Buch lesen: «The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3», Seite 6

Ib. p. 17. B.

It is a singular testimony, how acceptable to God that state of virginity is. He does not dishonor physic that magnifies health; nor does he dishonor marriage, that praises virginity; let them embrace that state that can, &c.

One of the sad relics of Patristic super-moralization, aggravated by Papal ambition, which clung to too many divines, especially to those of the second or third generation after Luther. Luther himself was too spiritual, of too heroic faith, to be thus blinded by the declamations of the Fathers, whom, with the exception of Augustine, he held in very low esteem.

Ib. D.

And Helvidius said, she had children after.

Annon Scriptura ipsa? And a 'heresy,' too! I think I might safely put the question to any serious, spiritual-minded, Christian: What one inference tending to edification, in the discipline of will, mind, or affections, he can draw from the speculations of the last two or three pages of this Sermon respecting Mary's pregnancy and parturition? Can – I write it emphatically – can such points appertain to our faith as Christians, which every parent would decline speaking of before a family, and which, if the questions were propounded by another in the presence of my daughter, aye, or even of my, no less, in mind and imagination, innocent wife, I should resent as an indecency?

Serm. III. Gal. iv. 4, 5. p. 20.

God sent forth his Son made of a woman.

I never can admit that and in St. Paul and St. John are adequately, or even rightly, rendered by the English 'made.'

Ib. p. 21, A.

What miserable revolutions and changes, what downfalls, what break-necks and precipitations may we justly think ourselves ordained to, if we consider, that in our coming into this world out of our mothers' womb, we do not make account that a child comes right, except it come with the head forward, and thereby prefigure that headlong falling into calamities which it must suffer after?

The taste for these forced and fantastic analogies, Donne, with the greater number of the learned prelatic divines from James I. to the Restoration, acquired from that too great partiality for the Fathers, from Irenæus to Bernard, by which they sought to distinguish themselves from the Puritans.

Ib. C.

That now they (the Jews,) express a kind of conditional acknowledgment of it, by this barbarous and inhuman custom of theirs, that they always keep in readiness the blood of some Christian, with which they anoint the body of any that dies amongst them, with these words; "If Jesus Christ were the Messias, then may the blood of this Christian avail thee to salvation!"

Is it possible that Donne could have given credit to this absurd legend! It was, I am aware, not an age of critical acumen; grit, bran, and flour, were swallowed in the unsifted mass of their erudition. Still that a man like Donne should have imposed on himself such a set of idle tales, as he has collected in the next paragraph for facts of history, is scarcely credible; that he should have attempted to impose them on others, is most melancholy.

Ib. p. 22. D. E.

He takes the name of the son of a woman, and wanes the miraculous name of the son of a virgin. – Christ waned the glorious name of Son of God, and the miraculous name of Son of a virgin too; which is not omitted to draw into doubt the perpetual virginity of the blessed virgin, the mother of Christ, &c.

Very ingenious; but likewise very presumptuous, this arbitrary attribution of St. Paul's silence, and presumable ignorance of the virginity of Mary, to Christ's own determination to have the fact passed over.

N. B. Is 'wane' a misprint for 'wave' or 'waive?' It occurs so often, as to render its being an erratum improbable; yet I do not remember to have met elsewhere 'wane' used for 'decline' as a verb active.

Ib. p. 23. A.

If there were reason for it, it were no miracle.

The announcement of the first comet, that had ever been observed, might excite doubt in the mind of an astronomer, to whom, from the place where he lived, it had not been visible. But his reason could have been no objection to it. Had God pleased, all women might have conceived, as many of the polypi and planariæ do. Not on any such ground do I suspend myself on this as an article of faith; but because I doubt the evidence.

Ib. p. 25. A – E.

Though we may think thus in the law of reason, yet, &c.

It is, and has been, a misfortune, a grievous and manifold loss and hindrance for the interests of moral and spiritual truth, that even our best and most vigorous theologians and philosophers of the age from Edward VI to James II so generally confound the terms, and so too often confound the subjects themselves, reason and understanding; yet the diversity, the difference in kind, was known to, and clearly admitted by, many of them, – by Hooker for instance, and it is implied in the whole of Bacon's Novum Organum. Instead of the 'law of reason,' Donne meant, and ought to have said, 'judging according to the ordinary presumptions of the understanding,' that is, the faculty which, generalizing particular experiences, judges of the future by analogy to the past.

