Theatrum chemicum, praecipuos selectorum auctorum tractatus de chemiae et lapidis philosophici antiquitate, veritate, iure, praestantia, & operationibus, continens: in gratiam verae chemiae, et medicinae chemicae studiosorum ... congestum, et in sex partes seu volumina digestum; singulis voluminibus, suo auctorum et librorum catalogo primis pagellis: rerum vero & verborum indice postremis annexo. Volumen primum [- sextum]

Sieve his things seven times. Jo. Dastin lib. 3. Fix with spirit seven times.

For by that sublimation, indeed repeated seven times or more often, silver (which by its own nature is more impure and imperfect than gold) can be rendered much more perfect than any natural or common gold. And do not understand this perfection and purity to come to it by fusion alone. For if you were to examine it with the greatest diligence often and more often in the fire, you would not on that account render it more perfect or purer than natural gold, unless you rightly use that Chemical sublimation repeated seven times or more. For that reason, therefore, that simile is most true, by which the prophet David compared the true and sincere words of God to such silver purified and prepared by the Chemical art rather than to natural or common gold. For that gold, although it is esteemed as pure and perfect among all metals, nevertheless contains some dross, albeit few, heterogeneous in itself. Otherwise, the prophet would have compared the sincere words of God to gold rather than to silver.

PROSE, which is sung by the church on the holy day of St. John the Evangelist in the month of December, by Adam of Saint Victor. The beginning of which is. Let us rejoice on the festive day, &c.

When he had solidified the broken parts of gems, he distributed them to three poor men.
He carries an inexhaustible treasure, he who made gold from rods, gems from stones.

For the divine John the Evangelist is enumerated by Avicenna in the book On the Soul, first diction, at the end of the seventh chapter, and by Vincent, in the Speculum Naturale Mirror of Nature, among the Christians who practiced the Chemical art.

HERMES the Egyptian, whom they call Trismegistus.

Obscurity, that is, poverty and sickness.

True, without falsehood, certain, most true. That which is above is as that which is below: and that which is below is as that which is above, for the perpetrating of the miracles of one thing. Its father is the sun: its mother is the moon. The wind has carried it in its belly. Its nurse is the earth. And its power is entire, if it has been turned into earth. Thus you will have the glory of the brightness of the whole world: Therefore all obscurity will flee from you, &c.

B. THO. Aquinas in 2. 2. q. 77. article 2.

If, however, true gold were made through Alchemy, it would not be illicit to sell it for true. Because nothing prohibits the art from using some natural causes to produce natural and true effects: just as Augustine says in the 3rd book On the Trinity concerning those things which are made by the art of demons.

The same in the beginning of lib. 4. Meteor.

The chief scope of the Alchemists is to transmute metals, namely the imperfect, according to truth, and not sophistically.