work of what sort it is." But St. Peter and St. Paul speak of the fire that shall be at the second appearing of Christ; and the prophet Zechariah of the day of judgment. And therefore this place of St. Matthew may be interpreted of the same; and then there will be no necessity of the fire of purgatory.

Another interpretation of baptism for the dead is that which I have before mentioned, which he preferreth to the second place of probability: and thence also he inferreth the utility of prayer for the dead. For if after the resurrection, such as have not heard of Christ, or not believed in Him, may be received into Christ's kingdom, it is not in vain, after their death, that their friends should pray for them, till they should be risen. But granting that God, at the prayers of the faithful, may convert unto Him some of those that have not heard Christ preached, and consequently cannot have rejected Christ, and that the charity of men in that point cannot be blamed; yet this concludeth nothing for purgatory; because to rise from death to life is one thing; to rise from purgatory to life is another; as being a rising from life to life, from a life in torments to a life in joy.

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A fourth place is that of Matt. v. 25, 26: “Agree with thine adversary quickly, whilst thou art in the way with him, lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison: verily I say unto thee, thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing." In which allegory, the offender is the sinner; both the adversary and the judge is "God;" the way is this "life;" the prison is the "grave;" the officer, "death;" from which the sinner shall not rise again to life eternal, but to a second death, till he have paid the utmost farthing, or Christ pay it for him by His passion, which is a full ransom for all manner of sins, as well lesser sins as greater crimes; both being made by the passion of Christ equally venial.

The fifth place is that of Matt. v. 22: "Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause, shall be guilty in judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be guilty in the council: but whosoever shall say, thou fool, shall be guilty to hell fire." From which words he inferreth three sorts of sins and three sorts of punishments; and that none of those sins but the last shall be punished with hell fire; and consequently, that after this life there is punishment of lesser sins in purgatory. Of which inference there is no colour in any interpretation that hath yet been given of them. Shall there be a distinction after this life of courts of justice, as there was amongst the Jews in our Saviour's time, to hear and determine divers sorts of crimes, as the judges and the council? Shall not all judicature appertain to Christ and His apostles? To understand therefore this text, we are not to consider it solitarily, but jointly with the words precedent and subsequent. Our Saviour in this chapter interpreteth the law of Moses; which the Jews thought was then fulfilled when they had not transgressed the grammatical sense thereof, howsoever they had transgressed against the sentence or meaning of the legislator. Therefore whereas they thought the sixth commandment was not broken but by killing a man: nor the seventh but when a man lay with a woman not his wife; our Saviour tells them the inward anger of a man against his brother, if it be without just cause, is homicide. You have heard, saith He, the law of Moses, "Thou shalt not kill," and that "Whosoever shall kill, shall be condemned before the judges," or before the session of the Seventy: but I say unto you to be angry with one's brother without cause, or to say unto him "Raca" or Fool," is homicide, and shall be punished at the day of judgment and session of Christ and His apostles with hell fire. So that those words were not used to distinguish between divers crimes, and divers courts of

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justice, and divers punishments; but to tax the distinction between sin and sin, which the Jews drew not from the differenoe of the will in obeying God, but from the difference of their temporal courts of justice; and to show them that he that had the will to hurt his brother, though the effect appear but in reviling, or not at all, shall be cast into hell fire, by the judges and by the session, which shall be the same, not different, courts at the day of judgment. This considered, what can be drawn from this text to maintain purgatory I cannot imagine.

The sixth place is Luke xvi. 9: "Make ye friends of the unrighteous Mammon; that when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting taber nacles." This he alleges to prove invocation of saints departed. But the sense is plain, that we should make friends with our riches of the poor; and thereby obtain their prayers whilst they live. "He that giveth to the poor, lendeth to the Lord.'

The seventh is Luke xxiii. 42: "Lord, remember me, when thou comest into thy kingdom." Therefore, saith he, there is remission of sins after this life. But the consequence is not good. Our Saviour then forgave him ; and at His coming again in glory will remember to raise him again to life eternal.

The eighth is Acts ii. 24, where St. Peter saith of Christ, "that God had raised Him up, and loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible He should be holden of it :" which he interprets to be a descent of Christ into purgatory, to loose some souls there from their torments: whereas it is manifest that it was Christ that was loosed; it was He that could not be holden of death or the grave; and not the souls in purgatory. But if that which Beza says, in his notes on this place, be well observed, there is none that will not see, that instead of "pains" it should be “bands ;" and then there is no further cause to seek for purgatory in this text.

CHAPTER XLV.

Of Demonology, and other Relics of the Religion of the Gentiles.

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THE impression made on the organs of sight by lucid bodies, either in one direet line or in many lines, reflected from opaque, or refracted in the passage through diaphanous bodies, produceth in living creatures, in whom God hath placed such organs, an imagination of the object, from whence the impression proceedeth; which imagination is called sight;" and seemeth not to be a mere imagination, but the body itself without us; in the same manner, as when a man violently presseth his eye, there appears to him a light without and before him, which no man perceiveth but himself; because there is indeed no such thing without him, but only a motion in the interior organs, pressing by resistance outward, that makes him think so. And the motion made by this pressure, continuing after the object which caused it is removed, is that we call "imagination" and memory;" and, in sleep, and sometimes in great distemper of the organs by sickness or violence, a 66 dream;" of which things I have already spoken briefly in the second and third chapters.

