Because that in a Body subject to Death there was nothing more near or more a-kin to the mind wherein it might sit and that therefore the mind had sunk it self into that cleer and Vital beginning as in an Inn and had been annexed to it by God even unto the Period of Life For I have therefore beheld so many foolish madnesses fallacies defects errors and Treacheries of men yea and all madnesses which might utterly deny all the use of the Mind and might make its totall absence rather than its presence to be Suspected Seventhly I knew that the Mortal Soul forthwith after the fall did so over-darken the Mind in its Inn and over-spread it being idle and as it were detain it Sleeping that it did Govern not only corporal actions but it did for the most part so dim or blacken the very presence of the mind it self that it is able to do nothing at all readily in this Life as though it were no longe belonging to its own right For there is a Law in our Members resisting the Law of our Mind Lastly I felt or perceived a contrary or contentions disquietness sprung up which endeavoured to excuse the liberty and burden of sinning For howsoever the mind doth continually breath forth a vital beam into its vicaress the sensitive Soul because it is that which never keeps holiday is wearied or sleepeth nevertheless it seemed to be so servile to the mortal Soul in its faculties that it is unable to enjoy its own understanding freely but to yield to the mad will or pleasure of the sensitive Soul Wherefore I being easily seduced through the deformities of Diseases readily descended because I saw that Serpents and some Simples yea even our hous-hold excrements did every way alter the use of the mind indeed the powers and functions of these to become wholly oppressed and mad and that we who were constituted in so great a majesty under the image of the Divinity did become far more miserable than Beasts For I was incited hereunto because it did not seem agreeable to 〈◊〉 or possibility that any Poysonous frail Being and that which is unlike to the immortality of the Mind could Spurn against the Image of God that it should loose all right and Prerogotive at the will of a mad Dog and that the Power of the meanest thing should be enlarged beyond the excellency of a Being which is infinite in duration hereafter For it seemed that that ought not to be capable of suffering by a frail or Mortal thing whatsoever should by it self be immortal But moreover the mind of a prudent man is be-set for the most part by foolishness because almost every one doth labour in his own point of giddiness For whosoever loveth that which is not to beloved is ennared and who so keeps not a proportion of suitableness between things that are to be loved now he herein beholds plausible things as pleasing with an affection of madness For so Eve beheld the apple as beautiful and therefore as pleasing she presently took that apple and ate And that thing is so usual that the holy Scriptures say that the number of fools is infinite For I have gone head-long into these-fallacies of errors because I as yet knew not what the necessity and bond of the combination of the mind and of the Sensitive Soul was For indeed because the mind was now connexed unto the mortal Soul it stood bound to this by the right of an Inn so that although the mind were of it self not capable of suffering yet because they were both combined by a conjugal bond and bride-bed of unity so as that the mortal Soul did enjoy the sole Life of the immortal mind it was altogether necessary that as oft as the mortal Soul did suffer any thing by frail or mortal hurtful things or things hostile unto it it should consequently also suffer that very thing through an equality or likeness of wed-lock a conjugal unity and social right of hospitality Not indeed that therefore frail things should obtain a power over an immortal Being which is supereminently above it and of a diverse station but God would have the mind thus to suffer as it being hindered by the discommodities of its Inn it should be deprived of its own liberty of ampleness and should hearken to the straights and anguishes of its mansion For the immortal life of the mind is communicated to a mortal Soul Seat and Inn which life notwithstanding as otherwise every thing received is received after the manner and capacity of the receiver is made mortal in that which is connexed with it or in a mortal light And the which may therefore also be oppressed by mortal things that the Life may be wholly blown out and then the mind being deprived of its Inn is not indeed extinguished or annihilated but is compelled to depart by reason of an untying and annihilating of the bond Whatsoever therefore the mind seemeth to suffer under Life it self indeed remaineth safe but it doth not freely exercise its Offices because feeling or perceivance is in the middle of the Bond. For truly I have constantly considered the light of the Sun married as a husband to the Splendour of the Glo-worm so
Predicaments through the ignorance of which or one only point heathenisme hath overwhelmed the Schooles of Medicine with the contagion of blindness And all curing hath been believed to be subject unto naked qualities excesses of degrees relative respects and actions For from hence they have feigned Contraries to be Remedies of Contraries and no Disease to be mitigated by the goodness of Nature the mildness of Medicines and by the appeasing and repentance of the Archeus that was first disturbed but only by fighting skirmishing and war to be reduced into a mean or temperature of the first qualities So that seeing they think every Disease to be a Disposition likewise that all Remedies ought to be a naked Disposition or they are deceived in their position whence it follows that the taking away of the stone out of the Bladder shall never be able of it self to import a cure of the sick For truly seeing it is a Remedy onely privative whereunto an appeasing of the Archeus belongs but it is not a Disposition contrary to the Stone And much lesse a prohibitive of the foregoing matter which they suppose of necessity to be supplied from elsewhere uncessantly to flow thither nor to cease the Stone being taken away by the knife to wit if the Disposition generating the matter whereof shall not first cease Therefore according to the Schooles He that is cut for the Stone should be cured onely for a little space to wit as the Impediments of Functions are taken away otherwise produced and cherished by the Stone being present and also as the disposition mentally interposing is secondarily casually and by accident obliterated But the mattter is far otherwise For truly a seminal Disease is a creature which made and found out its own matters and its own Idea's in us after sin by an hereditary right of the Archeus neither had he it originally in Nature And therefore the root of Diseases ought totally to be unknown to all Heathenisme And seeing an essential definition is not to be fetched from the Genus of the thing defined and its constitutive difference even as I have taught in the Book of Feavers by reason of the manifold perplexities of Errors and ridiculous positions but altogether from a connexion of both Causes which are Beings in Nature and therefore that the primitive and Ideal cause of Diseases hath stood neglected hitherto It follows also that the definition knowledge essence and roots of a Disease have remained unknown And finally that curings have been instituted by accident with an ignorance of the universal disposition of internal properties their efficacie and interchangable course Truly I know as a Christian that a Disease is not a Creature of the first Constitution because it is that which hath taken its rootes from sin in the impurity of Nature which afterwards in their own spring have at length budded in Individuals For neither were created poysons Diseases as long as they were without us but then when the Archeus of the same was made domestical unto us through the forreign disposition of its middle life it raised up seminal Idea's in our Archeus even as Fire is struck out of a Flint Then I say Diseases are made unto us the fore-runners of Death