Basil Valentine: Last Will & Testament (1671)

The Preface.

groping ways, has caused me to do so. I am not able to express how much my mind is perplexed when I think on the folly of this frail world and consider the CymmerianReferring to the Cimmerians, a mythical people described by Homer as living in perpetual darkness. darkness of its children, who think themselves of deep understanding when they have heard some nonsense from their university professors, thereby supposing to be much enlightened in their understandings. Where is that high and precious medicine of the ancient philosophers, who lived before any university was talked or heard of, who received their revelations upon an earnest, pious prayer unto God, joining thereunto their daily searchings into natural things and laying their hands to the work? Whither, I say, is their painfulness and industry fled? Surely to no other place than to the horrid, impure, and sordid apothecaries' shops, deeply precipitated and buried in the earth, and sunk so deep that neither the ringing or sounding of bells, nor the beating of mortars are able to rouse it. Thus their praise and the glory of the Highest is at a stand! And who produces any good of it? Thus much am I persuaded, that if my writings shall be produced to light after my death, and the judicious posterity and disciples of them do rightly read, meditate, and understand them well, and do, out of a Christian intention, seek, dive, and work the same only to the glory of God and the love and charity of their fellow brethren and Christians, then by means of their actions and works, that depend from such good and proper fundamentals, will be discovered and laid open to the public view all those foolish antics and forgeries which these loud-mouthed, vain-glorious fellows and high-conceited fools—who proclaim themselves to be the sole physicians and masters of both medicines, that is, of the inward and outward—arrogate to themselves great dignities and