4th. Whether the higher order of Seraphim illuminati ever sneer?
5th. Whether pure intelligences can love?
6th. Whether the Seraphim ardentes do not manifest their virtues, by the way of vision and theory; and whether practice be not a sub-celestial and merely human virtue?
7th. Whether the vision beatific be anything more or less than a perpetual representment, to each individual angel, of his own present attainments, and future capabilities, somehow in the manner of mortal looking-glasses, reflecting a perpetual complacency and self satisfaction?
8th. and last. Whether an immortal and amenable soul may not come to be condemned at last, and the man never suspect it beforehand?
Learned Sir, my friend,
Presuming on our long habits of friendship, and emboldened further by your late liberal permission to avail myself of your correspondence, in case I want any knowledge, (which I intend to do, when I have no Encyclopedia, or Ladies Magazine at hand to refer to, in any matter of science,) I now submit to your enquiries the above theological propositions, to be by you defended or oppugned, or both, in the schools of Germany, whither, I am told, you are departing, to the utter dissatisfaction of your native Devonshire, and regret of universal England; but to my own individual consolation, if, through the channel of your wished return, learned sir, my friend, may be transmitted to this our island, from those famous theological wits of Leipsic and Gottingen, any rays of illumination, in vain to be derived from the home growth of our English halls and colleges. Finally wishing, learned sir, that you may see Schiller, and swing in a wood, (vide poems) and sit upon a tun, and eat fat hams of Westphalia,
I remain,
Your friend and docile pupil, to instruct,
Charles Lamb."