from an occasional poyson Diseases therefore do continue with us when they have their provoking occasions subsisting in our Nature until neither their occasional matter be wasted away or at least until the Archeus be rid of his own perturbations or of his office For Diseases indeed came on us by Sin and afterwards in Nature now corrupted by Sin the ferments and ready obediences of matter waxed strong and so they pierced into the number and catalogue of Nature and even unto this day do most inwardly persevere with us after a singular manner Yet alwayes distinct from other created things in this that the created things of the first constitution have a proper existence in themselves but diseases neither are nor are able to subsist without us Because they proceed as it were from a formal light and the vital constitutive Beginning of us And therefore the natural Archeus and a Disease do pierce each other because they have a material co-resemblance But the Schooles when they heeded that Diseases do never exist without us supposed that our Body was the subject of Inhaesion of Diseases and consequently that Diseases were only accidents and therefore to be stirred up from an elementary distemperature because they apprehended them in a most prompt and rustical sence also for that cause they hoped that they should sufficiently and over vanquish Diseases by Heats and Colds And therefore they likewise decreed that every refreshment aid and help which nature being informed did require of the Physitian was not to be administred in shew of a refreshment in peace and tranquility but herein onely to prevail and that wars strifes contraries and discords were to be appointed whereby the hostile elementary qualities being cobroken in us they might by constraint return into a mediocrity of temperature that so they may restrain the injuries of Nature now corrupted by contrary injuries and subdue them by revenging Which thing surely they have thus judged nor have otherwise understood because that they knew no other action than that which from a superiority of the agent rules over the patient But surely those things do not savour of an help neither is the Law of Christ by whom all things were made conformable to those Lawes of the Schooles And so as elsewhere more largely either Christ is not the parent of Nature or an adversary to himself in Nature or such Heathenish speculations of healing are rotten The Schooles therefore have not considered that the matters of many Beings do not consist but in a strange Inne whereunto they were appointed Wherefore by reason of their different kind of manner of existing they thought a Disease to be a meer accident but predicamentally seperating the matter which a Disease might carry before it from a Disease As if an Embryo should be an accident because it is no where but in the womb Indeed it pleased the revenger of sin that Diseases with their matters as well that occasional as that equal and inward unto them should not subsist but in those whose the Diseases and offence should be and that without respect of the Being of one unto another For neither have the Heathenish Schooles ever considered as neither the Moderns who have been established on Paganish Beginnings that this relation of existence came unto them from the condition of sin and the procreation thereof from the Archeus sore shaken with perturbations Because such thoughts never entred into Heathenisme neither is it a wonder that the Gentiles knew not the force of Transgression although they do deliver by the Fable of Promotheus and Pandora that they learned something from the Hebrews Yet it is a wonder that they were ignorant that a Disease before it should be made ours ought to proceed from the
humane Nature The same Cause also doth wholly at this day make Death and a Disease For it is repugnant with the Glory of the Creator not to have made Death from the beginning and afterwards when it was made by Man for him to have assumed to himself the Glory of knowing how to make it as if he ought to have learned that thing from Man But what hath been already spoken concerning Death that is by an equal right to be understood concerning Diseases Because that seeing Death and a Disease have issued from the same piont of their original therefore if God be said to give Diseases or Death it is not that now he will be the Creator of those things whose Fabrick he before wholly refused But he is permissively called the Author and Prince of Life and Death Because as he is the true and alone Author of Life and therefore doth govern it and suffer it at his Pleasure So he permits that this man doth yield or depart and the other Man fall and that second Causes do happen as well directly as irregularly whence Man dieth or a Disease groweth But the Creation of a Disease as of a Being subsisting from a seminal matter and efficient and of an Ideal and deadly evil never proceeded from God For while he had placed it in the will of Man that he might remain without Death or the same day to die the Death by the same step also he put it into Mans hand to frame Death and a Disease it self as a fore-runner and preparer of Death The entrance of Death into the nature of Man being considered even as I have elsewhere explained it by a remarkable Paradox doth most exactly prove that a Disease doth nor only consist in the vital part of Man but also that a Disease it self is bred by a seminal Idea out of the Archeus himself But I will briefly prove that thing From the concupiscence of the Flesh arose the flesh of Sin and therefore also a mortal Archeus in that Flesh and from thence by consequence also the Archeus forasmuch as he is vital acts in the flesh of Sin every action and produceth every formal hurtful and deadly act which God hath refused to do and hath suffered Man to stamp on himself the Causes of Death and Diseases Yet Man is not therefore a Creator although he maketh formal acts to himself or the substantial formes of Diseases or the hurtful ones of Life For truly that was granted unto him by virtue of the Word That on what so ever day he should eat of the Fruit of the Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil he should die the Death and should make guards-men appointed for his own Death And that from the very Nature of Death it self necessarily brought forth in the flesh of Sin The act therefore which is of the Essence Exsistence and Subsistence even as also of the propagation or fruitfulness of the contagion of Diseases doth altogether depend in the Life from the Life by the Life within which it is also enclosed Surely miserable are Mortals and most exceeding miserable are the Sick who have hitherto hired Physitians at a great and dear price who know not what a Disease may be from whence it may arise and in what it may consist and subsist But I admire that before me the more Antient as neither Modern Physitians have smelt this out because their sacred Anchor being for the most part in the hope of a Crisis and concerning Crises's they have devised very many things to excuse their own Ignorances For truly a Crisis or judicial sign in Diseases proveth nothing besides the Archeus if they believe their own Hippocrates who saith that Natures themselves are the only Physitianesses and helpers of Diseases For the Moon doth not make Crises's causatively but the Archeus alone who follows the Harmony of the Moon For the Moon measureth dayes hath more regared unto the proof of the actions of the Archeus than unto causality For the Moon is alwayes on the fourth day in an opposite place to that which she was in on the first day Therefore also the Archeus hath opposite powers or faculties who doth imitate the Harmonious motions of the Moon So also on the seventh day c. I conclude therefore for the knowledge of a Disease that a Disease hath either a Fewell or an excitement only from the occasional Cause or doth arise from a voluntary and proper motion and perseveres in its own contagion of a seed as while an Epilepsie or the falling Evil is once con-centred or the Gowt hath taken root doth indeed awaken of its own free accord as oft as it listeth Even as also the Disease ceaseth for two or three dayes or more and