a stair or manifest scale of creatures, rising not disorderly or in confusion, but with a comely method and proportion. Between creatures of mere existence and things of life, there is a large disproportion of nature; between plants and animals or creatures of sense, a wider difference; between them and man, a far greater; and if the proportion hold on, between man and angels there should be yet a greater. We do not comprehend their natures who retain the first definition of Porphyry, and distinguish them from ourselves by immortality; for before his fall, man also was immortal; yet must we needs affirm that he had a different essence from the angels; having therefore no certain knowledge of their natures, 'tis no bad method of the schools, whatsoever perfection we find obscurely in ourselves, in a more complete and absolute way to ascribe unto them. I believe they have an extemporary knowledge, and upon the first motion of their reason do what we cannot without study or deliberation; that they know things by their forms, and define by specifical difference what we describe by accidents and properties; and therefore probabilities to us may be demonstrations unto them; that they have knowledge not only of the specifi

cal, but numerical forms of individuals, and understand by what reserved difference each single hypostasis (besides the relation to its species) becomes its numerical self. That as the soul hath a power to move the body it informs, so there's a faculty to move any, though inform none; ours upon restraint of time, place, and distance; but that invisible hand that conveyed Habakkuk to the lions' den, or Philip to Azotus, infringeth this rule, and hath a secret conveyance wherewith mortality is not acquainted. If they have that intuitive knowledge whereby as in reflexion they behold the thoughts of one another, I cannot peremptorily deny but they know a great part of ours. They that to refute the invocation of saints have denied that they have any knowledge of our affairs below, have proceeded too far, and must pardon my opinion till I can throughly answer that piece of Scripture, at the conversion of a sinner the angels in heaven rejoice. I cannot with those in that great father securely interpret the work of the first day, fiat lux, to the creation of angels, though, I confess, there is not any creature that hath so near a glimpse of their nature, as light in the sun and elements; we style it a bare accident, but where

it subsists alone 'tis a spiritual substance, and may be an angel; in brief, conceive light invisible, and that is a spirit.

XXXIV. These are certainly the magisterial and masterpieces of the Creator, the flower or (as we may say) the best part of nothing, actually existing what we are but in hopes and probability; we are only that amphibious piece between a corporal and spiritual essence, that middle form that links those two together, and makes good the method of God and nature that jumps not from extremes, but unites the incompatible distances by some middle and participating natures. That we are the breath and similitude of God, it is indisputable, and upon record of Holy Scripture; but to call ourselves a microcosm, or little world, I thought it only a pleasant trope of rhetorick, till my near judgment and second thoughts told me there was a real truth therein; for first we are a rude mass, and in the rank of creatures which only are, and have a dull kind of being not yet privileged with life, or preferred to sense or reason; next we live the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of men, and at last the life of spirits, running on in one mysterious nature those five kinds of existences,

which comprehend the creatures not only of the world, but of the universe. Thus is man that great and true amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds; for though there be but one to sense there are two to reason; the one visible, the other invisible, whereof Moses seems to have left description, and of the other so obscurely that some parts thereof are yet in controversy. And truly for the first chapters of Genesis, I must confess a great deal of obscurity; though divines have to the power of human reason endeavoured to make all go in a literal meaning, yet those allegorical interpretations are also probable, and perhaps the mystical method of Moses bred up in the hieroglyphical schools of the Egyptians.

XXXV. Now for that immaterial world, methinks we need not wander so far as the first moveable; for even in this material fabrick the spirits walk as freely exempt from the affection of time, place, and motion, as beyond the extremest circumference: do but extract from the corpulency of bodies, or resolve things beyond their first matter, and you discover the habitation of angels, which if

I call the ubiquitary and omnipresent essence of God, I hope I shall not offend divinity; for before the creation of the world God was really all things. For the angels he created no new world, or determinate mansion, and therefore they are everywhere where is his essence, and do live at a distance even in himself: that God made all things for man, is in some sense true, yet not so far as to subordinate the creation of those purer creatures unto ours, though as ministring spirits they do, and are willing to fulfil the will of God in these lower and sublunary affairs of man. God made all things for himself, and it is impossible he should make them for

any other end than his own glory; it is all he can receive, and all that is without himself; for honour being an external adjunct, and in the honourer rather than in the person honoured, it was necessary to make a creature from whom he might receive this homage, and that is in the other world angels, in this, man; which when we neglect, we forget the very end of our creation, and may justly provoke God not only to repent that he hath made the world, but that he hath sworn he would not destroy it. That there is but one world, is a conclusion of faith. Aristotle with all his philosophy