Taking the words, however, in their vulgar sense, I most deliberately protest against all the paragraphs in this page, from A to E, and should cite them, with a host of others, as sad effects of the confusion of the reason and the understanding, and of the consequent abdication of the former, instead of the bounden submission of the latter to a higher light. Faith itself is but an act of the will, assenting to the reason on its own evidence without, and even against, the understanding. This indeed is, I fully agree, to be brought into captivity to the faith.³⁴

Ib. p. 26. A. B.

And therefore to be under the Law, signifies here thus much; to be a debtor to the law of nature, to have a testimony in our hearts and consciences, that there lies a law upon us, which we have no power in ourselves to perform, &c.

This exposition of the term law in the epistles of St. Paul is most just and important. The whole should be adopted among the notes to the epistle to the Romans, in every Bible printed with notes.

Ib. p. 27. A.

And this was his first work, to redeem, to vindicate them from the usurper, to deliver them from the intruder, to emancipate them from the tyrant, to cancel the covenant between hell and them, and restore them so far to their liberty, as that they might come to their first master, if they would; this was redeeming.

There is an absurdity in the notion of a finite divided from, and superaddible to, the infinite, – of a particular quantum of power separated from, not included in, omnipotence, or all-power. But, alas! we too generally use the terms that are meant to express the absolute, as mere comparatives taken superlatively. In one thing only are we permitted and bound to assert a diversity, namely, in God and Hades, the good and the evil will. This awful mystery, this truth, at once certain and incomprehensible, is at the bottom of all religion; and to exhibit this truth free from the dark phantom of the Manicheans, or the two co-eternal and co-ordinate principles of good and evil, is the glory of the Christian religion.

But this mysterious dividuity of the good and the evil will, the will of the spirit and the will of the flesh, must not be carried beyond the terms 'good' and 'evil.' There can be but one good will – the spirit in all; – and even so, all evil wills are one evil will, the devil or evil spirit. But then the One exists for us as finite intelligences, necessarily in a two-fold relation, universal and particular. The same Spirit within us pleads to the Spirit as without us; and in like manner is every evil mind in communion with the evil spirit. But, O comfort! the good alone is the actual, the evil essentially potential. Hence the devil is most appropriately named the 'tempter,' and the evil hath its essence in the will: it cannot pass out of it. Deeds are called evil in reference to the individual will expressed in them; but in the great scheme of Providence they are, only as far as they are good, coerced under the conditions of all true being; and the devil is the drudge of the All-good.

Serm. IV Luke ii. 29, 30. p. 29.

Ib. p. 30. B.

We shall consider that that preparation, and disposition, and acquiescence, which Simeon had in his epiphany, in his visible seeing of Christ then, is offered to us in this epiphany, in this manifestation and application of Christ in the sacrament; and that therefore every penitent, and devout, and reverent, and worthy receiver hath had in that holy action his now; there are all things accomplished to him; and his for, for his eyes have seen his salvation; and so may be content, nay glad, to depart in peace.

O! would that Donne, or rather that Luther before him, had carried out this just conception to its legitimate consequences; – that as the sacrament of the Eucharist is the epiphany for as many as receive it in faith, so the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ himself in the flesh, were the epiphanies, the sacramental acts and phænomena of the Deus patiens, the visible words of the invisible Word that was in the beginning, symbols in time and historic fact of the redemptive functions, passions, and procedures of the Lamb crucified from the foundation of the world; – the incarnation, cross, and passion, – in short, the whole life of Christ in the flesh, dwelling a man among men, being essential and substantive parts of the process, the total of which they represented; and on this account proper symbols of the acts and passions of the Christ dwelling in man, as the Spirit of truth, and for as many as in faith have received him, in Seth and Abraham no less effectually than in John and Paul! For this is the true definition of a symbol, as distinguished from the thing, on the one hand, and from a mere metaphor, or conventional exponent of a thing, on the other. Had Luther mastered this great idea, this master-truth, he would never have entangled himself in that most mischievous Sacramentary controversy, or had to seek a murky hiding-hole in the figment of Consubstantiation.

Ib. B. C.

In the first part, then … More he asks not, less he takes not for any man, upon any pretence of any unconditional decree.

