X my remembrance. As now your He whose first step is ingenuity religion: carria pross cough, how dog the church. from those as home? The list never the wor RELIGIO MEDICI. 225 religion: for to do so, without jarring against the conduct of that first mover by eccentrical and irregular motions, obligeth one to yield a very dutiful obedience to the determinations of it without arrogating to ones felf a controuling ability in liking or mifliking the faith, doctrine, and conftitutions of that church which one looketh upon as their north star: whereas, if I mistake not, this author approveth the church of England not absolutely, but comparatively with other reformed churches. My next reflexion is concerning what he hath sprinkled (most wittily) in feveral places, concerning the nature and immortality of the human foul, and the condition and ftate it is in, after the diffolution of the body. And here give me leave to obferve what our countryman Roger Bacon did long ago; that thofe ftudents who bufy FE themfelves Dr. Fell mend eye -test? tu themselves much with fuch notions as refide wholly in the fancy do hardly ever become fit for abstracted metaphyfical fpeculations; the one having bulky foundation of matter, or of the accidents of it, to settle upon, at the leaft, with an foot: the other flying continually, even to a leffening pitch, in the fubtile air and accordingly it hath been generally noted, that the exacted mathematicians, who converse altogether with lines, figures, and other differences of quantity; have feldom proved eminent in metaphyficks or fpeculative divinity. Nor again the professors of thefe sciences, in the other arts. Much less can it be expected that an excellent physician whofe fancy is always fraught with the material drugs that he prescribeth his apothecary to compound his medicines of, and whofe hands are inured to the cut ting up, and eyes to the inspection of the anatomized qualities anatomized bodies; fhould easily, and with fuccefs, flie his thoughts at so towring a game, as a pure intellect, a feparated and unbodyed foul; furely this acute author's fharp wit, had he orderly applyed his ftudies that way, would have been able to fatisfy himself with less labour, and others with more fulnefs, than it hath been the lot of fo dull a brain as mine, concerning the immortality of the foul: and yet I affure you (my Lord) the little philofophy that is allowed me for my fhare, demonstrateth this propofition to me, as well as faith delivered it: which our physician will not admit in his. To make good his affertion here, this were very unreasonable, fince, sto do it exactly and without exact nefs, it were not demonftration) requireth a total furvey of the whole fcience of bodies, and all the operations that we are converfant with, of of a rational creature; which I having done, with all the fuccinctness I have been able to unfold fo knot ty a subject with,thath taken me up in the first draught near two hundred fheets of paper. I fhall therefore take leave of this point with only this note, that I take the immortality of the foul ( under his favour) to be of that nature, that to them only that are not versed in the ways of proving it by reason, it is an article of faith; to others, it is an evident conclufion of demonftrative science. And with a like fhort note I fhall obferve how if he had traced the nature of the foul from its first principles, he could not have fufpected it should fleep in the grave till the refurrection of the body. Nor would he have permitted his compaffionate nature to imagine it belonged to God's mercy (as the Millenarians did) to change its condition in thofe that are * It hath The omission of these pronouns in the earlier writers both of: |