m eternal essences" and "our nobel Genealogy should mind us of our
Father's House and make us weary of tutelage under hairy Faunes and
cloven-footed Satyres."[3] He shows that he has lost all interest in
theological speculations that assume a God remote in time and space, a
God who once created a world and left it to go to ruin. He reminds his
readers that the God in whom he believes is "yet alive and still
speaks."[4] In the light of this Preface, in which he declares that he
has "suckt in truth from divinest philosophy" from his childhood, it is
not strange that he welcomed Fox, when the latter appeared in Yorkshire
in 1651, proclaiming an inward Light and a present God near at hand,
nor is it surprising that Hotham said to the young prophet of the
inward Guide: "If God had not raised uppe this principle of light and
life, ye nation had beene overspread with rantism . . . but this
principle of truth overthrew ye roote & grounde of there [_i.e._ the
Ranters'] principle."[5]

The enthusiasm of Justice Hotham for his Teutonic master gets fervid
expression at the end of his Preface as follows: "Whatever the thrice
great Hermes [Hermes Trismegistus] delivered as oracles from his
prophetical tripos, or Pythagoras spake by authority or {211} Socrates
debated or Aristotle affirmed; yea, whatever divine Plato prophesied or
Plotinus proved: this and all this, or a far higher and profounder
philosophy is (I think) contained in the Teutonick's writings. And if
there be any friendly medium which can possibly reconcile these ancient
differences between the nobler wisdom which hath fixt her Palace in
Holy Writ and her stubborn handmaid, Naturall Reason: this happy
marriage of the Spirit and Soul, this wonderful consent of discords in
one harmony, we owe in great measure to Teutonicus his skill!"

The central problem of the _Discourse_, written by the brother, Charles
Hotham, is the origin of the soul. After the manner of his German
teacher, the English disciple finds the origin of man's soul in "the
bottomless, immeasurable Abyss of the Godhead," in "the great deep of
the perpetually eternal God." Man is an epitome of the universe. He
unites in himself all the contrary principles of the worlds visible and
invisible, he is a unity of body and soul, a centre of light and
darkness, and in him is a "supreme region," or "Divine Principle," "by
the mediation of which man has direct fellowship with God." In man,
who thus epitomize