again returns at set Periods although the occasional cause in the mean time be alwayes present and so after a hurtful solutive Medicine being taken although it be expelled a few hours after yet the Archens being thereby defiled rageth and is obedient to the drunk contagion of the venom So also ready inclinations and hereditary Diseases Proper or Natural unto some one whole Family are co-bred with us Because they are Con-centred in the Life it self and are as it were the Characterical marks and imprinted seales of hurtful Diseases CHAP. LXVIII I proceed unto the Knowledge of Diseases 1. Medicine is the most occult or intricate of Sciences 2. Therefore the ignorances of past ages are excusable 3. In what thing Diseases may inhabit 4. The rise or original of Diseases 5. Whence a Disease began 6. Why a Disease is immediately in the Being of the first Motions 7. Why the essence of Diseases hath been unknown 8. A Disease hath married a vital Being 9. After what manner all seeds do issue from the invisible World 10. The rise of Efficient Causes and the property of seminal Idea's 11. All the seminal Beginnings of things are from an invisible Idea 12. How a seminal beginning receives its compleating 13. The Ideal power of seeds is declared by their ranks 14. Although Death and a Disease began from the same Beginning yet they differ in that a Disease hath Idea's but a Death not 15. The Schooles will laugh at Idea's But the Author carps at the ignorance of the Schooles 16. He proveth their ignorance at least by one Example I Have already oftentimes nor in vain asserted that Arts and Sciences have hastened unto a pitch but that the art of healing alone if it hath not gone backwards at leastwise to have stood at a stay and to have whirled round about the same deceitful point Hence also I have conjectured that the knowledge of Diseases and a Medicine depending thereon was to Man most difficult On which so many flourishing wits have for so many ages vainly bestowed their endeavours and that thing I do not hereby conjecture to be from a contingency or events alone to wit because the knowledge of Diseases hath even hitherto stood neglected But because in respect
proper unto him from a Curse but from his being made creeping and that thing was sufficiently manifest to Adam For herein the Curse seized not so much on the Serpent as on the evil Spirit because the lying Impostor had hid himself in the most vile of creeping things on whose head therefore and not on the head of any creeping thing the Woman trod upon But because all Bruits which do generate by a long continued copulation were in times past reckoned impure and also forbidden from Man's use in Kitchins among which creeping Animals are not in the last place c. It containeth and likewise confirmeth the mystery of our Position To wit That the impurity of our Nature draws its rise from the Concupiscence of the Flesh And therefore the copulation in Beasts seemeth to be taken notice of in Beasts by God which was distinct and defiled with impurity In the next place also in the Law a Menstruous Woman and the person touching her were accounted to bring an impurity on every thing The which otherwise being now turned into a second and natural Cause ought to be plainly guiltless unlesse the Menstrues should by a Natural course derive it self from the same Causes from whence Death happened unto us And therefore also for this Cause it being plainly impure in the Law was reckoned a horrid thing with God But for that Woman alone doth suffer Menstrues before Bruits surely it doth not attest any Prerogative of our kind but rather every way a defect to wit that it is reckoned for a punishment of frustrated Chastity and referred into second Causes plainly from a notable Mystery of our Position neither doth it hinder these things that chast Virgins obey the Menstrues and that she is Monstrous who an opportunity being given is not Menstruous because Adamical Generation its self is constrained to carry no less the importunities of its own Nature than Death it self Yea seeing Chastity doth not excuse a Virgin from the Menstrues it is for a token that the Menstrues is not from a Curse nor from the punishment of Sin but altogether from Natural Causes no otherwise than as Death it self began from second Causes inserted in the disswaded Apple although hitherto unknown nor thorowly weighed The Menstrues therefore onely in Woman alone but not in Bruits doth accuse that the Transgression of the despised fatherly Admonition happened in the very privy parts therefore branded as it were with an unclean bloody Seal for a perpetual sign The which surely should not have place if a Sexual Copulation for the Propagation of man had not inverted the intention of the Creator rather than in Bruit-Beasts In this place a Paradox and impertinent consideration doth occur being interlaced as it were by a Parenthesis that Adam seeing he was created in the possession of Immortality God intended not that Man should be an Animal or Sensitive creature nor should be born conceive or live as an Animal for truly he was created into a living Soul and that he might be the immediate Image of God Therefore he as far differed from the Nature of an Animal as an Immortal being from a Mortal and as a God-like Creature from a Bruit The which is indeed more than in the whole Predicament And it is exceedingly to be admired and deservedly unworthy to be endured that the Schools of Christ do believe and confess these things and yet that even until now they draw the Essence of a Man Essentially from an Animal Nature because although Man afterwards procured Death unto himself and therefore may seem to be made nearer unto the Nature of Animal Creatures yet it stood not in his Power to be able to pervert the Species of the Divine Image Even as neither was the Evil Spirit of a Spirit made an Animal although he became nearer unto an Animal by hatred and brutal vices Therefore Man remained in his own Species wherein he was created For as oft as man is called an Animal or Sensitive living Creature and is in earnest thought to be such so many times the Text is falsified which saith But also the Serpent was more crafty than all the living Creatures of the Earth which the Lord God had made Because he speaks of the Natural craftiness of that Creeping Creature Again if the Position be true Man was not directed into the Propagation of Seed or Flesh neither therefore did he Aspire into a Sensitive Soul And therefore the Sensitive Soul of Adamical Generation is not of a brutal Species because it was raised up by a Seed which wanted the Original Ordination and Limitation of any Species And so that as the Sensitive Soul in Man arose besides the intent of the Creator and Nature So it is of no brutal Species neither can it subsist unless it be continually tyed to the Mind from whence it is supported in its Life Wherefore while Man is of no Brutal Species he cannot be an Animal in respect of his Mind and much less in respect of his Soul which is of no Species For a woman great with Child while by reason of sudden fear she changeth the Humane Young into a certain Bruit the mind indeed doth not wander into a brutal Soul but the mind departs and a Sensitive Soul begged of the Creator is substituted in its stead And seeing that it is promoted onely by the Idea of the Woman great with Child without an Original appointment therefore such kind of generated Creatures do most speedily die And the off-springs of Adam had likewise presently perished unless God had granted Matrimony unto him Wherefore in the Birth of Cain she truly said I possesse a Man from the Lord. Far be it therefore to have placed Man among Sensitive living Creatures Truly we must indulge Pagans who know not that thing but not equally Christians who too much adore Paganish Doctrine At least wise the Schools confesse that there is an ordinary Progress of Nature from not a sensible Creature into a sensible Animal but that the Life and Sense of Men is immediately iufsed by the hand of the Almighty They confesse in the next place that the Conditions of being living and feeling or perceiving in Man differ in their whole Condition from an Animal Nature because it follows the Faculty of the rational Form or Immortal mind But they shamefully believe that a Man aswel of the first Constitution as being now Divinely Regenerated by the Sacraments is an Essential Animal Fie let it shame man not to know that the Evil Spirit and whole Nature also are not able by any means or any way to change the Essence given unto him from the foreknowledge of the Creator but that he should continually remain such as he was created although in the mean time he hath cloathed himself with strange properties as Natural unto him from the vice of his own will For as it wants not an absurdity to reckonman glorified among Animals because he is not without a sense or feeling So
