p. 185. B.
Seas of blood and yet but brooks, tuns of blood and yet but basons, compared with the sacrifices, the sacrifices of the blood of men, in the persecutions of the primitive Church. For every ox of the Jew, the Christian spent a man; and for every sheep and lamb, a mother and her child, &c.
Whoo! Had the other nine so called persecutions been equal to the tenth, that of Diocletian, Donne's assertion here would be extravagant.
Serra. XXXIV. Rom. viii.16.p.332.
Ib.
p. 335. A.
But by what manner comes He from them? By proceeding.
If this mystery be considered as words, or rather sounds vibrating on some certain ears, to which the belief of the hearers assigned a supernatural cause, well and good! What else can be said? Such were the sounds: what their meaning is, we know not; but such sounds not being in the ordinary course of nature, we of course attribute them to something extra-natural. But if God made man in his own image, therein as in a mirror, misty no doubt at best, and now cracked by peculiar and in-herited defects — yet still our only mirror — to contemplate all we can of God, this word 'proceeding' may admit of an easy sense.
For if a man first used it to express as well as he could a notion found in himself as man
in genere