Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence

acknowledge ourselves great sinners, then we will invocate the holy mother of Christ, and his disciples, that they may pray for us, that so our sins may not be known. When we go in pilgrimage (to honour them) and perform divine service, or worship, then she will make intercession, and speak to her Son for us, and pray for us, so that we may thus (in her service) be holy ; and though we stick continually in bestial lechery, self-honour, and voluptuousness, yet that is no matter, we have the keys of Peter, and the mother of Christ for our assistance.

69. [Thus it is with the holy priests], as it was not Israel's meaning (in Moses) concerning the calf, to acknowledge it for a god, and to account it for the true God ; because they knew that [the calf] was gold, and that the true God had made himself known to be otherwise ; and also they had good experience [of the true God] by the wonders [which were wrought] before Pharaoh ; but they would thereby worship and reverence the absent God, and make a remembrance and worship of God for themselves : As king Jeroboam with his calfworship, where yet the honour must be l done to 1 intended the true God.

70. And as Jeroboam's calves were an abomination to God, which he yet with earnest zeal set up to serve the true God thereby, only that he might preserve his worldly kingdom, that the people might not fall from him, when they were to go up

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to Jerusalem to offer sacrifice ; and God rejected him and his whole house for it ; and as Moses came (in wrath) because of their divine service before the calf, and brake the Tables of the divine law, and took his sword, and one brother must slay the other, because of their abominations and sins of false worshipping of God ; so also (thou blind world in Babel of confusion) seeing thou art fallen away from the everywhere-present, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-hearing, all-smelling, and all-feeling Heart, Jesus Christ, and set upon thy own conceited ways, and dost not desire to see the gracious countenance itself of Jesus Christ, and wilt not lay aside thy shame and whoredom, thy appearing show of holiness or hypocrisy, thy self-conceited wilful pride, might, authority, pomp, and state, but livest in thy invented holiness, for thy pleasure, in covetousness, gormandizing, gluttony, and drunkenness, and in mere exalting of thyself in honour ; therefore the second Moses (who was promised by the first, and whom men should hear) hath broken the Or becoming Tables of his law, whereupon his precious 1incarnanan. . .

tion, suffering, death, resurrection, and entering into heaven stood, and hath stopped their entering into thy ears ; and he hath sent thee strong delusions (out of the spirit of thy own invented show of holiness) as St Paul saith ; so that thou believest the spirit of lying, and livest according to thy fleshly lust, that so thy own invented show of holiness with thy false key (which doth not openCh. 18] PROMISED SEED OF THE WOMAN 457 the suffering and dying of Jesus Christ in his death) doth deceive thyself.

71. For thou art not entered into the Father by the intercession of men, but by the precious incarnation of Jesus Christ ; and if thou dost not instantly turn in the last voice of God's call (whereas many of you have been much called) and go out from Babel, then Moses standeth in wrath, and saith, Gird every one his sword to his side, and slay his brother in Babel, and so thou destroyest thyself. For the spirit of thy own mouth will destroy thyself, so that thou shalt be no more 'called Babel, but fierceness, wrath and sword within thyself, which will consume thee, and not spare ; for thou murderest thyself, thou great wonder of the world.