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58
HISTORY OF THE ROSICRUC1ANS.
earth onely to extirpate those discomposed and wilde wits,
those untunable and bloodthirsty souls, those heterodox
and phantastick brains, who, being of a depraved judgment,
are nothing-but mad men, whose ambition was boundless,
and pride without end, and that when mankind should,
through their demerits, become unworthy of any mercy
from the Almighty, He would be pleased to punish them
with the scourges of plague, sword, and famine, rather than
to deliver mankind unto the good will and pleasure of those
insolent and wicked rulers, who, being composed of nothing
but blind zeal and diabolical folly, would pull the world in
pieces if they could compass the bestial caprices they hourly
hatch in their heads.
Cato's opinion had this unlucky end, when Seneca thus
"
Rough dealing is not so greatly requisite in
began :
Deformation as would seem by many of your discourses,
especially when disorders have grown to so great a height;
on the contrary, they ought, like wounds which are subject
to convulsions, to be drest with a light
hand. It is a
scandal to the physitian that the patient should die with
his prescriptions ir! his body, since all men will conclude
that the medecine hath done him more harm then his
malady. It is a rash advice to go from one extreme to
another, passing by the due medium ; man's nature is not
capable of violent mutations., and if it be true that the
world hath been falling many thousand years into the pre-
sent infirmities, he is a very fool who thinks to restore it
to health in a few days. Moreover, in reformation the
conditions of those who do reform, and the qualities of
those that are to be reformed, ought to be exactly con-
sidered. We that are the reformers are philosophers and
men of learning, and if those to be reformed be onely