suggests that the way of wisdom consists in making the "I believe" of the Church "neither a fetter nor a scandel." "May I be," he says, "in the bed-route of those Seekers that, distrusting the known and experienced deceits of their own Reason, walk unfettered in the quest of truth, . . . not hunting those poor soules with Dogge and speare whose dimme sight hath led them into desert and unbeated {210} paths." This was in all probability the Justice Hotham of whom George Fox wrote: "He was a pretty tender man yt had had some experiences of God's workeinge in his hearte: & after yt I had some discourse with him off ye things of God hee tooke mee Into his Closett & saide _hee had knowne yt principle_ [of the Light] _this 10 yeere_: & hee was glad yt ye Lorde did now publish it abroade to ye people."[2] Like his Teutonic master, Justice Hotham distrusts Reason and Sense as spiritual guides. They are at best, he says, "but guides of the night, dim lights set up, far distant from Truth's stately mansion, to lead poor groping souls in this world's affairs." The surer Guide is within the soul itself, for the soul of man, he insists, has "a noble descent from eternal essences" and "our nobel Genealogy should mind us of our Father's House and make us weary of tutelage under hairy Faunes and cloven-footed Satyres."[3] He shows that he has lost all interest in theological speculations that assume a God remote in time and space, a God who once created a world and left it to go to ruin. He reminds his readers that the God in whom he believes is "yet alive and still speaks."[4] In the light of this Preface, in which he declares that he has "suckt in truth from divinest philosophy" from his childhood, it is not strange that he welcomed Fox, when the latter appeared in Yorkshire in 1651, proclaiming an inward Light and a present God near at hand, nor is it surprising that Hotham said to the young prophet of the inward Guide: "If God had not raised uppe this principle of light and life, ye nation had beene overspread with rantism . . . but this principle of truth overthrew ye roote & grounde of there [_i.e._ the Ranters'] principle."[5] The enthusiasm of Justice Hotham for his Teutonic master gets fervid expression at the end of his Preface as follows: "Whatever the thrice great Hermes [Hermes Trismegistus] delivered as oracles from his prophetical tripos, or Pythagoras spake by authority or {211} Socrates debated or Aristotle affirmed; yea, whatever divine Plato prophesied or Plotinus proved: this and all this, or a far higher and profounder philosophy is (I think) contained in the Teutonick's writings. And if there be any friendly medium which can possibly reconcile these ancient differences between the nobler wisdom which hath fixt her Palace in Holy Writ and her stubborn handmaid, Naturall Reason: this happy marriage of the Spirit and Soul, this wonderful consent of discords in one harmony, we owe in great measure to Teutonicus his skill!"