way of regeneration in the
Spirit of Christ and _divinitize our knowledge into an effectual
working love and attaine the experimental and essential reality of it
in our owne soules!_"[26] The way out of "the tedious Maze and
wearisome laborinth of discussions and opinions concerning God, Christ,
Faith, Election, the Ordinances and the Way of Worship" is "to know the
Word of Life, Light and Love experimentally," to have "the fire of His
love so enkindled in our own hearts that it may breake forth in our
practice and conversation to the destroying of all Thornes and tearing
Bryars of vaine contentions!"[27]

Like his kinsman, he has endless faith in the possibility of man; he
thinks that the entire Scripture directs us to the Word within us, and
that the Book of all mysteries is within ourselves. "In our owne
Book," he says, "which is the Image of God in us, Time and Eternity and
all Mysteries are couched and contained, and they may be read in our
owne soules by the illumination of the Divine Spirit. Our Minde is a
true mysticall Mirror and Looking-glasse of Divine and Naturall
Mysteries, and we shall receive more real knowledge from one effectuall
innate essentiall beame or ray of Light arising from the New Birth
within us than in reading many {219} hundreds of authors whereby we
frame a Babel of knowledge in the Nation."[28]

He goes so far with his faith in the soul's possibility to return into
"the Original Centre of all Reality" that he declares that a man may
sink deep enough into this Original Principle that binds his own soul
into union with God so that he can penetrate by an inner Light and
experience into the secret qualities and virtues hid in all visible and
corporeal things, and may learn to discover the healing and curative
powers of metals and plants, and may thus, by inward knowledge, advance
all Arts and Sciences.[29]

Ellistone returns to this inner way of arriving at a knowledge of
outward things in his Preface to _Signatura rerum_ in 1651. Man, he
declares, is a microcosm, or abridgment, of the whole universe, he is
the emblem and hieroglyphic of Time and Eternity, and he who will take
pains to push in beyond Solomon's Porch, or the Outer Court of sense
and natural reason, to the Inner Court and Holy Place, where the
immortal Seed abides and where man can become one again with that which
he was in God before he became a creature, then he will have the key
that opens all mysteries both inner and