A beautiful paragraph, well worth extracting, aye, and re-preaching.

Ib. p. 34. E.

When thou comest to this seal of thy peace, the sacrament, pray that God will give thee that light that may direct and establish thee in necessary and fundamental things; that is, the light of faith to see that the Body and Blood of Christ is applied to thee in that action; but for the manner, how the Body and Blood of Christ is there, wait his leisure, if he have not yet manifested that to thee: grieve not at that, wonder not at that, press not for that; for he hath not manifested that, not the way, not the manner of his presence in the Sacrament to the Church.

O! I have ever felt, and for many years thought that this rem credimus, modum nescimus, is but a poor evasion. It seems to me an attempt so to admit an irrational proposition as to have the credit of denying it, or to separate an irrational proposition from its irrationality. I admit 2 + 2 = 5; how I do not pretend to know, but in some way not in contradiction to the multiplication table. To spiritual operations the very term 'mode' is perhaps inapplicable, for these are immediate. To the linking of this with that, of A. with Z. by intermedia, the term 'mode,' – the question 'how?' is properly applied. The assimilation of the spirit of a man to the Son of God, to God as the Divine Humanity, – this spiritual transubstantiation, like every other process of operative grace, is necessarily modeless. The whole question is concerning the transmutation of the sensible elements. Deny this, and to what does the modum nescimus refer? We cannot ask how that is done, which we declare not done at all. Admit this transmutation, and you necessarily admit by implication the Romish dogma, of the separation of a sensible thing from the sensible accidents which constitute all we ever meant by the thing. To rationalize this figment of his church, Bossuet has recourse to Spinosism, and dares make God the substance and sole ens reale of all body, and by this very hypothesis baffles his own end, and does away all miracle in the particular instance.

Ib. p. 35. B.

When I pray in my chamber, I build a temple there that hour; and that minute, when I cast out a prayer in the street, I build a temple there; and when my soul prays without any voice, my very body is then a temple.

Good; but it would be better to regard solitary, family, and templar devotion as distinctions in sort, rather than differences in degree. All three are necessary.

Ib. E.

And that more fearful occasion of coming, when they came only to elude the law, and proceeding in their treacherous and traitorous religion in their heart, and yet communicating with us, draw God himself into their conspiracies; and to mock us, make a mock of God, and his religion too.

What, then, was their guilt, who by terror and legal penalties tempted their fellow Christians to this treacherous mockery? Donne should have asked himself that question.

Serm. V. Exod. iv. 13. p. 39.

Ib. p. 39. C. D.

It hath been doubted, and disputed, and denied too, that this text, O my Lord, send I pray thee by the hand of him whom thou wilt send, hath any relation to the sending of the Messiah, to the coming of Christ, to Christmas day; yet we forbear not to wait upon the ancient Fathers, and as they said, to say, that Moses at last determines all in this, O my Lord, &c. It is a work, next to the great work of the redemption of the whole world, to redeem Israel out of Egypt; and therefore do both works at once, put both into one hand, and mitte quem missurus es, Send him whom I know thou wilt send; him, whom, pursuing thine own decree, thou shouldest send; send Christ, send him now, to redeem Israel from Egypt.

This is one of the happier accommodations of the gnosis, that is, the science of detecting the mysteries of faith in the simplest texts of the Old Testament history, to the contempt or neglect of the literal and contextual sense. It was, I conceive, in part at least, this gnosis, and not knowledge, as our translation has it, that St. Paul warns against, and most wisely, as puffing up, inflating the heart with self-conceit, and the head with idle fancies.

Ib. E.

But as a thoughtful man, a pensive, a considerative man, that stands still for a while with his eyes fixed upon the ground before his feet, when he casts up his head, hath presently, instantly the sun or the heavens for his object; he sees not a tree, nor a house, nor a steeple by the way, but as soon as his eye is departed from the earth where it was long fixed, the next thing he sees is the sun or the heavens; – so when Moses had fixed himself long upon the consideration of his own insufficiency for this service, when he took his eye from that low piece of ground, himself, considered as he was then, he fell upon no tree, no house, no steeple, no such consideration as this – God may endow me, improve me, exalt me, enable me, qualify me with faculties fit for this service, but his first object was that which presented an infallibility with it, Christ Jesus himself, the Messias himself, &c.

