The cabala, in its utmost purity, is contained in the many precepts given in this book. The cabala enables us to understand--to bring our understandings to act, and, by that means, to attain knowledge;--knowledge makes us the children of God--God makes whom he pleases adepts in wisdom. To be an adept, according to God's will, is no contemptible calling.
The noble and virtuous Brethren of the Rosy Cross holds this truth sacred that "Virtue flies from no man;" therefore how desirable a thing is Virtue. She teaches us, first, wisdom, then charity, love, mercy, faith, and constancy; all these appertain to Virtue; therefore it is physically possible for any well-inclined man to become an adept, provided he lays aside his pride of reasoning, all obstinacy, blindness, hypocrisy, incredulity, superstition, deceit, &c.
An adept, therefore, is one who not only studies to do God's will upon earth, in respect of his moral and religious duties; but who studies, and ardently prays to his benevolent Creator to bestow on him wisdom and knowledge from the fulness of his treasury; and he meditates, day and night, how he may attain the true aqua vita--how he may be filled with the grace of God; which, when he is made so happy, his spiritual and internal eye is open to a glorious prospect of mortal and immortal riches:--he wants not food, raiment, joy, or any other thing--he is filled with the celestial spiritual manna--he enjoys the marrow and fat things of the earth--he treads the wine-press, not of the wrath, but of the mercy of God--he lives to the glory of God, and dies saying "Holy, holy, holy Lord of Sabaoth! blessed is thy name, now and for evermore! Amen."
"It was of the colour that is in saffron, being weighty in its powder, and shining like bruised glass, when it should be the less exactly beaten. But there was once given unto me the fourth part of one grain, (I call, also, a "For that powder, by uniting the aforesaid quicksilver unto itself, preserved the same, at one instant, from an eternal rust, putrefaction, death, and torture of the fire, howsoever most violent it was, and made it as an immortal thing, against any vigour or industry of art and fire, and transchanged it into the virgin purity of gold; at leastwise one only fire of coals is required herein." By which we see that so learned and profound a philosopher as Van Helmont could not so easily have been made to believe that there existed a possibility of transmutation of base metals into pure gold, without he had actually proved the same by experiment. Again, let the standing monuments of Flammel's liberal bounty to the poor, through this mean, to be seen at Paris every day, stand as a testimony to the truth of the existing possibility of transmutation. Likewise, Helmont mentions a stone that he saw, and had in his possession, which cured all disorders, the plague not excepted. I shall relate the circumstance in his own words, which are as follow:-- "There was a certain Irishman, whose name was Butler, being some time great with James, King of England, he being detained in the prison of the Castle of Vilvord; and taking pity on one Baillius, a certain Franciscan Monk, a most famous preacher of Gallo-Britain, who was also imprisoned, 'My most dear friend, unless thou come hitherto, so as to be able, by one only remedy, to cure every disease, thou shalt remain in thy young beginnings, however old thou shalt become.'--I easily assented to this, because I had learned that from the secrets of Paracelsus; and being now more confirmed by sight and hope. But I willingly confess, that that new mode of curing was unaccustomed and unknown to me: I therefore said, that a young Prince of our Court, Viscount of Gaunt, brother to the Prince of Episuoy, of a very great House, was so wholly prostrated by the gout, that he thenceforth lay only on one side, being wretched, and deformed with many knots: he, therefore, taking hold of my right hand, said--'Wilt thou that I cure the young man? I will cure him for thy sake.'--'But,' I replied, 'he is of that obstinacy, that he had rather die, than drink one only medicinal potion.' "But the Potentate answered--'Go, tell Butler that if he shall restore me as thou hast said, I will give him as much as he shall require;--demand the price, and I will willingly sequester that which is deposited for his security.--And when I declared the thing to Butler, on the day following, he was very wrath, and said--'That Prince is mad, or witless and miserable, and therefore will I never help him: for neither do I stand in need of his money--neither do I yield--nor am I inferior to him.'--Nor could I ever induce him, afterwards, to perform what before he had promised; wherefore I began to doubt whether the things I had before seen were dreams. "It happened, in the mean time, that a friend, overseer and master of the glass-furnace at Antwerp, being exceeding fat, most earnestly requested of Butler that he might be freed from his fatness; unto whom Butler offered a small piece of that little stone, that he might once every morning lick, or speedily touch it with the top of his tongue: and, within three weeks, I saw his breast made more strait, or narrow, by one span, and him to have lived no less whole afterwards. Wherefore I began again to believe that the aforesaid gouty Prince might have been cured, according to the manner Butler had promised. "In the mean time, I sent to Vilvord, to Butler, for a remedy, in the case of poison given me by a secret enemy; for I miserably languished--all my joints were pained; and my pulse, vehement, being at length become an intermitting one, did accompany the faintings of my mind, and extinguishment of my strength. "Seeing that, afterwards, many other cures were performed upon certain gentlewomen, I asked Butler why so many women should be cured, but that I (while that I sharply conflicted with death itself, being also environed with pains of all my joints and organs) should not feel any ease?--But he asked with what disease I had laboured?--And when he understood that poison had given a beginning to the disease, he said,--that, as the cause had come from within to without, the oil ought to be taken into the body, or the stone to be touched with the tongue; because the grief being cherished within, it was not local or external; and also observed, that the oil did, by degrees, uncloath itself with the efficacy of healing, because the little stone being lightly tinged in it, it had not pithily charged the oil throughout its whole body, but had only ennobled it with a delible or obliterable besprinkling of its odour: for truly that stone did present, in the eyes and tongue, sea-salt spread abroad, or rarified; and it is sufficiently known that salt is not to be very intimately mixed with oil. "This same man, also, cured an Abbess, who, for eighteen years, had had her right arm swelled, with an entire deprivation of motion, and the fingers thereof stiff and unmoveable, only by the touching of her tongue with this admirable stone. "But very many being present witnesses of these same wonders, did suspect some hidden sorcery, or diabolical craft; for the common people have it for an ancient custom, that whatsoever honest thing their ignorance has determined