r God dwells in every visible work or body. Indeed,
if you would know spiritual things, it is to know how the Spirit or
Power of Wisdom and Life, causing motion or growth, dwells within
and governs both the several bodies of the stars and planets in the
heavens above, and the several bodies of the earth below, as grass,
plants, fishes, beasts, birds and mankind. For to reach God beyond
the Creation, or to know what he will be to a man after the man is
dead, if any otherwise than to scatter him into his essences of
fire, water, earth and air, of which he is composed, is a knowledge
beyond the line or capacity of man to attain to while he lives in
his compounded body. And if a man should go to imagine what God is
beyond the Creation, or what he will be in a spiritual
demonstration after a man is dead, he doth, as the proverb saith,
but build castles in the air, or tells us of a world beyond the
Moon or beyond the Sun, merely to blind the reason of man.

"'I'll appeal to yourself in this question, What other knowledge
have you of God but what you have within the circle of the
Creation? For if the Creation in all its dimensions be the fullness
of Him that fills all with Himself; and if you yourself be part of
this Creation: where can you find God but in that line or station
wherein you stand? God manifests Himself in actual Knowledge, not
in Imagination. He is still in motion, either in bodies upon earth
or in the bodies in the heavens, or in both; in the night and in
the day, in Winter, in Summer, in cold, in heat, in growth or not
in growth.'"

THE CAUSE OF IGNORANCE, EVIL AND SORROWS.

"But when a studying imagination comes into man, which is the
devil, for it is the cause of all evil and sorrows in the world;
that is he who puts out the eyes of man's knowledge, and tells him
he must believe what others have writ or spoke, and must not trust
to his own experience. And when this bewitching fancy sits in the
Chair of Government, there is nothing but saying and unsaying,
frowardness, covetousness, fears, confused thoughts, and
unsatisfied doubtings, all the days of that man's reign in the
heart."

EXAMINE THE WAYS OF MEN, NOT ONLY THEIR PRECEPTS.

"Or, secondly, examine yourself and look likewise into the ways of
all Professors, and you shall