This nature of sight having never been discovered by the ancient pretenders to natural knowledge; much less by those that consider not things so remote, as that knowledge is, from their present use; it was hard for men to conceive of those images in the fancy and in the sense, otherwise than of things really without us: which some, because they vanish away,.

they know not whither nor how, will have to be absolutely incorporeal, that is to say, immaterial, or forms without matter; colour and figure, without any coloured or figured body; and that they can put on airy bodies as a garment, to make them visible when they will to our bodily eyes; and others say, are bodies and living creatures, but made of air, or other more subtle and ethereal matter, which is, then, when they will be seen, condensed. But both of them agree on one general appellation of them, "demons." As if the dead of whom they dreamed were not inhabitants of their own brain, but of the air, or of heaven, or hell; not phantasms, but ghosts; with just as much reason as if one should say, he saw his own ghost in a looking-glass, or the ghosts of the stars in a river; or call the ordinary apparition of the sun, of the quantity of about a foot, the "demon," or ghost of that great sun that enlighteneth the whole visible world: and by that means have feared them, as things of an unknown, that is, of an unlimited power to do them good or harm; and consequently, given occasion to the governors of the heathen commonwealths to regulate this their fear, by establishing that "demonology" (in which the poets, as principal priests of the heathen religion, were especially employed or reverenced), to the public peace, and to the obedience of subjects necessary thereunto, and to make some of them good "demons," and others evil; the one as a spur to the observance, the other as reins to withhold them from the vioiation of the laws.

What kind of things they were, to whom they attributed the name of "demons," appeareth partly in the genealogy of their gods, written by Hesiod, one of the most ancient poets of the Grecians; and partly in other histories; of which I have observed some few before, in the twelfth chapter of this discourse.

The Grecians, by their colonies and conquests, communicated their language and writings into Asia, Egypt, and Italy; and therein, by necessary consequence their " demonology," or, as St. Paul calls it (1 Tim. iv. 1), "their doctrines of devils." And by that means the contagion was derived also to the Jews, both of Judea and Alexandria, and other parts, whereinto they were dispersed. But the name of "demon " they did not, as the Grecians, attribute to spirits both good and evil; but to the evil only and to the good "demons" they gave the name of the spirit of God; and esteemed those into whose bodies they entered to be prophets. In sum, all singularity, if good, they attributed to the spirit of God; and if evil, to some "demon," but a κaкodáμwv, an evil " demon," that is a "devil." And therefore, they called "demoniacs," that is "possessed by the devil," such as we call madmen or lunatics; or such as had the falling sickness, or that spoke anything which they, for want of understanding, thought absurd. As also of an unclean person in a notorious degree, they used to say he had an unclean spirit; of a dumb man, that he had a dumb devil; and of John the Baptist (Matt. xi. 18), for the singularity of his fasting, that he had a devil; and of our Saviour, because He said, he that keepeth His sayings should not see death in aternum (John viii. 52), "Now we know thou hast a devil; Abraham is dead, and the prophets are dead: and again, because He said (John vi. 20), "They went about to kill Him,' the people answered, "Thou hast a devil; who goeth about to kill thee? Whereby it is manifest that the Jews had the same opinions concerning phantasms, namely, that they were not phantasms, that is, idols of the brain, but things real and independent on the fancy.

Which doctrine, if it be not true, why, may some say, did not our Saviour contradict it, and teach the contrary? Nay, why does He use on divers occasions such forms of speech as seem to confirm it? To this I answer, that first, where Christ saith (Luke xxiv. 39), "A spirit hath not flesh and

bone," though He show that there be spirits, yet He denies not that they are bodies. And where St. Paul says (I Cor. xv. 44), we shall rise spiritual bodies," he acknowledgeth the nature of spirits, but that they are bodily spirits; which is not difficult to understand. For air and many other things are bodies, though not flesh and bone, or any other gross body to be discerned by the eye. But when our Saviour speaketh to the devil, and commandeth him to go out of a man, if by the devil He meant a disease, as frenzy, or lunacy, or a corporeal spirit, is not the speech improper? Can diseases hear? Or can there be a corporeal spirit in a body of flesh and bone, full already of vital and animal spirits? Are there not therefore spirits that neither have bodies, nor are mere imaginations? To the first I answer, that the addressing of our Saviour's command to the madness or lunacy He cureth, is no more improper than was His rebuking of the fever, or of the wind and sea; for neither do these hear; or than was the command of God, to the light, to the firmament, to the sun, and stars, when He commanded them to be; for they could not hear before they had a being. But those speeches are not improper, because they signify the power of God's word; no more therefore is it improper to command madness, or lunacy, under the appellation of devils by which they were then commonly understood, to depart out of a man's body. To the second, concerning their being incorporeal, I have not yet observed any place of Scripture, from whence it can be gathered that any man was ever possessed with any other corporeal spirit, but that of his own, by which his body is naturally moved.

