ing and worshipping their images or saints, are the same with the rites of the Pagans. “This, say they, is evident in their pilgrimages to visit images which had more holiness and virtue in them than others. In their candle-religion, burning incense, offering up gold to images, hanging up crutches, chairs, and ships, legs, arms, and whole men and women of war, before images, as though by them, or saints (as they say) they were delivered from lameness, sickness, captivity, or shipwrack.” In spreading abroad after the manner of the Heathens, the miracles that have accompanied images. “Such an image was sent from heaven, like the Palladium, or Diana of the Ephesians. Such an image was brought by angels. Such a one came itself far from the east to the west, as Dame Fortune fled to Rome. Some images though they were hard and stony, yet for tender-heart and pity wept. Some spake more monstrously than ever did Balaam’s ass, who had life and breath in him. Such a cripple came and saluted this saint of oak, and by and by he was made whole, and here hangeth his crutch. Such a one in a tempest vowed to Saint Christopher, and scaped, and behold here is his ship of war. Such a one, by Saint Leonard’s help, brake out of prison, and see where his fetters hang. And infinite thousands more miracles by like, or more shameless lies were reported.”
After all this, I appeal to every intelligent reader, whether the religion of the Heathens, according to its genuine purity as delineated in this Introduction, and as professed and promulgated by the best and wisest men of antiquity, is not infinitely preferable to that of the Catholics? And whether it is not more holy to reverence beings the immediate progeny of the ineffable principle of all things, and which are eternally centered and rooted in him; and to believe that in reverencing these, we at the same time reverence the ineffable, because they partake of his nature, and that through these as media we become united with him,[1] than to reverence men, and the images of men, many of whom when living, were the disgrace of human nature? The Church of England as we see prefers the Pagans to the Papists; and I trust that every other sect of Protestant Christians will unanimously subscribe to her decision. And thus much in defence of the theology of Plato, and the religious worship of the Heathens.
It now remains that I should speak of the following work, of its author, and the translation. The work itself then is a scientific developement of the deiform processions from the ineffable principle
- ↑ The ineffable principle of things, as is demonstrated in the Elements of Theology in this work, is beyond self-subsistence. Hence the first ineffable evolution from him consists of self-subsistent natures. As we therefore are only the dregs of the rational nature, many media are necessary to conjoin us with a principle so immensely exalted above us. And these media are the golden chain of powers that have deified summits, or that have the ineffable united with the effable.