Beautifully imagined, and happily applied.

Ib. p. 40. B.

That germen Jehovæ, as the prophet Esay calls Christ, that offspring of Jehova, that bud, that blossom, that fruit of God himself, the Son of God, the Messiah, the Redeemer, Christ Jesus, grows upon every tree in this paradise, the Scripture; for Christ was the occasion before, and is the consummation after, of all Scripture.

If this were meant to the exclusion or neglect of the primary sense, – if we are required to believe that the sacred writers themselves had such thoughts present to their minds, – it would, doubtless, throw the doors wide open to every variety of folly and fanaticism. But it may admit of a safe, sound, and profitable use, if we consider the Bible as one work, intended by the Holy Spirit for the edification of the Church in all ages, and having, as such, all its parts synoptically interpreted, the eldest by the latest, the last by the first, and the middle by both. Moses, or David, or Jeremiah (we might in this view affirm) meant so and so, according to the context, and the light under which, and the immediate or proximate purposes for which, he wrote: but we, who command the whole scheme of the great dispensation, may see a higher and deeper sense, of which the literal meaning was a symbol or type; and this we may justifiably call the sense of the spirit.

Ib. p. 41. B.

So in our liturgy we stand up at the profession of the creed thereby to declare to God and his Church our readiness to stand to, and our readiness to proceed in, that profession.

Another Church might sit down, thereby denoting a resolve to abide in this profession. These things are indifferent; but charity, love of peace, and on indifferent points to prefer another's liking to our own, and to observe an order once established for order's sake, – these are not indifferent.

Ib. p. 42. C.

This paragraph is excellent. Alas! how painfully applicable it is to some of our day!

Ib. p. 46. C.

Howsoever all intend that this is a name that denotes essence, being: Being is the name of God, and of God only.

Rather, I should say, 'the eternal antecedent of being;' I that shall be in that I will to be; the absolute will; the ground of being; the self-affirming actus purissimus.

Serm. VI Isaiah liii. 1. p. 52.

A noble sermon in thought and diction.

Ib. p. 59. E.

Therefore we have a clearer light than this; firmiorem propheticum sermonem, says St. Peter; we have a more sure word of the prophets; that is, as St. Augustine reads that place, clariorem, a more manifest, a more evident, declaration in the prophets, than in nature, of the will of God towards man, &c.

The sense of this text, as explained by the context, seems to me this; – that, in consequence of the fulfilment of so large a proportion of the oracles, the Christian Church has not only the additional light given by the teaching and miracles of Christ, but even the light vouchsafed to the old Church (the prophetic) stronger and clearer.

Ib. p. 60. A.

He spake personally, and he spake aloud, in the declaration of miracles; but quis credidit auditui Filii? Who believed even his report? Did they not call his preaching sedition, and call his miracles conjuring? Therefore, we have a clearer, that is, a nearer light than the written Gospel, that is, the Church.

True; yet he who should now venture to assert this truth, or even contend for a co-ordinateness of the Church and the Written Word, must bear to be thought a semi-Papist, an ultra high-Churchman. Still the truth is the truth.

Serm. VII. John x. 10. p. 62.

Since the Revolution in 1688 our Church has been chilled and starved too generally by preachers and reasoners Stoic or Epicurean; – first, a sort of pagan morality was substituted for the righteousness by faith, and latterly, prudence or Paleyanism has been substituted even for morality. A Christian preacher ought to preach Christ alone, and all things in him and by him. If he find a dearth in this, if it seem to him a circumscription, he does not know Christ, as the pleroma, the fullness. It is not possible that there should be aught true, or seemly, or beautiful, in thought, will, or deed, speculative or practical, which may not, and which ought not to, be evolved out of Christ and the faith in Christ; – no folly, no error, no evil to be exposed, or warred against, which may not, and should not, be convicted and denounced from its contrariancy and enmity to Christ. To the Christian preacher Christ should be in all things, and all things in Christ: he should abjure every argument that is not a link in the chain, of which Christ is the staple and staple ring.

Ib. p. 64.

In this page Donne passes into rhetorical extravagance, after the manner of too many of the Fathers from Tertullian to Bernard.

Ib. p. 66. A.

