which the witches do use in their conjuration. Toads (saturnine
animals) are killed by putting of salt upon them; I have seen the
experiment. Magical writers say, that cedar-wood drives away evil
spirits; it was, and is much used in magnificent temples.
Plinii Natural Hist. lib. 12, cap. 14.
"Alexandra Magno in pueritia sine parsimonia thura ingerenti aris,
paedagogus Leonides dixerat, ut illo modo, cum devicisset thuriferas
gentes, supplicaret. At ille Arabia potitus; thure onustam navim
misit ei, large exhortatus, ut Deos adoraret".
i. e. As Alexander the great, in the time of his minority, was
heaping incense upon the altars, even to a degree of religious
prodigality, his preceptor Leonidas told him, that he should prefer
his supplications to the Gods after that free manner, when he had
subdued the nations, whose produce was frankincense. And he, as soon
as he had made himself master of Arabia, sent him accordingly a ship
laden with incense, and with it ample exhortations to adore the Gods.
One says, why should one think the intellectual world less peopled
than the material1? Pliny, in his Natural History, lib. --- cap. -
tells us that in Africa, do sometimes appear multitudes of aerial
shapes, which suddenly vanish. Mr. Richard Baxter in his Certainty
of the Worlds of Spirits, (the last book he writ, not long before his
death) hath a discourse of angels; and wonders they are so little
taken notice of; he hath counted in Newman's Concordance of the Bible,
the word angel, in above three hundred places.
Pages:
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176