A Miracle of Engineering:The Conversion of Bensalem in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis

From Studies in Philology, Volume LXXXVII, No.2, Copyright (c)by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by Permission of the Publisher.

Sir Thomas More's Utopia can be profitably contrasted with Sir Francis Bacon's New Atlantis by comparing the way in which the two imagined countries receive Christianity. In Utopia, Christian missionaries arrive and make a certain amount of progress; as a result, Christianity is one of a number of religions professed in the island, with mutual toleration and no conflicts, when Raphael Hythlodaye arrives there.In Bensalem, on the contrary, the country is uniformly Christian,and its explorers learn the fact before they even go ashore, from the insignium of a cross on the letter of warning and greeting sent out to them with an emissary in a boat. Their first question to the governor of the island, as soon as they are in a position to ask him questions, is, "Who was the apostle of that nation, and how it was converted to the faith?"(1)In answer the governor explains that , within twenty years after Christ's death (hence more than five centuries before the conversion of England by St. Augustine of Canterbury) Bensalem had been instantly and totally converted to Christianity by the apostle St. Bartholomew. This apostle, however, had not appeared in person; he had only written a letter, which was then, along with the Bible, commended in absentiato the Bensalemites by means of a stupendous miracle. Bacon's solicitude on this point reflects the concerns of an epoch of religious wars. More's book had appeared just one year before Luther inaugurated this epoch with his attack on indulgences; Bacon's came after Henry VIII's break with Rome, Mary's reaction, Knox's overthrow of Mary Queen of Scots, Philip II's attack on England, and James I's vow to make the Puritans conform or harry them out of the land; and it came, moreover, just as the age of religious wars was beginning its most ghastly phase with the commencement in Germany of the hostilities that were to become the Thirty Years' War. In the midst of such events the cheerful anarchy of More's fiction must have seemed utopian in the very worst sense of the word.

The description of the miracle has usually been passed over in impatient silence by readers eager to reach the prophecy of modern science in the description of Salomon's House. But I wish to argue that this miracle is as prophetic as anything in Salomon's House; for is it not a commonplace that the age of religious controversies had to end before the enlightenment could begin?Thomas Sprat is careful to point out that the group which ultimately became the Royal Society found it necessary, as a precondition of its meetings, expressly to forbid theological discussions(2). We all know that this religious debate ended like the Battle of Verdun, in sheer weariness and sickness of bloodshed. But if Bacon had the humanity to wish for, or at least dream of, the rise of modern science in a peaceful Protestant Europe rather than on a bloodstained ash-heap, he had to presuppose a miracle very like this one.It may not be too much to say that this is the only miracle he could possibly have imagined.

The Roman Catholic doctrine of miracles was, and is, that they are a consequence of sanctity, one of the four notes of the church. From the miracles performed by Moses, through those of other patriarchs and prophets, through the miracle of Cana and other thaumaturgical feats of Jesus of Nazareth, through St. Peter's healing of the sick inadvertantly by casting his shadow on them, through the wondrous works wrought by Augustine, Cyprian, Jerome and Gregory, through the interminable pageant of the Acta Sanctorumand the Counter-Reformation extravaganzas of Peter of Alcantara and Teresa of Avila, a continuous unbroken stream of miracles runs on to the mysterious recovery, in 1960, in a convent in St. Louis, of Sister Boniface Dyrda from lupus, that being the event which has since resulted in the beatification of Father Junipero Serra.(3)

This doctrine of miracles consists with the well-known fact that, in effect, pre-and Counter-Reformation Catholicism based the certitudo salutis, or the individual's assurance on being numbered among the elect, on membership in the church and participation in the sacraments. Thus the miracle, the irrefutable proof of God's sponsorship, had to belong to, and manifest itself in, a visible organization and to be as ubiquitous and perennial as the organization itself.

The Protestant, in contrast, based the certitudo salutison God's predestination. But how to know that this predestination had been rightly understood, both in general and in the election of a particular individual, oneself?Clearly it was not an organization but a doctrine that had to be proven divine. That could be done more or less conclusively by demonstrating that the doctrine was entirely derived from the Bible , a logic that pushed the problem of authentication back on step. It now appeared that the only function of a miracle was to prove the divine authorship of the Bible.

