chapters of Genesis, I must confess a great deal of
obscurity; though divines have to the power of human reason endeavoured
to make all go in a literal meaning, yet those allegorical
interpretations are also probable, and perhaps the mystical method of
Moses, bred up in the hieroglyphical schools of the Egyptians.

The whole creation is a mystery, and particularly that of man. At the
blast of His mouth were the rest of the creatures made, and at His bare
word they started out of nothing: but in the frame of man (as the text
describes it) he played the sensible operator, and seemed not so much to
create, as make him. When he had separated the materials of other
creatures, there consequently resulted a form and soul; but having raised
the walls of man, he was driven to a second and harder creation of a
substance like himself, an incorruptible and immortal soul. . . . In our
study of anatomy there is a mass of mysterious philosophy, and such as
reduced the very heathens to divinity; yet amongst all those rare
discoveries, and curious pieces I find in the fabric of man, I do not so
much content myself, as in that I find not--that is, no organ or
instrument for the rational soul: for in the brain, which we term the
seat of reason, there is not anything of moment more than I can discover
in the cranium of a beast: and this is a sensible and no inconsiderable
argument of the inorganity of the soul, at least in that sense we usually
so conceive it. Thus we are men, and we know not how; there is something
in us that can be without us, and will be after us, though it is strange
that it hath no history what it was before us, nor cannot tell how it
entered in us.

ON NATURE

Thus there are two books from whence I collect my divinity--besides that
written one of God, another of His servant nature; that universal and
public manuscript, that lies expanded unto the eyes of all--those that
never saw Him in the one, have discovered Him in the other. This was the
scripture and theology of the heathens; the natural motion of the sun
made them more admire Him, than its supernatural station did the children
of Israel; the ordinary effects of nature wrought more admiration in them
than in the other all His miracles: surely the heathens knew better how
to join and read these mystical letters, than we Christians, who cast a
more careless eye on these common hieroglyphics, and disdain to suck
divinity from the flowers of nature. No