of this volume is prepared: Mephostophiles taking breath a little, presented his speech saying: it is said likewise. _Factum est autem vt moreretur mendicus, etc. And it came to pass that the beggar died, and was carried away of Angels into Abraham’s bosom, and that rich man died and was buried, and he being in Hell lifted up his eyes, when he was in torments, and saw Abraham afar off and Lazarus in his bosom._ Nor nothing doth that impugn which is said of the Papist, that he cannot come into God’s presence nor be one of the elect unless they be purified from their sins, for which purification, they ordain a place so terribly stuck with pins, needles, daggers, swords, nails, etc., so soultring[56] with hot burning furnaces, and so every way formidable with material sulphury fires, that no tongue can express, nor any heart imagine, wherein the sinful soul must be many times and often cleansed, but I hope if this were true then Lazarus should have been likewise so dressed in their terrible imagined terrors, which he was not, unless they will be so impudent to say that he had no sin. I shall not need to dispute how absurd it is to say that the sin of the soul in the body committed, must be extirpated and purified by a material substance and rigour, nor of the matter of the like argument. And hereupon he seemed to sigh as if some sudden thought had overpressed his stomach. I can, quoth he, largely discourse of all divine and human propositions, but as the unlearned Parrot who speaketh oft and much, and understandeth never anything to profit himself. Ah that unto us Spirits no secrets are secret, no doings of man unhid, and yet we Devils cursed of God are incapable of any of God’s mercies, though through them we were created. We know repentance is the way to attain the celestial favour: we know God’s mercies how great they are, and that we ought to despair of nothing, yet there is nothing (such is our seeing blindness) so it appertain to God and godliness, of which we do not despair. No, Wagner, we are so far from living again, as we are from certainty to be saved. But instead of that we are crossed with all kind of vexation, for since the first time that I with my Master and fellows fell down from heaven, being of the most royal order of Angels, Potestates, Cherubins, and Seraphins, riding upon the wrings of the Wind in all bright shining Majesty, and enjoying the most glorious and divine presence of our Creator, till for our heart-swelling pride, and haughty insolency, within as little space of time as we were created in, with his dreadful lightning threw us down headlong into the bottomless Abysses of the Air, wherein we endure these tortures and like wicked souls with us, as our manifold deserts have brought upon us. And for that we know that the way to mercy is utterly denied, and that we are as much hated of ourselves as of God, we think it the sweetest remedy in these manifold miseries to have partakers of our common woe with us. Wherefore it