Fridrichstadt Leisure.

First Class.

§. I.

No work of man occupies and disturbs minds more than this, and to no other does human genius devote itself with greater study and industry, than how they might find the entrance into the King's Palace and remove the bolt that prevents them from being admitted to the hidden recesses of this Palace. Nor is any glaucoma a cataract or blinding effect equally seductive placed before the eyes of those who bring their minds to embrace this Sophia Wisdom. For this Sophia is so fortified and immersed in labyrinthine passages that, unless the filum ariadneum Ariadne's thread is extended to them by God, they lose their oil and their labor. But those who seek the way to arrive at these inner golden Sanctuaries of the Palace are divided by us into three classes. The first class includes those to whom, by singular mercy from the supreme Divinity, access into the Sanctuary of Nature is granted, and it is given to kiss chaste Sophia with a chaste kiss, who also receives her suitors, as sincere worshipers of God, into her embraces with open arms; nor does she ever let them be torn away from her, but enters into an indissoluble marriage with her suitors, and with them falls down before the tribunal of the mercy of the Holy Trinity and prays with a devout mind day and night. And these are those who follow the dictates of Nature tenaciously and depend on no authority of authors, nor on men of illustrious and renowned fame and great name, even if they are hailed as lights of the world and as deities of the learned circle by their parasites. Since this sentence occupies their mind from the marrow: The material of this divine work is of one and the same lineage and origin, such that one arises from the other, and one is dissolved into the other, namely the material of the L. P., from which it has essential identity in itself, so that not only does one arise from the other, as is said, but also one is dissolved in the other, and one passes into the other, as if by a magnetic and fateful attraction, no differently than water into water; indeed, as parched earth draws and imbibes water, so also the philosophical earth imbibes philosophical water, and water and earth pass into one body.

§. 2. The vulgar mass of Physicians and Philosophers adheres to this opinion: that these two ingredients for the composition of the L. P. differ from each other as much as heaven is from earth, and that between them there can never be a bond so indissoluble that the power of Vulcan fire might not easily break and separate them from each other so that two distinct entities remain, endowed with distinct attributes and predicates. Indeed, they think they are of such disparate condition and modification that one could more quickly combine oil and water into one indissoluble body, and more quickly mix heaven with earth; and this is the mind, indeed this is the decree of the philosophers and doctors of the school, against which no one dares to mutter or whisper, unless he wants to be struck and shattered by the thunderbolt of the anathema of ignorance and lack of knowledge. But let them abound in their own sense, and embrace a frog in place of Diana.