The text is shown on its own: no facing layer is held for this issue.
page 47
The translator’s English as printed (A. E. Waite). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
wrangling and disputing about Divine things in a most unchristian manner, and put forth no end of manifold distinctions, divisions, and confusions, thus obscuring the Scriptural doctrine concerning the union of natures and communication of substances in Christ. If they will not believe God and His Holy Word, they might at least be enlightened by a study of our chemical Art, and ofthe union oftwo waters (viz., that of mercury and that of the Sun) which our Art so strikingly and palpably exhibits. But the scholastic wisdom of their Ethnic philosophy is entirely based upon pagan philosophy, and has no foundation in Holy Scripture or Christian Theology. "Their Aristotelian precepts, their * substances " and * accidents," entirely blind them to the true proportions of things, and they forget Tertullian's saying "that philosophers are the patriarchs of heresy." But we do not think it worth while to pursue this subject any further. Again, as our chemical compound (in which the two essences have been combined) is subjected to the action of fire, and is decomposed, dissolved, and well digested, and as this process, before its consummation, exhibits various chromatic changes, so this Divine Man, and Human God, Jesus Christ, had, by the will of His heavenly Father, to pass through the furnace of affliction, that is, through many troubles, insults, and sufferings, in the course of which His outward aspect was grievously changed ; thus He suffered hunger when, after His Baptism and EHis entrance upon the ministry of the Word, the Holy Spirit led Him into the wilderness to be tempted of the Devil, and there waged with Him a threefold contest, as an example to all baptized Christian men, who, having declared themselves followers of Christ, are, like Him, tempted, and have to sustain the shock of various grievous assaults. Again, He was subject to weariness, He shed tears, He trembled, He wrestled with death, He shed drops of sweat mingled with blood, He was taken captive and bound, was struck in the face by the high priest's servant, was mocked, derided, spitted upon, scourged, crowned with thorns, condemned to die upon the Cross, which He had to bear Himself; was nailed to it between two malefactors, received vinegar and gall to drink, cried out with a loud voice, commended His spirit into the hands of His Father—and so gave up the ghost and died upon the Cross. These and other tribulations,which are faithfully related by the Evangelists, He had to bear in the course of His earthly life.
And as the Sages say that the above mentioned process of chemical digestion is generally completed within forty days, so the same number seems to have a most peculiar significance in Scripture, more particularly in connection with the life of our Lord. The Israelites remained forty years in the wilderness ; Moses was forty days and forty nights on Mount Sinai; Elijah's flight from Ahab occupied the same length of time. Christ fasted forty days and forty nights in the wilderness; He spent forty months in preaching upon earth; He lay forty hours in the grave—appeared to His disciples forty days after His Resurrection. Within forty years from Christ's Ascension Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, and made level with the ground.
Then again, the Sages have called our compound, while undergoing the process of decomposition, the Raven's Head, on account of its blackness. In the same way, Christ (Isaiah liii.) had no form nor comeliness—was despised and rejected of men— a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief—so despised, that men hid, as it were, their faces from Him ; and in the 22nd Psalm He complains that He * is a worm, and no man," *a scorn and laughing-stock of the people." "We may also see an analogy to Christ in the fact that the decomposed body of the sun lies for some time dead and lifeless, like burnt-out ashes, at the bottom of the phial, and that its * soul" gradually descends to it under the influence of greater heat, and once more saturates, as it were, the dead and decaying body, and saves it from total destruction. For when, on the Mount of Olives, and on the Cross, Christ had experienced a feeling of utter dereliction, He was afterwards comforted and strengthened, and nourished (as it were) with Divine nectar from above. And when at length He had given up the ghost, and all the strength forsook His body, so that He went down to the parts below the earth, even there He was preserved, refreshed, and filled with the quickening power of the eternal Deity, and thus, by the reunion of His spirit with His dead body, quickened, raised from the dead, lifted up into heaven, and appointed Lord and King ofall— where, sitting at the right hand of His Father, He now rules, governs, preserves, and quickens all things with the power of
The Sophic Hydrolith reads the Stone's preparation as a figure of Christ, and here rests the parallel on a number. Because the digestion "is generally completed within forty days", the forties of Scripture are gathered as confirmation, down to the claim that Christ spent "forty months in preaching upon earth; He lay forty hours in" the grave. The list adds coincidences rather than argument. Boehme's Signature of All Things on this shelf draws the same parallel and claims more: the process of Christ and the process of the Stone, he says, differ in not the least tittle, and the forty days become a trial the work must pass or be abandoned. The Hydrolith uses the furnace to illustrate the creed; Boehme holds that furnace and creed are one process.