grow in him instead of the divine seed, and so came under the
dominance of the natural, elemental world, with its "lesser light" of
knowledge and with its "tree of death." But the Paradise, with its
greater Light of Wisdom and with its Tree of Life, is always near to
man and can be repossessed and regained by him. The outer elements,
and the astral world with its visible stars, _rule_ no one, determine
no one. Each man's "star" is in his own breast. It lies in his own
power to "theologize his astrologie," to turn his universe into
spiritual forces. By "a new nativity," initiated by obedient response
to the inward Light--the spiritual Star, not of earth and not of the
astral universe, but of God the indwelling Spirit--he may put on the
new man, created after the likeness of God, and become the recipient of
heavenly Wisdom springing up within him from the Life of the Spirit.[33]

There can be no question in the mind of any one who is familiar with
the literature and religious thought of seventeenth-century England,
that the ideas set forth in this chapter exerted a wide and profound
influence, and were a part of the psychological climate of the middle
decades of that century. The channel here indicated was only one of
the ways through which these ideas came in. In due time we shall
discover other channels of this spiritual message.

[1] Ficino is dealt with at greater length in Chapter XIII.

[2] The Cabala was, as I have tried to make clear, only one of the
influences which produced this new intellectual climate. The
rediscovered "Hermes Trismegistus," the mystically coloured Platonism,
as it came from Italy, the awakened interest in Nature and in man, and
the powerful message of the German Mystics all played an important part
toward the formation of the new _Weltanschauung_.

[3] _Three Books of Occult Philosophy_, translated by J. F. (London,
1651).

[4] Stoddart's Life of Paracelsus (London, 1911), p. 76.

[5] Browning, _Paracelsus_, B. i. This passage fairly represents
Paracelsus' general position. "There is," he says in his
_Philosophia sagax_, "a Light in the spirit of man which illuminates
everything. . . . The quality of each thing created by God, whether
it be visible or invisible to the senses, may be perceived and
known. If man knows the essence of things, their attributes, their
attractions, and the elements of which they consist, he will be a
Master of nature, of the elements, and of the