only shewed forth a humane Image in the rationality of their sensitive Soul and beautiful Fairness for their Wives because they were Fair And from them they generated Gyants strong and famous Men of their Age For there was much Wickedness in every season or at all times so as that it repented God that he had created Man according to that saying All Flesh had corrupted its way that is every Man had not only left the ways of the Lord but he had also corrupted the way which he had chosen to himself For God had purposed to generate man by the overshadowing of the holy Spirit which was his immediate Image and to conjoyn himself intimately unto him But Man perverted the Intent of God Wherefore afterwards God who is totally Good permitted Wedlock And then again Man bespotted the Generation of Adam and had almost proceeded unto the Destruction of the Species unless the Miracle of the Floud had come And at length the Devil had again prevented the Intent of God by Paganism unless in the fulness of times the compassion of God had withstood him he sending his Son from his own Heart or Bosom To whom be all Sanctification However God be no accepter of Persons therefore neither of Sexes Yet it hath well pleased him to stuff the female Sex with a straight measure of tribulations by reason of his unsearcheable Judgments For the Hairs of our Head are numbred and a Leaf falls not from the Tree but by Permission And much less is a poor Woman or Maid born whom the Finger of God hath not formed Therefore I have many times enquired throughout the Parishes after the knowledge of this Paradox and I have every where found in the Books of those that are yeerly Baptized twice more Daughters at least to be Born and Baptized than Males Also that twice more Males at least are extinguished by Diseases Travels War Duel Shipwracks c. than Females From whence it follows that God doth every year create more Daughters and that more do come to ripe Years And from hence lastly it is manifest that so compleat a number of Maids is not appointed by God but for the choiceness of Virgins Seeing that he which hath forbidden Luxury and Adultery doth nevertheless create and conserve a more plentiful Catalogue of Females and a sparing Catalogue of Males and he therein denoteth that the Constancy of a single Life in the Woman is acceptable unto him To wit as she comes so much the nearer unto the Purity and Innocency of the first Intention in Creation For a conclusion of this Treatise I will adjoyn what S. Hildegard writeth unto the Grisean Monks Page 186. Virginity signifieth the Sun which enlightneth the whole World because God hath adjoyned Virginity unto himself the which Man being left begat that Virginity which a Ray or Beam of the Divinity plentifully poured forth and the which Ray doth govern all things For the King which ruleth all things is God and Virginity was conjoyned unto him when God and Man was born of a Virgin Thus the Queen stood at his right hand in Rayment guilt with Gold with an encompassed Variety because Virginity resisting the Devil stood to the Virtue of the Divinity in its resplendent Work being on every side encompassed with the Multitude of diverse Virtues For the Divinity hath espowsed Virginity unto it self when as the Angel at first fell on the left Hand and now also hath he elected a People of Salvation for himself being in Adam which People he hath named his right Hand concerning which People he hath adjoyned Vriginity unto himself which hath brought forth the greatest Work Because as God created all things by his Word So also Virginity through the heat of the holy Divinity begat the Son of God Thus Virginity is not without Fruitfulness Because a Virgin begat God and Man by whom all things were made But also by this means all the Virtues of the Old and New Testament which God hath wrought in his Saints are beguilded being as it were a Garment beautified with Gold And the Virgin shall freely collect these Virtues unto her self Because the Ligament of a man shall not constrain or knit her up The Wheele also which Ezekiel saw hath fore-signified Virginity because the same Virginity was pre-figured in the Law before the Incarnation of the Son of God But after his Incarnation she wonderfully worketh very many Miracles because God by her Purged all Offences and rightly ordained every Institution For Virginity supports old Things and sustaineth new things and is the very Root and Foundation of all good things because alwayes and ever it was with him who is without Beginning and without End For the Nature of Man which was destroyed by Sins hath by Virginity revived in Salvation seeing that by another Nature she hath withdrawn Sins from Men. These things the Prophetess wherein indeed are confirmed those things which I have hitherto spoken concerning the entrance of Death into humane Nature CHAP. XCIV A Supply concerning the Fountains of the Spaw The first Paradox 1. Which are to be called Fountains 2. Diverse Opinions about the exposition hereof 3. The diversity of Soils in the Earth 4. Incorporeal Seeds are Reasons entertained in the Elements 5. The Root of Rocks is the Inn of Mettals 6. The last Ground or Soyle is the springing Womb of true Fountains 7. The Virgin-Earth 8. In the last Soyle the Waters do live 9. When Waters do as it were undergo Death 10. After what manner the last Soyle is in the highest Mountains 11. A vital reason of Fountains from the similitude of the Microcosme 12. What the Sea in Genesis is 13. The External Sea is the Fruit of a greater Sea 14. The boyling Sand is a thousand times bigger than the Sea it self 15. A Paradoxal Explication of a Text of the holy Scripture 16. The last Soyle is the internal Sea 17. A Paradoxal Explication of a Text of Ecclesiastes 18. A Regression of the Waters from the Internal Sea unto the External and from this to that 19. In this Regression the benefits of Waters and Minerals are granted unto us 20. Night Darkness Oromasis Iliadus are one and the same 21. A Life of its own is attributed to the Internal Sea from a Similitude or like Thing VVE must needs before all sharply touch at the Original of Fountains in general Indeed I do not with the Vulgar name any kinde of issuings forth of Waters even those that are continual and unwearied Ones Fountains For although the decaying Snow and repeated Rain shall afford a dayly and continual issuing Defluxion of Waters through the blind Passages of Rocks and intervening Places of great Stones or steep Windings I do not therefore name them Fountains For truly that heap of Waters is too casual and accidentary and so a dead one Therefore whereby it may be manifest that there is a certain vital Principle and spring in Fountains In the first place the
