“to have attained to greater meekness and conquest of passions,” than the other sects.  The chief of them was Dr. Pordage, Rector of Bradfield, in Berks, with his family.  They held “visible and sensible communion with angels” in the Rectory, on the very walls and windows of which there appeared miraculous pictures and symbols; and the Doctor himself, besides alarming people with such strange phrases as “the fiery deity of Christ dwelling in the soul and mixing itself with our flesh,” was clearly unorthodox on many particular points.[1]—­Boehme’s system included a mystical physics or cosmology as well as a metaphysics or theosophy, and some of his English followers seem to have allied themselves with the famous Astrologer William Lilly, whose prophetic Almanacks, under the title of Merlinus Anglicus, had been appearing annually since 1644.  But indeed all sorts of men were in contact with this quack or quack-mystic.  He had been consulted by Charles I as to the probable issue of events; he had been consulted and feed by partisans of the other side:  his Almanacks, with their hieroglyphics and political predictions, had a boundless popularity, and were bringing him a good income; he was the chief in his day of those fortune-telling and spirit-auguring celebrities who hover all their lives between high society and Bridewell.  As he had adhered to the Parliamentarians and made the stars speak for their cause, he had hitherto been pretty safe; but the leading Presbyterian and Independent ministers, as we have seen (ante IV, p. 392), had recently called upon Parliament to put down his bastard science.  Gataker had attacked “that grand impostor Mr. William Lilly” in an express publication.[2]—­Is it in a spirit of mischief that Baxter names THE VANISTS, or disciples of Sir Henry Vane the younger, as one of the recognised sects of this time?  That great Republican leader, it was known, with all his deep practical astuteness and the perfect clearness and shrewdness of his speeches and business-letters, carried in his head a mystic Metaphysics of his own which he found it hard to express.  It was a something unique, including ideas from the Antinomians, the Anabaptists, and the Seekers, he had been so much among, with something also of the Fifth-Monarchy notion, and with the theory of absolute Voluntaryism in Religion, but all these amalgamated with new ingredients.  Burnet tells us that, though he had taken pains to find out Vane’s meaning in his own books, he could never reach it, and that, as many others had the same experience, it might be reasonable to conclude that Vane had purposely kept back the key to his system.  Friends of Vane had told Burnet, however, that “he leaned to Origen’s notion of a universal salvation of all, both of devils and the damned, and to the doctrine of pre-existence.”  Even when Cromwell and Vane had been close friends, calling each other “Fountain” and “Heron” in their private letters.  Vane had been in possession of such peculiar lights, or of others, beyond Cromwell’s