Leisure at Fridrichstadt.

First Class.

No work of men occupies and disturbs their minds more entirely, and to none does human ingenuity surrender itself with greater study and industry, than to how they might find the entrance into the King's Palace and remove the bolt that prevents them from being introduced to the hidden recesses of this Palace. Moreover, no equally seducing cloud original: "glaucoma" is cast before the eyes of those who lead their spirit to embrace this Sophia Wisdom. For this Sophia is so fortified and immersed in labyrinthine passages that, unless the Ariadnean thread is offered to them by God, they lose their oil and their labor. Those, however, who seek the way to arrive at these golden Sanctuaries of the inner Palace are divided by us into three classes. The first class comprises those to whom, from the Supreme Divinity by singular mercy, access is granted into the Sanctuary of Nature, and it is given to them to kiss chaste Wisdom with a chaste kiss, which also receives her suitors like sincere worshipers of God into her embraces with open arms, and never allows them to be torn away from her, but enters into an indissoluble marriage with her suitors, and with them, before the tribunal of the mercy of the Most Holy Trinity, she kneels and prays with a devout mind day and night. And these are they who firmly follow the dictate of Nature, and depend upon no authority of authors, or of men of illustrious and renowned fame and great name, even if they are saluted as the lights of the world and the Divinities of the learned circle by their parasites. Since this sentiment occupies their mind to the marrow: The matter 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 matter of the L. P. Philosopher's Stone 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 into the other, and one passes into the other, as if by a magnetic and fatal attraction, not otherwise than as water into water, nay, as thirsty earth drinks and imbibes water; so also does the philosophical earth imbibe the philosophical water, and water and earth pass into one body.

§. 2. The common herd of Doctors and Philosophers adheres to this opinion: that these two ingredients for the composition of the L. P. differ from each other by the whole heavens, and between them an indissoluble bond can never be made, which the power of Vulcan fire might not easily break and thus sequester them from each other, so that two distinct entities remain, endowed with distinct attributes and predicates.