To the Protestant, the huge array of popish miracles, including many quite recent if not actually contemporary, resembled Spenser's House of Pride--massive and high-built,but resting on sand and shaken by the slightest breeze. The reformers attacked it at its most vulnerable points. Boxley Abbey in Kent was famous for a miraculous crucifix whose corpus nodded approvingly or frowned accordingly as pilgrims' offerings to it were generous or meager. During Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, this cross was removed from the chapel wall and found to be (of course) a huge puppet operated with wires and wheels; it was taken to London, publicly displayed, and destroyed with suitable jubilation and sarcasm.(4)

Bacon, however, was not so carried away by the pleasures of debunking as to ignore the harm done to Christendom by the medieval miracle stories. In The Advancement of Learninghe laments that their exposure as "old wives' fables, impostures of the clergy, illusions of spirits, and badges of antichrist" had been "to the great scandal and detriment of religion" (Works,VI, 126).

The Catholics counterattacked with brand-new miracles in Europe and in Goa, India, Brazil, Argentina, and Canada , in many respects outdoing the dated ones in the Golden Legend and other medieval hagiographies. Those attributed to Sts. Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier moved a nineteenth-century Anglican, Richard Chenevix Trench, to typical indignation:

Upwards of two hundred miracles of Loyola were laid before the Pope, when his canonization was in question--miracles beside which, those of our Lord shrink into insignificance. If Christ by his word and look rebuked and expelled demons, Ignatius did the same by a letter. If Christ walked once upon the sea, Ignatius many times in the air. If Christ, by his shining countenance and glistening garments, once amazed his disciples, Ignatius did it frequently; and entering into dark chambers, could, by his presence, light them as with candles.If the sacred history talks ofthreepersons whom Christ raised from the dead, the number which Xavier raised exceeds all count.(5)

But the Anglicans' outrage at these tall tales was at times tinged with envy. "That may have some truth in it, "wrote Sir Thomas Browne, "that is reported by the Jesuites of their Miracles in the Indies; I could wish it was true, or had any other testimony than their own Pens."(6)

The Roman Catholic excess in the quantity and the astounding quality of their sixteenth-century miracles has, in common with the Anglican envy of it, a motivation so deeply shocking that neither confession felt able to express it in so many words: in order to provide adequate authentication for the church on the one hand, or the Bible on the other, one must improve on Christ and on his apostles.

[A]ll we that are Christians, ought assuredly to know that since the comming of Christ in the flesh, and establishing of his Church by the Apostles, all miracles, visions, prophecies, and appearances of angels or good spirites are ceased. Which served only for the first sowing of faith....(7)

So wrote James I. Given the need to establish the Bible, and not the church; and given also the ridicule by almost all Protestants of almost all miracles of medieval and post-medieval date, this was virtually the only position he was free to take. It would have been a tactically insane move to lay oneself open to equal counter-ridicule by setting up one, or a series of Protestant miracles to validate, let us say, the Augsburg Confession or the XXXIX Articles (though Lord Herbert of Cherbury very timidly made an essay in that direction to commend his De Veritate.(8)

The movement whose special circumstances proved the rule about modern miracles was Jansenism. Protestant in theology, yet deeply imbued with a Roman Catholic horror of schism, and only wishing to argue that their faith was that of Augustine of Hippo, and hence the true Catholic one from which Rome itself had unfortunately but not irretrievably strayed, the Jansenists produced an impressive series of miraculous cures in the Cemetery of St. Medard in Paris. The Jesuits, alarmed at such a frank proposal to beat them at their own game, procured a royal edict closing the cemetery, and a wag posted on its gate the verse:"De par le roi, Defense a Dieu, De faire miracles, En ce lieu."(9)