Some of the later authors in the Roman Church … have noted (in several of the Fathers) some inclinations towards that opinion, that the devil retaining still his faculty of free-will, is therefore capable of repentance, and so of benefit by this coming of Christ.

If this be assumed, – namely, the free-will of the devil, – as a consequence would indeed follow his capability of repenting, and the possibility that he may repent. But then he is no longer what we mean by the devil; he is no longer the evil spirit, but simply a wicked soul.

Ib. p. 68. C.

As though God had said Qui sum, my name is I am; yet in truth it is Qui ero, my name is I shall be.

Nay, I will or shall be in that I will to be. I am that only one who is self-originant, causa sui, whose will must be contemplated as antecedent in idea to or deeper than his own co-eternal being. But 'antecedent,' 'deeper,' &c. are mere vocabula impropria, words of accommodation, that may suggest the idea to a mind purified from the intrusive phantoms of space and time, but falsify and extinguish the truth, if taken as adequate exponents.

Ib. p. 69. C.

We affirm that it is not only as impious and irreligious a thing, but as senseless and as absurd a thing, to deny that the Son of God hath redeemed the world, as to deny that God hath created the world.

A bold but a true saying. The man who, cannot see the redemptive agency in the creation has but a dim apprehension of the creative power.

Ib. D. E. p. 70. A.

These paragraphs exhibit a noble instance of giving importance to the single words of a text, each word by itself a pregnant text. Here, too, lies the excellence, the imitable, but alas! unimitated, excellence of our divines from Elizabeth to William III.

Ib. D.

O, that our clergy did but know and see that their tithes and glebes belong to them as officers and functionaries of the nationalty, – as clerks, and not exclusively as theologians, and not at all as ministers of the Gospel; – but that they are likewise ministers of the Church of Christ, and that their claims and the powers of that Church are no more alienated or affected by their being at the same time the established clergy, than they are by the common coincidence of being justices of the peace, or heirs to an estate, or stockholders!³⁵ The Romish divines placed the Church above the Scriptures; our present divines give it no place at all.

But Donne and his great contemporaries had not yet learnt to be afraid of announcing and enforcing the claims of the Church, distinct from, and coordinate with, the Scriptures. This is one evil consequence, though most un-necessarily so, of the union of the Church of Christ with the national Church, and of the claims of the Christian pastor and preacher with the legal and constitutional rights and revenues of the officers of the national clerisy. Our clergymen in thinking of their legal rights, forget those rights of theirs which depend on no human law at all.

Ib. p. 71. A.

This is the difference between God's mercy and his judgments, that sometimes his judgments may he plural, complicated, enwrapped in one another; but his mercies are always so, and cannot be otherwise.

A just sentiment beautifully expressed.

Ib. C.

Whereas the Christian religion is, as Gregory Nazianzen says, simplex et nuda, nisi prave in artem difficillimam converteretur: it is a plain, an easy, a perspicuous truth.

A religion of ideas, spiritual truths, or truth-powers, – not of notions and conceptions, the manufacture of the understanding, – is therefore simplex et nuda, that is, immediate; like the clear blue heaven of Italy, deep and transparent, an ocean unfathomable in its depth, and yet ground all the way. Still as meditation soars upwards, it meets the arched firmament with all its suspended lamps of light. O, let not the simplex et nuda of Gregory be perverted to the Socinian, 'plain and easy for the meanest understandings!' The truth in Christ, like the peace of Christ, passeth all understanding. If ever there was a mischievous misuse of words, the confusion of the terms, 'reason' and 'understanding,' 'ideas' and 'notions,' or 'conceptions,' is most mischievous; a Surinam toad with a swarm of toadlings sprouting out of its back and sides.

Serm. VIII. Mat. v. 16. p. 77.

Ib. C.

Either of the names of this day were text enough for a sermon, Purification or Candlemas. Join we them together, and raise we only this one note from both, that all true purification is in the light, &c.

The illustration of the name of the day contained in the first two or three paragraphs of this sermon would be censured as quaint by our modern critics. Would to heaven we had but even a few preachers capable of such quaintnesses!

Ib. D.

Every good work hath faith for the root; but every faith hath not good works for the fruit thereof.

