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form it, which consists of the five last chapters. That investigation I begin with Reason, which keeps me busy therewith until the eighth chapter, and in the rest I use nothing but pure Scripture.

The beginning of everything I place in the distinction of names, determining beforehand, to avoid misunderstanding, what is to be understood by Spirit and Body. This is in the first chapter. Thereafter in the second, I speak of GOD: not only proving that what we understand by that name is no more than one; but also that there is not the least community of essence between him and the creature. I directly contradict Spinosa Baruch Spinoza in this; and much more than the operation of the Spirits who are created, which is usually asserted from God's all-perfect and incomprehensible essence. This I entirely reject, as a matter that most causes us to wander in this investigation. And therefore the arguments taken from God's nature do not hold for me to show what a Spirit, which is his creature and has no more than the name in common with him, can perform. From God's extreme perfection I then subsequently prove in the third chapter that such Spirits as the Heathens hold for Gods and Mediators of men with the highest Deity never exist: because the reasons they draw from God's perfection for that belief are contrary to God's perfection.

Those imagined Spirits being thus set aside, I come to those which we know for certain exist: namely our Souls, being a part of us, and thus best known through own consciousness. Of these I treat in the fourth chapter: and prove as best I can the immortality of the same, and that it must exist within the Body. And this I derive from two grounds: from Reason and from the Scripture; since the Soul must be known to us through both ways. Through the first from consciousness and experience; and through the other, because it concerns the state of Souls after this life, of which God's Word primarily instructs us. But in this part of my treatise, where I proceed with Nature alone, I do not bring in the Scripture: in the following part I did not find it necessary, because there it is a matter upon which a Christian stands firm and presupposes, when he wishes to dispute the matter I am treating. But what has been invented by Men outside of that, and first of all in Heathendom, all that I throw out as

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as superstition and fiction: and such is in the fifth chapter. Thus we have then certainly learned of such a Spirit which truly is, has a Body, and does not live without a Body; as well as the others of the group, which all the world falsely believes in.

But outside of those opinions of Heathendom, we nonetheless hear mention of Angels; to which not only Christians, but also Jews and Muslims original: "Mahometanen" adhere. The question is whether one can know through bare Reason that such Spirits, having no body of their own, are in essence. Concerning that I show in the same chapter that we, with our understanding, without the help of the divine Scripture, get no further than to see the possibility thereof; but not that they certainly exist. For that reason I did not find it necessary in the first part to investigate the operations of such Spirits upon bodies, or upon other spirits; since it seems foolish to concern oneself with the actions of such creatures of which one does not even know if they are in the world. For which reason I also in the first edition only mentioned something of it in passing with one verse, namely section 7 in the 6th chapter. See how far it is from the truth, which nonetheless everyone assumes as fixed, that I would have made my work to deny the operations of Spirits upon bodies and other Spirits: and even further, that I would ground all my interpretations of scriptural passages upon that denial. But after I have been continually so plagued about it: I finally decided, upon reprinting, to insert an entire chapter between the 6th and 7th: which is now the seventh, and the seventh is the eighth, and so on. Therein I then intend to show that the proof given for it is not applicable, and that a true proof is lacking here. But all this, so far as Nature is concerned, and human Reason can understand without the help of God's Word.

I then go there: and subsequently do not concern myself with Reason, but only with the Scripture. First I look for such Spirits, as said, in the Scripture: and find that it signifies them to us under this Name of ANGELS, which gives us to understand their service on God's behalf concerning other creatures, but not their essence. The Scripture also does not relate to us their Origin in creation, nor how that fall happened, through which a part of them were already estranged from God in the beginning: nonetheless it establishes