Paracelsus described in his Books of the Faculties of the Members I here do hear Whisperers who are wont to swallow nothing but afore-chewed things accusing the unthought of darkness of Words Those Coale-men they say do expose their Medicines unto us hand to hand and afford unto us ocular Demonstrations But that is a new rule of learning the Phylosophy of Pythagoras Let them first buy Coals and Glasses and let them first learn those things which watching successive Nights and Expences of Moneys have afforded us the Gods do sell Arts to Sweats not to Readings alone Therefore the Example of Acâ—aeon affrighteth me from daring indeed to expose Diana to an open view being spoyled of her Garment He that can apprehend it let him apprehend it Depart thou therefore from thine own self and bid farwell to accustomed things who presumest by an easie Compendium of readings to search into the innermost Chambers of Nature But besides whereby we may give satisfaction unto the former head of a full Cure a searching out of a Medicine for the every way safe and secure Dissolution of the Stone did remain 1. Therefore it is fit that it be changed into Urin to wit that it may touch the Place affected 2. That it have in it a Power of loosing the Bolts of the Stone For it is the Gift of God which Art doth not provide but only sequestreth and extracteth 3. That it possess that thing in a specifical and appropriated Property but not in second Qualities because they are for the most part frail things failing in time of Preparation or Infamous through the Cruelty of Qualities 4. That it be subtile that it pass on every side and be able to demolish its Object at a far distance 5. That it be friendly to Nature least indeed it pervert all things For not every Messenger approacheth unto the Mines of Stones but he alone who being loosed from his Bands hath known the wayes being fited for his Journey being a Friend to the Places and which hath Virtues They erre therefore who ascribe this single Combate only unto Corrosives to wit they too much trusting unto second Qualities as being badly secure do sleep thereupon and through a neglecting of specifical Properties also appropriated ones which are only extended on their proper Object being sleighted they have gone into Obscurity For the Oestrich doth not break or digest Iron or little Birds Flints Unions small Stones through an emulous quality of Corrosion There is a Virtue of loosing the Bars and Bolts of Tartar It is convenient this Virtue to meditate of and this to imitate I have spoken Blessed be ye God of Wonders who at sometime converteth the Waters into Rocks and at sometime the Rocks into Pooles of Waters CHAP. CI. The Understanding of Adam ADam put right Names upon all living Creatures and therefore he had an intimate or intuitive or clear speculative Knowledge of these which is called the Attainment of Nature Perhaps he had likewise a most full knowledge of Herbs Minerals yea and of the Stars For truly an Object not before seen being presented unto him he had known the innermost Properties thereof From hence therefore many do conclude that the same Knowledge is given to us by a natural Property as to the successive Heirs of Adam but to be obscured through Sin But others contend that it is wholly withdrawn through eating of the Fruit of the knowledge of Good and Evil. Of these things I being long since badly perswaded alass I also believed them For I left something untryed that I might reach unto the promised Labour of Wisdom the Paradise of Long Life through the knowledge of Adam But at length I observed many things which might subvert these very principles For First of all I could scarce perswade my self that Adam in the State of Innocency knew those Things and more which afterwards he through eating of the Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil was ignorant of That indeed was when he had eaten of the Apple of Oblivion Drowsiness or Ignorance But not when he had eaten of the Apple of Knowledge But if in Original Sin the Original Transgressour and Defiler of humane Nature himself as yet knew what he knew before after what manner indeed by a super-attained new Knowledge and that of another Disposition being as it were laid up in the forbidden Fruit had he withdrawn all knowledge from his Posterity And moreover how had not he who from his Creation had all Knowledge except that which by a hidden Paraphrase and Emphatical manner of speaking is called by the holy Spirit The knowledge of Good and Evil traduced this likewise on his Posterity For if through eating of the Apple His Eyes were opened the which was even made known to him before after some sort they were closed and he became a knower of Good and Evil and saw himself to be naked why was there not at least-wise in his Seed as much knowledge as there was in the Apple Why if through his Seed Sin be translated is not also Shame translated that it might naturally Shame the Indians of their Nakedness That likewise a Child of three years old should be ashamed of its Nakedness no otherwise than Adam was presently after the Apple was eaten In the next place if he were endowed from his Creation with the knowledge of the Natures Societies and Properties of Animals and from hence it was pithily essential unto him How had God who is so great a Lover of us withdrawn our essential intellectual and natural Gifts whereby he will be worshipped in the Spirit of Man but hath left natural Gifts unto the evil Spirit the most vile despised and worst of Creatures Had he so greatly impoverished our Spirit and favoured the Devil more than the Sons of Men with whom to be he cals it his Delights I indeed after that I conceived in my Soul the Knowledge of long Life and the Causes of Death knew that as long as Adam was Immortal his Mind did immediately quicken his Body and governed it Yea that for that Cause also he perfectly understood whatsoever things are read to have been put under his Feet But after that the sensitive Soul was seminally introduced as a Mean between the Mind and the Body Adam afterwards lived in the Soul and middle Life that is after a modern or mean manner And his Mind for the support of the sensitive Soul dispersed from it self only a darksom Light through the Mists of the Flesh upon the Life of a new and impure Generation But the former Knowledges which he had before the Fall were in the sensitive Life laid up though remembrance yet over-clouded with the Dim and wretched Discourse of Reason when as he had now generated after the manner of Bruit-beasts and had seminally transferred a middle Life then all his Knowledge as well former as latter of Good and Evil to wit the remembrance of the same were obliterated and Man thereby was
Desire or Love of which I here speak is not a function of the appetitive power nor the very qualitative power of desiring it self but it is a substantial part of the mind or rather the Mind it self flowing from Understanding and Will Because those three are undividably conjoyned by the Creator under Unity in as great a simplicity as may be Yet in live persons or mortal men it is separated from Understanding and Will in its Functions by reason of the condition of the Organ and Nature of the sensitive Soul For truly now we desire oftentimes those things which the Understanding judgeth not to be desirable and which the Will could wish were not desired But it must needs be that things whose operations are different or dis-joyned that the same things are dis-joyned in their root according to the manner whereby all particular things are separated In the Soul indeed onely by a relative supposionality but in the Body according to a corporeal and qualitative Nature And therefore that substantial Desire or Love is an intimate Essence of the Soul being consubstantial and co-equal in age with the same So that although in Heaven there be a full satiety of desirable things and a perpetual enjoymens thereof yet that desire in the Soul doth not therefore cease the which is a study or â—â—â—eavour of complacency Neither doth it therefore infer a passion of the Soul any more than Charity it self because they are conjoyned in their root as one and the same thing For an amarous desire ceasing of necessity either a fullness or glutting or an unsensibleness of fruition or enjoyment should presently arise which in the heavenly Wights would be a shameful thing That desire therefore of Love is the fewel of an unterminable or endless delight under which consideration the Mind resembles the Spirit the Comforter For the unutterable Creator hath placed Man in the liberty of his own Desire that he might live in the Spirit after the Image of God in a holy Desire and perfect Charity It is manifest therefore that Operations are distinct from the root of Faculties while we understand those things which we do not desire but while we desire those things which we do not plainly know and which we would not desire In the