The New Olympic and Blessed Rosary

loving world regulates itself, and boasts of great, high wisdom and gifts, and thereby swaggers and parades, and lets itself believe as if the heavens would fall down if they were not there: and yet it is all together but a false, pagan, deadly philosophy, and before the face of God, a horrible sin, a stinking, conceited wisdom which is mere foolishness before Him, as Paul says, and can never again stand before the throne of God or dare to show itself. So also are there many stinking, foul, moldy cisterns, pools, and puddles that flow out of the dead sea and the dark kingdom of Satan, in which there is nothing but devilish poison and gall. Yes, many thousands of people drink of it, ignorant and in great blindness, both temporal and eternal death, and yet they hold them for healthy, wholesome wells and water springs.

After I, from my youth up, have searched with great diligence and earnestness for such a well of truth and living water springs of true wisdom and philosophy: I have indeed myself been directed and drawn all the way to the foul, disgusting, stinking puddles of the presumed world-wise philosophy and arts, but nevertheless, through Divine gracious Providence and the drawing of the Heavenly Father, I have been paternally redeemed and turned away from such murky, dark cisterns: and finally attained to the highly enlightened philosopher and Monarch of the Arts THEOPHRASTUS Paracelsus, who explained and laid out to me the light of nature from a true foundation fundamentally, in Astronomy, Philosophy, Magic, and Cabalistic Theology, which foundation can never be contradicted in eternity: And then also attained to Him who speaks in the New Testament, John chapter 4, to the Samaritan woman, that HE can give living water: and to whom He shall give such, it shall become in him a well of water, and spring up into Eternal Life: and whoever shall drink of this water, him it shall never again thirst. Item: To Him, of whom the