prehended in its unity, and that is a perfect trinity. I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret magick of numbers; beware of philosophy, is a precept not to be received in too large a sense; for in this mass of nature there is a set of things that carry in their front, though not in capital letters yet in stenography and short characters, something of divinity, which to wiser reasons serve as luminaries in the abyss of knowledge, and to judicious beliefs, as scales and roundles to mount the pinnacles and highest pieces of divinity. The severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some more real substance in that invisible fabrick.

XIII. That other attribute wherewith I recreate my devotion, is his wisdom, in which I am happy; and for the contemplation of this only, do not repent me that I was bred in the way of study: the advantage I have of the vulgar, with the content and happiness I conceive therein, is an ample recompence for all my endeavours, in what part of knowledge soever.

Wisdom is his most beauteous

attribute, no man can attain unto it, yet Solomon pleased God when he desired it. He is wise because he knows all things, and he knoweth all things because he made them all; but his greatest knowledge is in comprehending that he made not, that is, himself. And this is also the greatest knowledge in man. For this do I honour my own profession, and embrace the counsel even of the devil himself; had he read such a lecture in paradise as he did at Delphos,* we had better known ourselves, nor had we stood in fear to know him. I know he is wise in all, wonderful in what we conceive, but far more in what we comprehend not; for we behold him but asquint, upon reflex or shadow; our understanding is dimmer than Moses' eye, we are ignorant of the back parts or lower side of his divinity. Therefore to pry into the maze of his counsels, is not only folly in man, but presumption even in angels; like us, they are his servants not his senators; he holds no council but that mystical one of the Trinity, wherein though there be three Persons, there is but one mind, that decrees without contradiction; nor needs he any, his actions are not begot with deliberation, his

* Fvшdi σεavròv. Nosce teipsum.

wisdom naturally knows what is best; his intellect stands ready fraught with the superlative and purest ideas of goodness; consultation and election, which are two motions in us, make but one in him; his actions springing from his power, at the first touch of his will. These are contemplations metaphysical; my humble speculations have another method, and are content to trace and discover those expressions he hath left in his creatures, and the obvious effects of nature. There is no danger to profound these mysteries, no sanctum sanctorum in philosophy; the world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied and contemplated by man; 'tis the debt of our reason we owe unto God, and the homage we pay for not being beasts; without this the world is still as though it had not been, or as it was before the sixth day, when as yet there was not a creature that could conceive or say there was a world. The wisdom of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about, and with a gross rusticity admire his works; those highly magnify him, whose judicious inquiry into his acts, and deliberate research into his creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned admiration. Therefore

Search while thou wilt, and let thy reason go
To ransom truth e'en to th' abyss below;
Rally the scattered causes, and that line
Which nature twists, be able to untwine;
It is thy Maker's will, for unto none

But unto reason can he e'er be known.

The devils do know thee, but those damned meteours

Build not thy glory, but confound thy creatures.

Teach my endeavours so thy works to read,

That learning them, in thee I may proceed.

Give thou my reason that instructive flight,

Whose weary wings may on thy hands still light;

Teach me to soar aloft, yet ever so,

When near the sun to stoop again below;

Thus shall my humble feathers safely hover,

And though near earth, more than the heavens discover.

And then at last, when homeward I shall drive

Rich with the spoils of nature to my hive,

There will I sit like that industrious fly,

Buzzing thy praises, which shall never die

Till death abrupts them, and succeeding glory

Bid me go on in a more lasting story.

And this is almost all wherein an humble creature may endeavour to requite, and some way to retribute unto his Creator; for if not he that sayeth, Lord, Lord, but he that doeth the will of his Father, shall be saved, certainly our wills must be our performances, and our intents make out our

actions; otherwise our pious labours shall find anxiety in their graves, and our best endeavours not hope but fear a resurrection.

XIV. There is but one first cause, and four second causes of all things; some are without efficient, as God; others without matter, as angels; some without form, as the first matter; but every essence created or uncreated, hath its final cause, and some positive end both of its essence and operation; this is the cause I grope after in the works of nature, on this hangs the providence of God: to raise so beauteous a structure as the world and the creatures thereof, was but his art, but their sundry and divided operations with their predestinated ends, are from the treasury of his wisdom. In the causes, nature, and affections of the eclipses of the sun and moon, there is most excellent speculation; but to profound farther, and to contemplate a reason why his providence hath so disposed and ordered their motions in that vast circle, as to conjoin and obscure each other, is a sweeter piece of reason and a diviner point of philosophy; therefore sometimes, and in some things, there appears to me as much divinity in Galen his books de usu partium, as in Suarez' metaphysics: had Aristotle