Nine Books on the Dignity and Advancement of Learning

the proposals read to you that have been presented for the good of his Majesty's affairs. I can assure this truth: since it has pleased you, MY LORD, to honor me sometimes with such an agreeable commission.

The ninth, and which closes the entire Work, as if by way of a vow, gives a particular opening to that which is defective in the legitimate and permitted use of reason, touching upon things that regard Divinity. But I have heard you speak of it with so much address and firmness, that I can believe that you are capable of providing its true precepts. The excellent reasoning that I heard you make not long ago on the passage of the Scripture, where it is said that Elisha received the double spirit of his master Elijah, made me know that you understood perfectly well the emanation of the Binary which departs from the Unity; and which for this falling rendered double the spirit of Elisha, as depending on that of Elijah; just as that most learned and most religious Prelate (who joined the Hebrew Cabala with the sound resolutions of Christian Theology) had first touched upon something by way of table conversation. I was also struck with astonishment when I heard you apply it to what he was saying: That the division of the spirit of Moses to the Seventy the elders of Israel, who governed after him the children of Israel, signified the participation of his spirit and not its disunion, or its sharing: In the same sort, you added, that a single torch can light a hundred, even though it loses nothing of its light, nor of its brightness. What was that to say other than that you penetrated to the depths of this secret of the Old Testament?

But I am very glad to finish with this last Book, since I have exhausted this little that I had of words; in order to say only