The Protestants thus founded their doctrine solidly on a Cessation of Miracles, either at the death of the last apostle(ca.100 A.D.)at the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity (313 A.D.), or at the extinction of the Arian heresy (ca.630 A.D.). (10) The first date consists with the doctrine, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, that the prerogative of announcing truths necessary to salvation ended with the apostles and was succeeded only by the right and duty to expound what had already been delivered, the depositum fidei; no further teaching to be confirmed implies no further miracles to confirm it. The second and third dates follow from the notion that miracles were wanted to confirm the true faith until it was strong enough to stand by itself, either until it had defenders more impressive from a worldly point of view than illiterate fishermen and tentmakersor until it was no longer opposed by heretical kingdoms and armies. But all versions of the Cessation of Miracles entail serious difficulties.

The first of these is that the Cessation of Miracles is not in the Bible.Jesus does indeed grant his apostles the power of casting out demons, healing the sick, and raising the dead, but he fails to mention that this power will ever be withdrawn, either from them or their successors. St. Paul does indeed warn his proselytes that Satan can perform signs and wonders able, if it were possible, to deceive even the elect; and the Protestants loved to use this text as a salutary warning against the prestige of popish miracles.But, Paul's words unfortunately imply that the elect will, and should, look for authentic signs and wonders as confirmations that a given doctrine is of God.So the Protestant, to establish the supremacy of the Bible, and nothing but the Bible, must resort to a doctrine taken from some other source.

The second difficulty is that all but the most extreme protestants wished to argue the identity of their doctrine with that of Augustine of Hippo (354-430 A.D.);indeed, in his stress on the unconditional nature of divine predestination, John Calvin was, and he gloried in the fact, little more than Augustine redivivus(11). Moreover, Anglicans such as Joseph Hall, who wished to base the order of bishops in their church on apostolic succession rather than on (increasingly unreliable) parliamentary legislation, wished to regard the Apostle of the English, Augustine of Canterbury (d.604 A.D.), as a messenger of Christ rather than a limb of antichrist.A glance at these dates will suggest that a Protestant devoted to the first Augustine, only, will choose the Conversion of the Empire as the optimal moment for the Cessation of Miracles; and a Protestant devoted to both of them will choose the Extinction of Arianism.

Sir Thomas Browne candidly acknowledges his embarrassment:

That Miracles are ceased, I can neither prove, nor absolutely deny, much less define the time and period of their cessation. That they survived Christ, is manifest upon Record of Scripture;that they out-lived the Apostles also, and were revived at the Conversion of Nations many yeares after, we cannot deny, if we shall not question those Writers whose testimonies we do not controvert in points that make for our own opinions. Therefore that may have some Truth in it that is reported by the Jesuites... [and so on as quoted above.]

And thus, his reflections on the Cessation of Miracles having led him halfway to Rome, he wanders off into a literary digression and leaves the question hanging.

To express the manner in which the Cessation of Miracles leads to atheism, nothing can surpass the suave contempt of Gibbon.

From the first of the fathers to the last of the popes, a succession of bishops, of saints, of martyrs and of miracles is continued without interruption, and the progress of superstition was so gradual and almost imperceptible that we know not in what particular link we should break the chain of tradition. Every age bears testimony to the wonderful events by which it was distinguished, and its testimony appears no less weighty and respectable than that of the preceding generation, till we are insensibly led on to accuse our own inconsistency, if in the eighth or the twelfth century we deny to the venerable Bede, or to the holy Bernard, the same degree of confidence which, in the second century, we had so liberally granted to Justin or to Irenaeus....Whatever era is chosen for[the Cessation of Miracles]...the insensibility of the Christians who lived at that time will equally afford a just matter of surprise. They still supported their pretensions after they had lost their power. Credulity performed the office of faith; fanaticism was permitted to assume the language of inspiration, and the effects of accident or contrivance were ascribed to supernatural causes.(12)

The third difficulty in the Cessation-of-Miracles idea is that the decision of the synods of Rome and Carthage (382 A.D.;397 A.D.), fixing the canon of the Bible, and thus admitting so dubious a document as the Revelation of John the Divine to be the word of God, while rejecting, for example, the comparatively sober Gospel of Papias,must itself have been divinely inspired and so needs a miracle to confirm it. And whatever document establishes that miracle also needs to be confirmed. The Protestant, in fact, had involved himself into an obvious infinite-regression paradox. Every miracle must have a document and every document another miracle till the series terminates in a miracle that needs no confirmation because it happens right here and right now. Perhaps that simple exercise in logic created the Roman Catholic doctrine in the first place.

