blind with opposition and prejudice, have fallen into an excess of scorn and laughter.  There are, questionless, both in Greek, Roman, and African churches, solemnities and ceremonies, whereof the wiser zeals do make a Christian use, and stand condemned by us, not as evil in themselves, but as allurements and baits of superstition to those vulgar heads that look asquint on the face of truth, and those unstable judgments that cannot consist in the narrow point and centre of virtue without a reel or stagger to the circumference.

As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties in religion, which have unhinged the brains of better heads, they never stretched the pia mater of mine.  Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith; the deepest mysteries ours contains, have not only been illustrated, but maintained by syllogism, and the rule of reason.  I love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an O altitudo!  It is my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, with incarnation and resurrection.  I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason, with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossible est.  I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point; for to credit ordinary and visible objects, is not faith, but persuasion.  Some believe the better for seeing Christ’s sepulchre; and when they have seen the Red Sea, doubt not of the miracle.  Now, contrarily, I bless myself, and am thankful that I lived not in the days of miracles; that I never saw Christ nor His disciples.  I would not have been one of those Israelites that passed the Red Sea, nor one of Christ’s patients on whom He wrought His wonders; then had my faith been thrust upon me, nor should I enjoy that greater blessing pronounced to all that believe and saw not.  It is an easy and necessary belief, to credit what our eye and sense hath examined:  I believe He was dead and buried, and rose again; and desire to see Him in His glory, rather than to contemplate Him in His cenotaph or sepulchre.  Nor is this much to believe; as we have reason, we owe this faith unto history.  They only had the advantage of a bold and noble faith, who lived before His coming, who upon obscure prophecies and mystical types could raise a belief and expect apparent impossibilities.

Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty years, which to relate were not a history but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common ears like a fable; for the world, I count it not an inn but an hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in.  The world that I regard is myself; it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation.  Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my condition and fortunes, do err in my altitude, for I am above Atlas’s shoulders.