CONTENTS
[SHOEMAKER HANKIN]
[SNARLEY BOB ON THE STARS]
["SNARLEYCHOLOGY I. THEORETICAL"]
["SNARLEYCHOLOGY II. EXPERIMENTAL"]
[A MIRACLE, I]
[A MIRACLE, II]
[SHEPHERD TOLLER O' CLUN DOWNS]
[SNARLEY BOB'S INVISIBLE COMPANION]
[THE DEATH OF SNARLEY BOB]
[FARMER PERRYMAN'S TALL HAT]
[A GRAVEDIGGER SCENE]
[HOW I TRIED TO ACT THE GOOD SAMARITAN]
["MACBETH" AND "BANQUO" ON THE BLASTED HEATH]
[OTHER BOOKS TO READ]
There is nothing that so embases and enthralls the Souls of men, as the dismall and dreadfull thoughts of their own Mortality, which will not suffer them to look beyond this short span of Time, to see an houres length before them, or to look higher than these material Heavens; which though they could be stretch'd forth to infinity, yet would the space be too narrow for an enlightened mind, that will not be confined within the compass of corporeal dimensions. These black Opinions of Death and the Non-entity of Souls (darker than Hell it self) shrink up the free-born Spirit which is within us, which would otherwise be dilating and spreading it self boundlessly beyond all Finite Being: and when these sorry pinching mists are once blown away, it finds this narrow sphear of Being to give way before it; and having once seen beyond Time and Matter, it finds then no more ends nor bounds to stop its swift and restless motion. It may then fly upwards from one heaven to another, till it be beyond all orbe of Finite Being, swallowed up in the boundless Abyss of Divinity, [Greek: hyperanô tês ousias], beyond all that which darker thoughts are wont to represent under the Idea of Essence. This is that [Greek: theion skotos] which the Areopagite speaks of, which the higher our Minds soare into, the more incomprehensible they find it. Those dismall apprehensions which pinion the Souls of men to mortality, churlishly check and starve that noble life thereof, which would alwaies be rising upwards, and spread it self in a free heaven: and when once the Soul hath shaken off these, when it is once able to look through a grave, and see beyond death, it finds a vast Immensity of Being opening it self more and more before it, and the ineffable light and beauty thereof shining more and more into it.
Select Discourses of John Smith,
the Cambridge Platonist, 1660.