Cosmologia Sacra

of any other book, has at any time occasioned the omission of my duty to the sick. It is very well known that there is no one physician in London at this day but has his spare hours. And I will take it as excusable if I have dedicated my own unto this work. And having addicted myself to the contemplation of nature from my youth upward, as I hoped I was in some measure qualified for an essay of this kind, so I concluded the applying of my small talent hereunto to be the best use I should ever be able to make of it. I had therefore nothing further to think of but endeavouring that the performance might, in some degree, answer the proposed end.

For this, I intended at first only a few sheets. But looking further, I saw it necessary to proceed from the beginning of things, hereby the better to show that there is nothing contained in the Holy Scriptures concerning God or man, the visible or invisible world, but what is agreeable unto right reason.

The first chapter, concerning God, I have comprised in as few words as I could, suitable to a subject of all others the most sublime. In which I have demonstrated the nature of God a priori, viz., from the necessity of his being; in the following chapters, a posteriori, or from the universe, his handy-work. And whereas the being of the Sacred Trinity is thought by some to be impossible, I have proved, on the contrary, in four or five paragraphs, that we cannot have a due conception of the Deity without it.

Of the second chapter, concerning the corporeal world, having neither health, nor leisure, nor convenience for the making of nocturnal and other celestial observations, I have taken the greater part from the best astronomers of the present age, not omitting to intermix such remarks of my own as are proper to the scope I aim at.