next place we will as while a man goes willingly to Punishment those things which we do not desire and desire those things which we would not as while any one commands his Leg to be cut off And likewise the Desire doth afterward some-sometimes overcome the Will or the Will doth oft-times compell the Desire and they by turns draw each other under mutual Commands but wholly in Mortals because the sensitive Soul draws the Understanding and the Body the sensitive Soul into a manifold disorder of division For so impossible things happen to be desired and things past are wished for as present For unlesse that Desire were from the root of the Mind he should not sin who should see a Woman to lust after her before the consent of a full Will Therefore very many things are desired whose Causes are not willed and many things whose Effects are refused by the Will and Judgement The Desire also doth operate in one manner and the Will in another Also in the motion of the Day or in duration the Desire doth oftentimes go before and sometimes followes the Will and one overcomes the other by course that it may restrain something that is distinct from it self And that wholly in mortal Bodies But in Eternity where Love or Amorous Desire ariseth as the substance of the Soul nothing is Desired which is not Willed and that as well in respect of Act as Substance and Essence Because by reason of the simplicity of Substance they are collected into Unity Although in the Root they have diverse Suppositions which plainly exceed the manner â—f Understanding in mortal Men. In the next place the Kingdom of God in man is unutterable that is God himself by whose perpetual splendour all things are gathered together into Truth Therefore the Primary or chief Image of God is in his immortal Soul because the very Essence whereof it self is also the veriest Image of God which Image can neither be expressed by words as neither thought by the heart in this Life because it resembles a certain similitude of God But in the husk of the Mind or in the sensitive Soul and vital Form there is the same Image re-shining yet received after the manner of an inferior nature and defiled through transgressions or Death from whence at length the Body also borroweth not indeed the Image of God but the Figure of him But the Soul is devolved into utter darkness even as it hath separated it self from the uncreated Light and from the virtue of the Image and therefore it hath by reason of appropriation so lost its native Light as if it were proper unto it as beseeming it that thenceforth it understands wills or loves nothing besides it self and for it self For the damned shall rise not changed because their Body rising again shall receive its limitations from their Soul The which seeing now it is with all depraved affections reflexed onely on it self after a corporeal manner It shall not in rising again delineate the Image of God which is as it were choaked in it in the Body but after a corporeal manner That is by way of figure Lastly It being deprived through the flood-gate of death of the helps of Imagination Memory and Free-Will It afterwards understands wills loves all things from a blind apprehension as being onely addicted to it self For it knows its Immortality but feels Damnation and complaines of it as that Injustice is done unto it Because the love of it self is onely to excuse its excuses in sins as being committed in dayes of ignorance and innocency with much frailty of Nature lyings in wait of Enemies and want of sufficient Grace As neither that an eternal punishment is deservedly due for a momentary transgression For then it begins to be mad and persists in hating of God Chiefly because it knows the unviolable arrest of its loss and an eternal impossibility of escaping It being therefore cut off in its hope passeth even from the very beginning of its entrance into the utmost desperation in a place where no piety compassion refreshment or recantation is entertained It happens also that seeing the Understanding doth naturally transform it self into the Idea of the thing understood and therefore into the similitude of evil Spirits its Objects Therefore there is alwaies a present hatred of God despair cursing damnation and the furious torments of Hell The Almighty of his goodness vouchsafe to break the snares that are extended for us in our passage Amen CHAP. CIII The Property of External Things THe spiritual beginning of Life being now finished before I descend unto corporeal and sensible Organs and other supports of Life I will propose something concerning Places First of all therefore
forth as if also being in wrath it were disturbed or sorely disquieted by the imprinted Image of revenge for indeed there is in the Blood even after Death its Sense of the Murderer that is present and its revenge because it hath also its own phantasie Therefore not Abel himself but his innocent Blood cries notwithstanding unto Heaven for revenge For which Cause in Sieges the Plague for the most part enters as a Companion to wit because the magical Spirit of the more outward Man hath conceived in combates an imprinted Character of revenge but sometimes the Souldiers being through Poverty reduced to desperation and their Wives are almost adjoyned with them in dying and many Misfortunes are by way of Imprecation bequeathed to the more wealthy Souldiers or Officers from whence most strong Impressions are left as Posthumes or Survivers after Death on the Sidereal or Astral Spirit of the dying Man especially of a Woman with Child which Spirit presently after Death wandring about in the Air deviseth meanes or wayes of its own verge rank or order that is spiritual ones of hurting and revenging and then readily commits it self to Execution But such kind of Plagues are outragious sparing none and as it were immediately sent down from Heaven and because they being spiritual do implore help from corporeal Remedies in vain I am silent as to that For neither is it sufficiently safe to express the connexion and agreement of Mummies betwixt each other for from thence hath issued the whole Necromancy of the Antients For that reason also God in the Law forbad the Bodies of those that were hanged even of Heathens to be left on the Gibbet and the Sun should not go down upon them Thou wilt answer that the Plague of Sieges ariseth by reason of the manifold Filths of Excrements But on the contrary Curriers Tanners or Leather-dressers Emptiers of Jakes's and those who spend their time about Glew to be made by the Putrefaction of Skins are at hand for all of them so far are they from being subject to the Plague for the most part are long lived wonderful is God in the Spirit of the Microcosm Dost thou desire to know perhaps why the Blood of a Bull is Poysonous but not that of his Brother the Oxe Indeed the Bull in time of Killing murmurs against his Executioner and imprinteth on his Blood a Mark and potent Character of revenge But if it happen that in slaying of an Oxe through one stroake he hath become furious and hath the longer continued in the same Fury he leaves his Flesh but unwholesom unless first the disturbance being pacified he as idle and shut up by himself be left to return to himself by fasting The Bull therefore dies more excelling in revenge than other Animals and therefore his Fat but not his Blood unless the humane Blood in the Unguent be conquered by the forreign Tincture of the Bulls Blood is altogether necessary for the Weapon Salve if the Weapons the Authors of the Wounds shall not be besprinkled with the Blood of the Wounded And if by the besmearing of the same Weapons a perfect or safe Cure be to be expected truly the Usnea or Moss together with its fellow Ingredients are not sufficient that a Cure should be made without fresh Blood had out of the Wound for a more violent Efficacious or taurine Impression is required and an aereal Communication of the Honey of Flowers From hence therefore it is sufficiently manifest that the Efficacy of the Unguent is not to be imputed to the Concurrence of Satan who also could Cure the Wound without Honey and Bulls Blood but to the communion of natural Qualities with the derived Post-hume revenge