But the situation is no mere dilemma, for a third option presents itself. The miracle that confirms everything--the divine origin of the Bible as it stands, the truth of Calvin's ideas, the election of oneself--can be taken to be the working of God's spirit right here and right now in the believer's heart, bringing with it irresistible certainty of these things;that inward stirring which also told Cromwell on one occasion that he must execute King Charles and, on another, and much more unarguably from where we sit, told him that the New Model Army was about to win the Battle of Dunbar. This was the enthusiasmso execrated by the Restoration and eighteenth-century Anglicans.

Thus, about 1616, when Bacon planned New Atlantis, he saw England's national church encumbered with a doctrine from which various logical paths led to Rome, to anarchy and to atheism (which meant another kind of anarchy). His ideal state, Christian and scientific at the same time, needed--and one can say this with no allowance for metaphor or hyperbole--a miracle to end all miracles.

To return to the New Atlantis; in answer to the explorer's question, the governor of Bensalem recalls:

About twenty years after the ascension of our Saviour, it came to pass that there was seen by the people of Renfusa,(a city upon the eastern coast of our island,)within night,(the night was cloudy and calm,)as it might be some mile into the sea, a great pillar of light; not sharp, but in form of a column or cylinder, rising from the sea a great way up towards heaven; and on the top of it was seen a large cross of light, more bright and replendant than the body of the pillar. Upon which so strange a spectacle, the people of the city gathered apace together upon the sands, to wonder; and so after put themselves into a number of small boats, to go nearer to this marvellous sight (370-71).

Of all the miracles of Christ, the ones that are not, because they cannot be, honored with any shrine are the ones he performed at sea. No shrine, no pilgrimage; hence no temptation of a resident priesthood or monastic community to exploit the curiosity and credulity of pilgrims with sacred relics more or less authentic, much less with a Boxley Rood.Simply by locating his miracle one mile offshore, Bacon has obviated millennia of superstitious practices.

But when the boats were come within about sixty yards of the pillar, they found themselves all bound, and could go no further; yet so as they might move to go about, but might not approach nearer; so as the boats stood all as in a theatre, beholding this light as an heavenly sign(371).

At this point a textual variant becomes important. The 1628New Atlantiscalls the pillar a "heavenly Signe,"(13) but the 1638 Nova Atlantis says "scaphae veluti in Theatro starent,lucem hanc tanquam Scenam coelestem spectaturae" (The boats stood as in a theater, beholding this light as if it were a heavenly scene). (14)This reading should be preferred, as the word scenenot having yet undergone the semantic generalization that made it come to mean any environment whatever,continues the metaphor of the theater by specifically referring to the backdrop on a stage. When, as here, Bacon's Latin translation of his own work varies from the English, Spedding says that the variation should be deemed a correction. (15)If we consider the connotations of the words "theater" and "scene," specially in Bacon's attack on Idols of the Theater in Novum Organum,we shall appreciate how momentous it is that the pillar of light is called a scene rather than a sign.

Picture, then, this scene: the black disk of water; the circle of boats crowded gunwale to gunwale; the gaping crowd bemused and suffering a helplessness only he can appreciate who has been becalmed, "in irons," as sailors say, in a small boat at sea;and, in the mathematical center of the circle, the silent cylinder of light shooting straight up to the zenith.Jacob's ladder with angels ascending and descending is not so exactly or geometrically visualized, much less is the star of Bethlehem. The latter, in fact, is so hard to picture to scale, in a well-defined relation to the inn and the stable, that it bears no comparison with this spectacle (see my discussion of the star of Bethlehem in "The Horoscope of Christ," Milton Studies, XII (1978):227-28).

