O how this earthly temper doth debase

The noble soul, in this her humble place!
Whose wingy nature ever doth aspire

To reach that place whence first it took its fire.
These flames I feel, which in my heart do dwell,
Are not thy beams, but take their fire from hell;
O quench them all! and let thy light divine
Be as the sun to this poor orb of mine,

And to thy sacred Spirit convert those fires,
Whose earthly fumes choke my devout aspires.

XXXIII. Therefore for spirits, I am so far from denying their existence, that I could easily believe that not only whole countries, but particular persons have their tutelary and guardian angels. It is not a new opinion of the church of Rome, but an old one of Pythagoras and Plato; there is no heresy in it, and if not manifestly defined in Scripture yet is it an opinion of a good and wholesome use in the course and actions of a man's life, and would serve as an hypothesis to salve many doubts whereof common philosophy affordeth no solution. Now if you demand my opinion and metaphysicks of their natures, I confess them very shallow, most of them in a negative way, like that of God; or in a comparative, between ourselves and fellow-creatures; for there is in this universe

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