i. e. As Alexander the great, in the time of his minority, was
heaping incense upon the altars, even to a degree of religious
prodigality, his preceptor Leonidas told him, that he should prefer
his supplications to the Gods after that free manner, when he had
subdued the nations, whose produce was frankincense. And he, as soon
as he had made himself master of Arabia, sent him accordingly a ship
laden with incense, and with it ample exhortations to adore the Gods.
One says, why should one think the intellectual world less peopled
than the material? Pliny, in his Natural History, lib. --- cap. -
tells us that in Africa, do sometimes appear multitudes of aerial
shapes, which suddenly vanish. Mr. Richard Baxter in his Certainty
of the Worlds of Spirits, (the last book he writ, not long before his
death) hath a discourse of angels; and wonders they are so little
taken notice of; he hath counted in Newman's Concordance of the Bible,
the word angel, in above three hundred places.
Hugo Grotius in his Annotations on Jonah, speaking of Niniveh, says,
that history has divers examples, that after a great and hearty
humiliation, God delivered cities, &c. from their calamities. Some did
observe in the late civil wars, that the Parliament, after a
humiliation, did shortly obtain a victory. And as a three-fold chord
is not easily broken, so when a whole nation shall conjoin in fervent
prayer and supplication, it shall produce wonderful effects. William
Laud, Arch-Bishop of Canterbury, in a sermon preached before the
Parliament, about the beginning of the reign of King Charles I.
affirms the power of prayer to be so great, that though there be a
conjunction or opposition of Saturn or Mars, (as there was one of them
then) it will overcome the malignity of it. In the life of Vavasor
Powel, is a memorable account of the effect of fervent prayer, after an
exceeding drought: and Mr. Baxter (in his book aforementioned) hath
several instances of that kind, which see.
**St. Michael and all Angels.
The Collect.
0 everlasting God, who hast ordered and constituted the services of
men and angels, after a wonderful manner: mercifully grant, that as
thy holy angels always do thee service in Heaven: so by thy
appointment, they may succour and defend us, through Jesus Christ our
Lord. Amen.
CORPS-CANDLES IN WALES.
**Part of a Letter to MR. BAXTER.
SIR
I AM to give you the best satisfaction I can touching those fiery
apparitions* (Corps Candles) which do as it were mark out the way for
corpses to their {Greek text: Koimeterion} and sometimes before the
parties themselves fall sick, and sometimes in their sickness. I could
never hear in England of these, they are common in these three
counties, viz. Cardigan, Carmarthen, and Pembroke, and as I hear in
some other parts of Wales.**
* Mr. Baxter's Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits, p. 137.
** And Radnor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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