Faith, that is, fidelity – the fealty of the finite will and understanding to the reason, the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world, as one with, and representative of, the absolute will, and to the ideas or truths of the pure reason, the supersensuous truths, which in relation to the finite will, and as meant to determine the will, are moral laws, the voice and dictates of the conscience; – this faith is properly a state and disposition of the will, or rather of the whole man, the I, or finite will, self-affirmed. It is therefore the ground, the root, of which the actions, the works, the believings, as acts of the will in the understanding, are the trunk and the branches. But these must be in the light. The disposition to see must have organs, objects, direction, and an outward light. The three latter of these our Lord gives to his disciples in this blessed sermon on the Mount, preparatorily, and, as Donne rightly goes on to observe, presupposing faith as the ground and root. Indeed the whole of this and the next page affords a noble specimen, how a minister of the Church of England should preach the doctrine of good works, purified from the poison of the practical Romish doctrine of works, as the mandioc is evenomated by fire, and rendered safe, nutritious, a bread of life. To Donne's exposition the heroic Solifidian, Martin Luther himself, would have subscribed, hand and heart.

Ib. p. 78. C.

And therefore our latter men of the Reformation are not to be blamed, who for the most, pursuing St. Cyril's interpretation, interpret this universal light that lighteneth every man to be the light of nature.

The error here, and it is a grievous error, consists in the word 'nature.' There is, there can be, no light of nature: there may be a light in or upon nature; but this is the light that shineth down into the darkness, that is, the nature, and the darkness comprehendeth it not. All ideas, or spiritual truths, are supernatural.

Ib. p. 79.

Throughout this page, Donne rather too much plays the rhetorician. If the faith worketh the works, what is true of the former must be equally affirmed of the latter; – causa causæ causa causati. Besides, he falls into something like a confusion of faith with belief, taken as a conviction or assent of the judgment. The faith and the righteousness of a Christian are both alike his, and not his – the faith of Christ in him, the righteousness in and for him. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet, not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.³⁶

Donne was a truly great man; but, after all, he did not possess that full, steady, deep, and yet comprehensive, insight into the nature of faith and works which was vouchsafed to Martin Luther. Donne had not attained to the reconciling of distinctity with unity, – ours, yet God's; God's, yet ours.

Ib. D.

Velle et nolle nostrum est, to assent, or to dis-assent, is our own.

Is not this, even with the saving afterwards, too nakedly expressed?

Ib.

And certainly our works are more ours than our faith is; and man concurs otherwise in the acting and perpetration of a good work, than he doth in the reception and admission of faith.

Why? Because Donne confounds the act of faith with the assent of the fancy and understanding to certain words and conceptions. Indeed, with all my reverence for Dr. Donne, I must warn against the contents of this page, as scarcely tenable in logic, unsound in metaphysics, and unsafe, slippery divinity; and principally in that he confounds faith – essentially an act, the fundamental work of the Spirit – with belief, which is then only good when it is the effect and accompaniment of faith.

Ib. p. 80. D.

Because things good in their institution may he depraved in their practice – ergone nihil ceremoniarum rudioribus dabitur, ad juvandam eorum imperitiam?

Some ceremonies may be for the conservation of order and civility, or to prevent confusion and unseemliness; others are the natural or conventional language of our feelings, as bending the knees, or bowing the head; and to neither of these two sorts do I object. But as to the adjuvandam rudiorum imperitiam, I protest against all such ceremonies, and the pretexts for them, in toto. What? Can any ceremony be more instructive than the words required to explain the ceremony? I make but two exceptions, and those where the truths signified are so vital, so momentous, that the very occasion and necessity of explaining the sign are of the highest spiritual value. Yet, alas! to what gross and calamitous superstitions have not even the visible signs in Baptism and the Eucharist given occasion!

Ib. p. 81. E.

Blessed St. Augustine reports, (if that epistle be St. Augustine's) that when himself was writing to St. Hierome, to know his opinion of the measure and quality of the joy and glory of heaven, suddenly in his chamber there appeared ineffabile lumen, says he, an unspeakable, an unexpressible light, … and out of that light issued this voice, Hieronymi anima sum, &c.

The grave recital of this ridiculous legend is one instance of what I have called the Patristic leaven in Donne, who assuredly had no belief himself in the authenticity of this letter. But yet it served a purpose. As to Master Conradus, just above, who could read at night by the light at his fingers' ends, he must of course have very recently been shaking hands with Lucifer.