The best approximation I can make to the eery modernity of the tableau just described is to say that the spectators are like a television audience. Before the invention of electronic mass media, a deed of great importance could either be done in private--"in a corner" in St. Paul's phrase (Acts 26:26)--or with numerous eyewitnesses, but in the latter case, there was always the possibility that the witnesses could in various ways interfere with,or influence, the event. Certainly the miracles of Jesus of Nazareth were blatantly influenced by the people who happened to be present. St. Mark implies that, by choice or necessity, the more spectacular miracles were saved for audiences predisposed to believe them (6:5-6). In thinking about historic events before the coming of the mass media, we must be careful to remember how the spectators often helped create them. For example, in Plutarch's version of Julius Caesar's funeral (very much in contrast to Shakespeare's adaptation of it), it is clear that Mark Antony went to the scene intending to justify the murder. However, the unexpectedly emotional response of the crowd to some of the orator's praise triggered an echoing response in him, and, as much to his own surprise as anyone else's, he began inciting them to avenge the dead man. If Plutarch is right, the crowd, in a manner of speaking, told Antony what to say, and he said it; then he told them what to do, and they did it. Also to this point is the fact that William Laud's attempt to force the ritual of the Anglican prayerbook on the Scots (1637) could not be done in a corner.As the Scottish bishops began a communion service in St. Giles's church, Edinburgh, a woman named Jenny Geddes, unknown to history except for this one act, threw a stool at them; an attempt to arrest her provoked a riot; and the reulting uprising spread through the land to become a national revolt, eventuating in the Solemn League and Covenant and the First Bishops' War. With his helpless floating mob,sitting in the dark across sixty yards of water from the object of their astonished attention, Bacon was imagining a situation that had never existed before, but to which analogies were to become plentiful in after ages.

Given a miracle in the middle of a crowd, it is possible for any member of the crowd to take credit for it and so convert it into overwhelming evidence of a lie. This, in fact, is exactly what happened, and on an epic scale, if any version of the Cessation of Miracles is true. A rabble of popish impostors--"a wicked race of deceivers" as Milton calls them(16)--somehow slipped into the place of men oossessed of the gift of miracles and began taking credit for the latter's sanctity, like Papageno taking credit for killing the dragon that afflicted Tamino--or in a literary analogy closer to the point, like Duessa receiving from Redcross the homage due to the beauty and virtue of Una. Hence Bacon's precaution of assembling a large crowd of spectators, and rigorously preventing them from being anything but spectators, bestows on Bensalem the benefits of the Gospel and simultaneously rescues it from superstition.

It so fell out, that there was in one of the boats one of the wise men of the society of Salomon's House; which house or college (my good brethren) is the very eye of this kingdom...(371)

In this offhanded manner we learn that experimental science, or the reading of "the book of God's works," as Bacon calls it, by a wide margin precedes revelation, or "the book of God's word."Salomon's House has obviously been the eye of Bensalem since long before the advent of Christ. But the age of religious wars which had evoked so many expressions of fanaticism had not left Bacon untouched. In one of his more striking metaphors he says that we must behave as if our minds were subjected to and literally enslaved by the word of God,(17) and the member of Salomon's house now proceeds to an impressive demonstration of his submissive frame of mind: he lies face down in his boat. Then he rises and prays to the "Lord God of heaven and earth,"mentioning as he does so that his scientific knowledge of "thy works of creation, and the secrets of them" assures him that this is no work of art, imposture or illusion, but "thy Finger and a true Miracle"(371-72). The reader realizes with amazement that this event has what no miracle from Moses to Francis Xavier has ever had: a scientific observer. The latter, moreover, possesses a truth one would have expected to be part of revelation, namely God's invariable motive for miracles:" thou never workest miracles, but to a divine and excellent end"(372). How does he know that? [W]e learn in our books that...the laws of nature are thine own laws, and thou exceedest them not but upon great cause"(372). In perfect literalness, the book of God's works is here brought forward to authenticate the book of God's word. Theology, reversing her medieval role, has become the ancilla philosophiae naturalis.

