and every fixed star a
sun, with his compassing planets (as Brunus and Campanella conclude) cast
three or four worlds into one; or else of one world make three or four new,
as it shall seem to them best. To proceed, if the earth be 21,500 miles in
[3039]compass, its diameter is 7,000 from us to our antipodes, and what
shall be comprehended in all that space? What is the centre of the earth?
is it pure element only, as Aristotle decrees, inhabited (as [3040]
Paracelsus thinks) with creatures, whose chaos is the earth: or with
fairies, as the woods and waters (according to him) are with nymphs, or as
the air with spirits? Dionisiodorus, a mathematician in [3041]Pliny, that
sent a letter, _ad superos_ after he was dead, from the centre of the
earth, to signify what distance the same centre was from the _superficies_
of the same, viz. 42,000 stadiums, might have done well to have satisfied
all these doubts. Or is it the place of hell, as Virgil in his Aenides,
Plato, Lucian, Dante, and others poetically describe it, and as many of our
divines think? In good earnest, Anthony Rusca, one of the society of that
Ambrosian College, in Milan, in his great volume _de Inferno, lib. 1. cap.
47._ is stiff in this tenet, 'tis a corporeal fire tow, _cap. 5. I. 2._ as
he there disputes. "Whatsoever philosophers write" (saith [3042]Surius)
"there be certain mouths of hell, and places appointed for the punishment
of men's souls, as at Hecla in Iceland, where the ghosts of dead men are
familiarly seen, and sometimes talk with the living: God would have such
visible places, that mortal men might be certainly informed, that there be
such punishments after death, and learn hence to fear God." Kranzius _Dan.
hist. lib. 2. cap. 24._ subscribes to this opinion of Surius, so doth
Colerus _cap. 12. lib. de immortal animae_ (out of the authority belike of
St. Gregory, Durand, and the rest of the schoolmen, who derive as much from
Aetna in Sicily, Lipari, Hiera, and those sulphureous vulcanian islands)
making Terra del Fuego, and those frequent volcanoes in America, of which
Acosta _lib. 3. cap. 24._ that fearful mount Hecklebirg in Norway, an
especial argument to prove it, [3043]"where lamentable screeches and
howlings are continually heard, which strike a terror to the auditors;
fiery chariots are commonly seen to bring in the souls of men in the
likeness of crows, and devils ordinarily go in and out." Such another proof
is that place near the Pyramid