than to bestow a great deal of time to understand
him that was not willing to be easily understood, and to know that his
bombasted words do signify nothing more than before was easily known
by common familiar terms.

This is not in all its parts true. It is true that the first principles
of Behmen are to be found in the writings of the Neo-Platonists after
Plotinus, and (but mixed with gross impieties) in Paracelsus;--but it is
not true that they are easily known, and still less so that they are
communicable in common familiar terms. But least of all is it true that
there is nothing original in Behmen.

Ib.

The chiefest of these in England are Dr. Pordage and his family.

It is curious that Lessing in the Review, which he, Nicolai, and
Mendelssohn conducted under the form of Letters to a wounded Officer,
joins the name of Pordage with that of Behmen. Was Pordage's work
translated into German?

Ib. p. 79.

Also the Socinians made some increase by the ministry of one Mr.
Biddle, sometimes schoolmaster in Gloucester; who wrote against the
Godhead of the Holy Ghost, and afterwards of Christ; whose followers
inclined much to mere Deism.

For the Socinians till Biddle retained much of the Christian religion,
for example, Redemption by the Cross, and the omnipresence of Christ as
to this planet even as the Romanists with their Saints. Luther's
obstinate adherence to the ubiquity of the Body of Christ and his or
rather its real presence in and with the bread was a sad furtherance to
the advocates of Popish idolatry and hierolatry.

Ib. p. 80.

Many a time have I been brought very low, and received the sentence of
death in myself, when my poor, honest, praying neighbours have met,
and upon their fasting and earnest prayers I have been recovered. Once
when I had continued weak three weeks, and was unable to go abroad,
the very day that they prayed for me, being Good Friday, I recovered,
and was able to preach, and administer the Sacrament the next Lord's
Day, and was better after it, &c.

Strange that the common manuals of school logic should not have secured
Baxter from the repeated blunder of 'Cum hoc, ergo, propter hoc'; but
still more strange that his piety should not have revolted against
degrading prayer into medical quackery.

Before the Revolution of 1688, metaphysics ruled without experimental
psychology, and in these curious paragraphs of Baxter we see the effect:
sinc