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people expecting nothing but death, confessed all their most secret sins. "Here," says the old Canon of Valencia, "here may it be seen what sacred and salutary fruits of true religion Christians may gather from the storms and tempests of the sea! For it doth not only by the vomiting which it provokes purge the body of all choler and ill humours, but by the great terror which its fearful yawnings occasion, it roots out from the soul all the evil affections of sin, and with tears and bitter repentance washes with the current of firm and good resolutions all that had till now been defiled. So that every one recovers from his diseases both of body and soul far better at sea than upon shore. It is against all reason therefore to think that a tempest at sea is a sad and unhappy omen for Christian sailors when they begin their voyages and enterprizes; they ought rather to regard it as a fortunate prognostic, since having weather.

ed it, and purged (as we have said) their ills both of body and soul, they remain more acceptable to God, and in sounder health and better plight to go on with their adventure,"

Hist. del R. D. Jayme, L. 6, C. 2. Miedes might have improved sea-sickness still farther, if the grand discoveries of Swedenborg had been known in his time, or if he had remembered the opinions of his own countryman Huarte, who, though as wild and visionary a theorist as the most visionary of his own days, has had the good luck to be cried up as a philosopher in ours, for some imagined resemblance to to the the ridiculous fancy of Helvetius... The great Swedish Ouranographist, whose discoveries were not always confined to heaven, discovered that all diseases were the works of evil spirits, and in particular that the foul spirits who are ripening for Hell, and take delight in putridity, get into our insides and manufacture for

us all the evils which arise from indigestion. A doctrine very reconcileable with Huarte's philosophy.

It is a thing certain, says that author, that there are to be found some dispositions in a man's body which the Devil coveteth with so great eagerness, as to enjoy them he entereth into the man in whom they are found, wherethrough he becometh possessed: but the same being corrected and changed by contrary medicines, and an alteration being wrought in these black, filthy and stinking humours, he naturally comes to depart. This is plainly discerned by experience; for if there be a house great, dark, foul, putrified, melancholick, and void of dwellers, the Devils soon take it up for their lodging. But if the same be cleansed, the windows opened, and the sunbeams admitted to enter, by and by they get them packing, and especially if it be inhabited by much company, and that there be meetings and pastimes and playing on

musical instruments. The Devil is so slovenly, so melancholick, and so much an enemy to things eat, chearful, and clear, that when Christ, entered into the region of Genezaret, St. Matthew re counteth how certain Devils met him in dead carcases which they had caught out of their graves, crying and saying, Jesus, thou son of David, what hast thou to do with us, that thou art come before hand to torment us? we pray thee, that if thou be to drive us out of this place where we are, thou wilt let us enter into that herd of swine which is yonder. For which reason the holy Scripture termeth them unclean Spirits. Huarte, Eng. transl. P. 92. 94.

211. Valentine Gretrakes.

It is Henry* More who tells us of his civet-like odour of complection. He is

See vol. I, p. 144, where I had supposed it wai Lord Herbert of Cherbury.

explaining how an enthusiast may cure some diseases by touching or stroking the part diseased, yet it would be no true miracle,.. and the perverse ingenuity with which he supports a true opinion by false reasoning, is very characteristic of this curious writer. "There may be very well, he says) a sanative and healing contagion, as well as morbid and venomous. And the spirits of melancholy men being more massy and ponderous, when they are so highly refined and actuated by a more than ordinary heat and vigour of the body, may prove a very powerful elixir, Nature having outdone the usual pretences of chemistry in this case." Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, Sect. 58..

"This very place," he adds in the Scholia to this Treatise, "I shewed to that excellent person, Mr. Boyle, at London, as I was talking with him in aBookseller's "shop, being asked by him what I thought of the cures of Valentine Gretrakes, with the fame of which all.

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