Our Saviour, immediately after the Holy Ghost descended upon Him in the form of a dove, is said by St. Matthew (chapter iv. 1) to have been "led up by the Spirit into the wilderness" and the same is recited (Luke iv. I) in these words, "Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost, was led in the Spirit into the wilderness;" whereby it is evident that by "Spirit" there is meant the Holy Ghost. This cannot be interpreted for a possession; for Christ and the Holy Ghost are but one and the same substance; which is no possession of one substance or body by another. And whereas in the verses following He is said "to have been taken up by the devil into the holy city, and set upon a pinnacle of the temple," shall we conclude thence that He was possessed of the devil, or carried thither by violence? And again, "carried thence by the devil into an exceeding high mountain, who showed Him thence all the kingdoms of the world:" wherein we are not to believe He was either possessed, or forced by the devil; nor that any mountain is high enough, according to the literal sense, to show Him one whole hemisphere. What then can be the meaning of this place, other than that He went of himself into the wilderness; and that this carrying of Him up and down from the wilderness to the city, and from thence into a mountain, was a vision ? Conformable whereunto is also the phrase of St. Luke, that He was led into the wilderness, not "by," but "in," the Spirit; whereas, concerning His being taken up into the mountain, and unto the pinnacle of the temple, he speaketh as St. Matthew doth which suiteth with the nature of a vision.

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Again, where St. Luke (chap. xxii. 3, 4) says of Judas Iscariot, that "Satan entered into him, and thereupon that he went and communed with the chief priests and captains, how he might betray Christ unto them; may be answered, that by the entering of Satan, that is the " enemy," into him, is meant, the hostile and traitorous intention of selling his Lord and Master. For as by the Holy Ghost is frequently in Scripture understood, the graces and good inclinations given by the Holy Ghost; so by the of tering of Satan may be understood the wicked cogitations and designs enthe adversaries of Christ and His disciples. For as it is hard to say

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that the devil was entered into Judas, before he had any such hostile design; so it is impertinent to say he was first Christ's enemy in his heart, and that the devil entered into him afterwards. Therefore the entering of Satan, and his wicked purpose, was one and the same thing.

But if there be no immaterial spirit or any possession of men's bodies by any spirit corporeal, it may again be asked, why our Saviour and His apostles did not teach the people so; and in such clear words, as they might no more doubt thereof. But such questions as these are more curious than necessary for a Christian man's salvation. Men may as well ask why Christ, that could have given to all men faith, piety, and all manner of moral virtues, gave it to some only, and not to all; and why He left the search of natural causes and sciences to the natural reason and industry of men, and did not reveal it to all, or any man supernaturally; and many other such questions. Of which nevertheless there may be alleged probable and pious reasons. For as God, when He brought the Israelites into the Land of Promise, did not secure them therein, by subduing all the nations round about them; but left many of them, as thorns in their sides, to awaken from time to time their piety and industry: so our Saviour, in conducting us toward His heavenly kingdom, did not destroy all the difficulties of natural questions; but left them to exercise our industry and reason; the scope of His preaching being only to show us this plain and direct way to salvation, namely, the belief of this article, "that He was the Christ, the Son of the living God, sent into the world to sacrifice himself for our sins, and at His coming again, gloriously to reign over His elect, and to save them from their enemies eternally." To which the opinion of possession by spirits, or phantasms, is no impediment in the way; though it be to some an occasion of going out of the way, and to follow their own inventions. If we require of the Scripture an account of all questions which may be raised to trouble us in the performance of God's commands, we may as well complain of Moses for not having set down the time of the creation of such spirits, as well as of the creation of the earth and sea, and of men and beasts. To conclude, I find in Scripture that there be angels and spirits, good and evil; but not that they are incorporeal, as are the apparitions men see in the dark, or in a dream or vision: which the Latins call spectra, and took for "demons." And I find that there are spirits corporeal, though subtle and iuvisible; but not that any man's body was possessed or inhabited by them; and that the bodies of the saints shall be such, namely, spiritual bodies, as St. Paul calls them.

Nevertheless, the contrary doctrine, namely, that there be incorporeal spirits, hath hitherto so prevailed in the Church, that the use of exorcism, that is to say, of ejection of devils by conjuration, is thereupon built; and, though rarely and faintly practised, is not yet totally given over. That there were many demoniacs in the primitive Church, and few madmen, and other such singular diseases; whereas in these times we hear of, and see many madmen, and few demoniacs, proceeds not from the change of nature, but of names. But how it comes to pass that whereas heretofore the apostles, and after them for a time the pastors of the Church, did cure those singular diseases, which now they are not seen to do; as likewise, why it is not in the power of every true believer now to do all that the faithful did then, that is to say, as we read (Mark xvi. 17, 18), " in Christ's name to cast out devils, to speak with new tongues, to take up serpents, to drink deadly poison without harm-taking, and to cure the sick by the laying on of their hands," and all this without other words, but "in the name of Jesus," is another question. And it is probable that those extraordinary gifts were given to the Church, for no longer a time than men trusted wholly to Christ, and looked for their felicity only in His kingdom to come; and conse