hall well
mark and perceive. For they wax more proud, more wayward, more
envious, suspicious, misjudging and depraving other men, with the
delight of their own praise, and such other spiritual vices of the
soul.
Of the matter may you gather, if it has happened that his
revelations before have proved false, or if they be strange things
rather than profitable ones. For that is a good mark between God's
miracles and the devil's wonders. For Christ and his saints have
their miracles always tending to fruit and profit. The devil and
his witches and necromancers, all their wonderful works tend to no
fruitful end, but to a fruitless ostentation and show, as it were
a juggler who would for a show before the people play feats of
skill at a feast.
Of the law of God you must draw your reasons in showing by the
scripture that the thing which he thinketh God biddeth by his
angel, God hath by his own mouth forbidden. And that is, you know
well, in the case that we speak of, so easy to find that I need
not to rehearse it to you. For among the Ten Commandments there is
plainly forbidden the unlawful killing of any man, and therefore
of himself, as (St. Austine saith) all the church teacheth, unless
he himself be no man.
VINCENT: This is very true, good uncle, nor will I dispute upon
any glossing of that prohibition. But since we find not the
contrary but that God may dispense with that commandment himself,
and both license and command also, if he himself wish, any man to
go kill either another man or himself, this man who is now by such
a marvellous vision induced to believe that God so biddeth him,
and therefore thinketh himself in that case discharged of that
prohibition and charged with the contrary commandment--with what
reason can we make him perceive that his vision is but an illusion
and not a true revelation?
ANTHONY: Nay, Cousin Vincent, you shall in this case not need to
ask those reasons of me. But taking the scripture of God for a
ground for this matter, you know very well yourself that you shall
go somewhat a shorter way to work if you ask this question of him:
Since God hath forbidden once the thing himself, though he may
dispense with it if he will, yet since the devil may feign himself
God and with a marvellous vision delude one, and make as though
God did it; and since the devil is also more likely to speak
against God's commandment than God against his own; you shall have
good cause, I say, to demand of
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