The age in which he lived was too much depressed to be roused by his vigorous efforts; and his laudable attempts to emancipate the christian world from that slavish ignorance in which it was held, were, for very obvious reasons, severely censured by the Roman church: he was arraigned, condemned, and cast into prison, where he was exhausted by a tedious confinement and severe penance[1], and soon after fell a victim to the vengeance of his enemies.
The papal tyranny having thus prevailed against the strenuous efforts of this rational and intelligent philosopher, it was easy, under the pretence of exalted devotion, to suppress more feeble attempts toward improvement and reformation.
But those high pretensions to extraordinary sanctity have been so often used as a cloak, by men of an intriguing spirit, that they are now justly deemed suspicious; and we need only look into the lives and writings of the ecclesiastical chymists to be convinced that they were assumed by them, to cover their ignorance, ambition, and dissolute manners. An overweening conceit of their own opinions, and an arrogant contempt for those of others, is, notwithstanding all their pretensions to humility and self-denial, the genuine characteristic of those hypocritical writers. Thus we find them extolling themselves to the disparagement of all mankind. _Ye doctors of physick and surgery_, says Basil Valentine, _come to me, a religious person, and servant of God, I will shew you what ye have never seen, I will make manifest to you the way of health and salvation, which you have not yet known_.[2]
In delivering their chymical processes, an invocation of God is the first precept, and they, then, proceed in the name of the Lord. But not content with having magnified themselves beyond their equals, they address their disciples in the stile and manner of the founder of the christian religion: _I warn you_, says the same ecclesiastical chymist, _my disciple and apostle, if you would imitate me, you must take up your cross, and suffer as I have suffered, and learn to bear persecution as I also have done_[3]: and having thus made themselves equal with God, they proceeded to disclaim all dependance on the supreme Being, declaring, in their pride, that, if God would not assist them, they would rather consult the Devil than the works of former writers[4].