beasts, and
thought them wiser than God, and resolved to be ruled by them, which to
me seems altogether against reason, that the woman should be so
ignorant and unrationall, who was created rationall after the image of
God to be ruler of all creatures: for at this day if a Serpent went up
into a tree, and did speake from thence to men and women, it would make
them afraid in so much that they would not doe what he bid them: or
dost thou thinke that in Mesopotamia (a great way off beyond the seas)
that there is a materiall garden wherein standeth the tree of life, and
the tree of knowledge of good and ill, both in one place, and an
angell, standing with a flickering sword to keep the tree of life from
the man!"[84]

The book contains a very striking confession of Faith quite unlike that
which Rutherford or Baillie or Edwards would have allowed as "sound,"
but yet serious, honest, and marked with a clear note of experience.
God is, for the writer, above everything a living God, a Spirit, "a
perfect clear Light that reveals to man the Truth." God is, he says,
Light, Life, and Love, and He is all these things to man. He instructs
and convinces his conscience; He disciplines and corrects him; He
raises condemnation in us for our sins, and "His Light persuades our
hearts to have true sorrow and real repentance for our sins, with a
{263} broken and contrite heart and sorrowful spirit, and so we begin
to hate ourselves and our sins, and doe really forsake them."[85]
"There is," he maintains, in words that sound strangely like the yet
unborn Quakers, "an infallible Spirit, Jesus Christ, the power of God
in us, which directs, corrects, instructs, perswades, and makes us wise
unto salvation; for He is the holy Word of life unto us . . . and
discovers all mysteries unto us, . . . if so be we are obedient unto
Him; but if we are not obedient unto Him, this infallible Spirit, Jesus
Christ in us, then we shall know nothing of God or of the Scriptures,
but it shall be a _sealed book, a dead letter, a seeming contradiction_
unto us."[86]

Samuel Rutherford declares the little treatise to be "a rude, foolish
and unlearned Pamphlet of late penned and changing, as Familists and
Antinomians doe, Scripture and God and Christ into metaphores and vaine
Allegories."[87] The comment of this good man is honest and sincere,
but of value only as revealing the mental attitude of himself. Here
the representative of the old system was speaking ou