left in the concrete or composed Body of Blood and Fat. Our Adversaries will prate rejoycing that the Power of the Magnetical Unguent could scarce have been proved but by a Witch by Satan and the spiritual Magick of the invisible World which is a suppositious or imaginary Science plainly of no weight or worth and a damnable Errour Notwithstanding not any sinister perverting of the matter in handling but the gross Ignorance of others and the miserable Condition of humane Frailty hath required that thing which more promptly inclines to Evil knowes Evil and is more readily taught by Evil than by Good But certainly whatsoever we have here alleaged concerning Satan and Witches it is not that from thence others should hope for a conformity or suitable resemblance of the Oyntment with Witches for neither are the spiritual Virtues of the Unguent and the Phantasie of the Blood stirred up by Satan as a Guider or Enforcer But this is that I aim'd at to wit that there doth inhabit in the Soul a certain Magical Virtue given her of God naturally proper and belonging unto her inasmuch as we are his Image and Engravment that in this respect also she acts after a peculiar manner that is spiritually on an Object at a distance and that much more powerfully than by any corporeal helps because seeing the Soul is the more principal part of the Body therefore the Action belonging unto her is spiritual magcial and of the greatest Validity That the Soul doth by the same Virtue which was rendred as it were drowsie through the knowledge gotten by eating of the Apple govern and stir her own Body but that the same magical Faculty being somewhat awakened is able to act also out of her Prison on another distant Object only by her Beck conveighed thereunto by Mediums for therein indeed is placed the whole Foundation of natural Magick but in no wise in Blessings Ceremonies and vain Superstitions but that all these wicked observances were brought in by him whose endeavour it hath alwayes been every where to defile all good things with his Tares But we do not tremble at the name of Magick but with the Scripture interpret it in a good-sense Yet we have granted that it may be indifferently employed to a good or evil Intent to wit by the use or abuse of that Power And so that under that Word we understand the most profound inbred knowledge of things and the most potent Power for acting being alike natural to us with Adam not exstinguished by Sin not obliterated but as it were become drowsie therefore wanting an Excitement Therefore we shew that Magnetism is exercised not indeed by Satan but by that which belongs not to Satan and therefore that this Power which is co-natural unto us hath stood abusively dedicated to Satan as if he were the Patron thereof that the Magical Power doth as it were sleep in us since Sin and therefore that it hath need of a stirrer up Whether that Exciter be the holy Spirit by Illumination as the Church mentions to have happened in the Eastern Magi or Wise Men of the East and which at this day sometimes happens in others or Satan doth also for some foregoing submissive Engagement stir up the same in Witches And in such as these the
guiltless child with the plague for a sinner neither should the habitations of the godly be ever subject to the plague and God should appoint an unjust Deputy which should cruelly kill the good with the plague which should not lay hold on the wicked He should kill the good I say for sins that entred not into their thoughts or at leastwise from hence it is manifest that the plague hath its own cause in nature At length if the plague were the off-spring of Coelestial light surely that should alwayes rise up in an instant seeing the aspects of the stars are by the minutes of a moment Wherefore the plague before that its poyson being bred from elsewhere it could come down unto us it should first be dispersed with the wind should be well washed with the first be-sprinkling of rain and be appeasingly allayed with the colds of the night and Clouds before it should descend unto us and also those Cities should be punished which had least offended and then that also in Paracelsus is ridiculous that the Arching plague and noter of our crimes should inhabit in the Sun wherein God hath placed his own Tabernacle as it were an angry and revenging parent by reason of the contagion of impurity received Yet that Saturn and Mars he being unconstant so saith in another place were the revengers of crimes Therefore after what manner soever it be taken providence suffers the injury of the punishing heaven and God blasphemy and so a deceit of Paganisme is included whether they shall say that the pestilent poyson is stamped by the stars or sent from them for the revenge of crimes or also that it is framed by the natural course of the stars through yearly elementary qualities or extraordinary or indirect and monstrous ones directed by Satan They on both sides dash themselves on the Atheisme of Pagans For neither hath the evil Spirit that power on us which the Gentiles suppose neither is there any other Guardian read to be in a plague sent from God beside Angels of light and so it is to have departed from the truth of the holy Scriptures to have attributed a power of generating the plague unto the stars or the devil especially where the dispute concerning a natural plague and not that sent from the hand of God comes in place and where it is to be enquired concerning remedies causes and obstacles or preventions For first of all oft-times the plague begins from one only individual to wit from a guitless child and so the heavens had for a purging satisfaction of this child smitten the whole Family Town and at length the Province to wit the innocent for the wicked after the manner of an Apothecary that Substitutes quid pro quo that is any thing instead of any thing Again while the plague creeps by its contagion from one unto another at leastwise the poyson shall be no longer handed forth by the heaven or a wound inflicted by the heaven in the second third and tenth person as if the whole anger or revenge of the heaven were stirred up through the fault of the first guiltless person Again the plague that is conceived only from the terrour of one that is fearful since in the most special kind for no other actually existeth in individuals it differs not from any other which should be sent from heaven through the poyson of the stars Therefore neither shall there be any natural plague at all from the heaven if it be conceived from elsewhere by the naked image of terrour nor that its original stands in need of the heaven For after another manner one individual is not constituted by parents differing in the whole predicament For if the most High created the Physitian and medicine from the earth and the plague be formed by the stars I at least fear least all future medicine should be unfit for so great a poyson But at leastwise the Lord could not erre in that he sent medicine from the earth and not from the heaven And moreover the Books of the Kings and Revelation attribute the plague to holy Angels which is the mark-pledge of Divine Revenge neither is it lawful to go back unto the evil spirits and stars as the beginnings of pestilent poysons In the next place Paracelsus writeth that the plague is beamed forth from the heaven as it were from an Archer only into three places to wit behind the ears under the arm-pits and into the groyns Wherefore the plague arisen in other members shall either not be the plague or of another kind and of unlike causes than that which should be the wound of the heaven is or next the heaven hath erred in its darting or at leastwise Paracelsus hath rashly erred through boldness Therefore if other Forreign causes do frame the plague without the help of the heavens it must needs be that these are deprived of their possession and estimation and that the heaven ought hereafter to attempt the controversie by way of Petition If in the next place the plague be a wound therefore it is from external things suscepted or undergone not a Fever or disease consisting of an appointed seed and by consequence whatsoever of Diaphoretick or transpirative medicines they