istians, through so many rubs and briars of
difficulties, contend for, is at last no better than a sort of folly
and madness. This, no question, will be thought extravagantly spoke; but
consider awhile, and deliberately state the case.

First, then, the christians so far agree with the Platonists as to
believe that the body is no better than a prison or dungeon for the
confinement of the soul. That therefore, while the soul is shackled
to the walls of flesh, her soaring wings are impeded, and all her
enlivening faculties clogged and fettered by the gross particles of
matter, so that she can neither freely range after, nor, when happily
overtook, can quietly contemplate her proper object of truth.

Farther, Plato defines philosophy to be the meditation of death, because
the one performs the same office with the other; namely, withdraws the
mind from all visible and corporeal objects; therefore while the soul
does patiently actuate the several organs and members of the body, so
long is a man accounted of a good and sound disposition; but when the
soul, weary of her confinement, struggles to break jail, and fly beyond
her cage of flesh and blood, then a man is censured at least for being
magotty and crack-brained; nay, if there be any defect in the external
organs it is then termed downright madness. And yet many times persons
thus affected shall have prophetic ecstacies of foretelling things to
come, shall in a rapture talk languages they never before learned, and
seem in all things actuated by somewhat divine and extraordinary; and
all this, no doubt, is only the effect of the soul's being more released
from its engagement to the body, whereby it can with less impediment
exert the energy of life and motion. From hence, no question, has sprung
an observation of like nature, confirmed now into a settled opinion,
that _some long experienced souls in the world, before their dislodging,
arrive to the height of prophetic spirits_.

[Illustration: 384]

If this disorder arise from an intemperance in religion, and too high a
strain of devotion, though it be of a somewhat differing sort, yet it is
so near akin to the former, that a great part of mankind apprehend it as
a mere madness; especially when persons of that superstitious humour
are so pragmatical and singular as to separate and live apart as it
were from all the world beside: so as they seem to have experienced
what Plato dreams to have happened between some, who, enc