have decreed for a succour of the plague let it be false and deceitful and Incarnative and Vulnerary medicines shall be more fit and a Diaphoretick for prevention is most exceeding vain that any one may not be wounded by the Coelestial Archer For there should be but a sluggish Buckler of a sudoriferous medicine against an arrow so poysonsom being darted so powerfully from so far in a straight line and with so great leisure and being most securely led the weapon proceeding through so many thousand miles of Stages For it became Paracelsus to have known that the Carbuncle Glandules or Kernels Buboes and bladdery swellings behind the ears are not indeed the Pest it self yea neither that they are any way wounds but signs the product and effects of the Pest For because that also some signates of the Plague are frequently not seen but after death Wherefore that heavenly Slinger should as oft as he wounded send in not the plague but the effect of the plague and he had come too late as to inflict the plague or wound on those parts in him who had already before died by the plague For a certain one being continually provoked to vomit with headach dies under continual faintings within seven hours from the invasion of the sickness But presently about the time of death he is tinged above the Navil even unto the throat-bones with a frequent mark or black print of the stroak For curiosity sake since an Anatomist was wanting I dissected him and found the mouth of his stomach now cauterized with a black Escharre Lastly the black marks or tokens are not wounds even as neither are the Glandules little bladders Buboes c. Therefore at least the heaven doth not wound in the plague the which if
Of the power of witches 779. 86 Of the nature and extent thereof 780 How a witch may be bound up in the heart of a horse 782 109 110 Witchcraft Simpathy and Magnetism do differ 759. 1 VVomen why monthly purged 405 24 VVomen are subject to double disieases 609 358. 17 VVomen consume not so much Blood as men 740 Yet they make more Ibid. VVhy they have so many conceits when with child 306 50 VVomb its overslowings cured by odorus ointments 114. 17 Remedy for a woman in travel 306. 46 VVomb a peculiar monarchy 575 A Twofold monarchy of a woman 609. 15 VVomb governs its self Ibid. 334. 43 VVomb brings forth an alterative Blas Ibid. Disseases of the womb differ from products 610. 19 The progresse of the wombs defects 612. 358 Its cure 612. 325 48 Sugar stirs up the sleeping fury of the womb 612 Wherein the fruitfulness of the womb consists 630 Where the womb of the urine beginneth 209 23 Womb warreth under its own banners 306. 52 Of the force of Imagination in women with Child 1117. 1118 The monarchy of the womb distingisheth a woman from a man 335. 48 In words herbs and stones there is great vertue 575 Silk-worms figure out a shadow of the Resurrection 684. 94 VVounds asswaged by odours c. 114 17 Hurt by the Moon-beams 141. 55 Z. ZEnexton against the plague 1144 Of the uselessness of some Zenextons 1145 Pretious stones not true Zenextons 1146 Amber a Zenexton and how so made Ibid. The qualities a Zenexton ought to have 1148 1149. Toad a Zenexton Ibid How the Toad is prepared for a Zenexton 1150 VVhy he is a true Zenexton 1152 A Poetical Soliloquie of the Translatour Harmonizing and Sympathizing with the Author's Genius WHen first my Friend did ask me to translate Van Helmonts Works wrapt up in hidden state Of Roman dialect that 't was a Book Of Med'cine and Phylosophy I took It in good part enough and did not doubt But to perform what I should set about By Gods asistance for I willing stood Much pains to take about a publick good I forth with entred on it and did see More than my friend thereof could tel to me For why since something was begot within My inward parts which loved truth but sin And selfish errour hated I began To feel and love the spirit of the man Whom I perceived like a gratious Son To build his knowledg on the Corner Stone And out of self to sink in humble wise As his Confession in me testifies The light of understanding was his guide From heath'nish Books and Authors he did slide And cast them of that so he might be free Singly to stand O Lord and wait on thee And in the pray'r of silence on thee call Because he knew thee to be All in All. And thou didst teach him that which will conduce To th' profit of his Neighbour be of use Both unto soul and body as inclin'd To read with lowly and impartial mind But as for lofty and and self-seeking ones Thou scatter wilt their wisdom wealth and bones Because thou art not honour'd in a lye Whether of Nature or Divinity But in the truth of knowledge of thy Life And of thy wondrous works which men of strife And alienated can no whit attain Till from the fall they do return again Helmont that thou returned'st I believe Thy testimony of it thou dost give When by the light thou saist entring thy dore Thou changed wast from what thou wert before And cause thou suffredst by a wicked sort For being good and once wast poyson'd for 't That 't was unjustly I am doubting past ' Cause th' Enemies conscience prickt him at the last And truely'n many places of thy Ream Words slow forth from thee like a silver stream And so that I at sundry times have found Sweet op'nings from the un'ty in the ground But did thy life in words alone consist Or art thou to be enrowl'd among the list Of Stoical Notionists which only spend Their time in contemplation and so end Their days or were good actions wrought by thee Which as the fruits discover do the tree Did shew that healing virtue forth did start From thy fire-furnace as love from thy hart If not how is it that thou dost us tel Thou ceased'st not Annually to heal Some Myriades or ten thousands yed Thy medicines were not diminished Or that thou wert so tender of the poor What if I say that bagd from door to door That thou retiredly didst live at home And cure them out of Charity not roâ—â— And gape for gain for visits as do most Physitians who unto rich houses post Floating about even as in a floud Of poysoned purged filths and venal blood And so the peoples wealth health life do soaâ— Through the sâ—ay viâ—ard of a Doctors cloak But Helmonts hand-pen asit plain appears Their false-paint coverings a funder tears In room whereof such Practicâ— Theory It doth insert that they as standers by Like Bibels Merchants will ven weâ—p and waâ—â— When they shall see their trade begin to fail And upright Artists held up by the â—an Of him who owns the good Samaritan Yet such School-Doctors shall not thus relent Whom Grace and goodnesse shall move to repent This is not utter'd out of spleen but pity Unto the sick in Country and in City No just cause given by these words to hate But to be owned by the Magistrate And I my self in former silly times Through School-tradition and Galenick lines Have wrong'd my body weaken'd my nature Clipping my vitals in their strength and Stature And though through Grace to soul and body to T' was turned to good yet that 's no thank to you Help Chymists help to pul their Babel down Builtby the pride of Academicks Gown Let Theophrastus Azoth Helmonts Lore Erect an Engine such as ne're before Hark Chymists hark attend Baptista's law He speaks to h's Sons as th' Lyon by the Paw And why as th' eye is opened to look May y' not discern Hercules by his foot Be it sufficient that he gives a tast Least pretious peat is he unto swine should east Be 't no dishonour to the Ghymick School That some mistakes thereof he doth controâ—â— Rather a praise unto the Masters eye Houshold disorders for to rectifie Strike Chymists strike strike fire out of your 〈◊〉 And force the fire unto the highest stint Of a Reverb'ratory such a heat As Galen back out of the field may beat And fetch th' Archeal Crasis Seminum To keep the field gainst a Rololleum Srrive not not by reason if you 'd win the day Pâ—ice your Athanar as he another way Aime not at lucre in what ye undertake Your motive love the spirit your guider make That day to day in you the Word may preach And night to night unto you knowledge teach That so Elias th' Artist if he come Ye as prepar'd may bid him welcome home And all well-wishers unto Science true Unto