The scientist now petitions God to "give us the interpretation and use" of the miracle.Instantly his boat (and his alone) can move, and he has the crew row him slowly towards the pillar. Jehovah, one infers, shares the scientist's self-estimate as the person fittest to be allowed to probe this phenomenon more deeply. As only Aaron and his sons might enter the sanctuary where the Ark of the Covenant was, so only the scientist can enter this charmed circle, which, as it turns out, also contains an ark.

But ere he came near it, the pillar and cross of light brake up, and cast itself abroad, as it were, into a firmament of many stars; which also vanished soon after...(372)

(Breaking up and casting themselves abroad into a firmament of many stars which vanish,is exactly what befalls Cinderella's gown, horses and coach in Walt Disney's animated film. The resemblance is so exact as to suggest either that a member of the Disney studios was influenced by The New Atlantisor that Bacon had second sight reaching to the 1950's and Hollywood. It may confirm what I was just saying about Bacon's relation to the mass media,but the point seems so arbitrary and fantastic that I willingly return to my thesis about religious miracles.)

In engineering, a solution is called elegant if it attains its end with the fewest possible operations. Jehovah's pillar of cloud by day and fire by night, preceding the Israelites for forty-two years, remained longer than was strictly necessary to convince them of his might. Europe in Bacon's day was littered with miracles that had overstayed any imaginable purpose: every year the blood of San Gennaro liquefied at Naples; medicinal oil continued to flow from St. Walburga's tomb in Bavaria centuries after her death.(18) Bacon's elegant pillar, in contrast,vanishes the instant its purpose has been attained, doubtless another preventive against being co-opted. The scientist, reaching the spot the pillar had indicated, finds an ark floating on the water, with a book and a letter wrapped in a palm-branch. The book is the Bible, a more complete version than any extant in Judea or elsewhere, as it contains (in about 50 A.D.) Revelations and other documents not yet written by their human authors. That this collection is, in fact, the same as the Bible of Sixteenth-Century Europe amounts to a quiet miracle in itself for the reasons mentioned above; it was to be more than three centuries after the fictive time of the Bensalem miracle that the canon of the Bible was to be agreed on at the synods of Rome and Carthage. Thus the Bensalem miracle, in an anticipatory manner, confirms the divine inspiration of the synods' decision. The letter in the ark is a declaration by Bartholomew that an angel has, in a vision,instructed him to launch this ark on the waves. When the book and letter are taken back to Renfusa, men of sundry nations are found miraculously able to read them as if both were in the reader's own tongues. And thus is Bensalem converted "through the apostolical and miraculous evangelism of St. Bartholomew"(373).

The absence of the saint himself, however, is exquisitely appropriate. The purpose of the whole episode being to authenticate a book rather than a man or group of men, Bartholomew himself would only get in the way. He might have to repudiate--or, worse, he might fail to repudiate--a tendency of the Bensalemites to identify him as the cause or author of the miracle and grant him quasi-divine honors. Still, something is wanted to connect the Bible with Christ and his apostles besides its own statements--that problem of authentication cropping up again--so there is the letter. And thus in one night's work, Bensalem has the Bible, containing everything necessary to salvation, the people being favorably disposed to receive it by the testimony of hundreds of eyewitnesses and of modern science.

Taking this pleasing fiction on its own terms, one reaches a moment when suddenly it pleases no more. There is, after all, yet another human authority in which one has to place implicit trust. Salomon's House is clandestine. Its capabilities are astonishing; it can "imitate and demonstrate meteors; as snow, hail, rain... thunders, lightnings...generations of bodies in air; as frogs, flies, and divers others"(400). Can its scientists also imitate a pillar of light, and an invisible barrier that could keep boats a given distance from a point on the water? The member of Salomon's House who describes it to the narrator actually goes out of his way to point out how easily his colleagues could fake a miracle:

And surely you will easily believe that we that have so many things truly natural which induce admiration, could in a world of particulars deceive the senses, if we would disguise those things and labor to make them seem more miraculous (409).

The phrase "more miraculous" suggests a loose approximation to the theological concept of the true miracle which any given event either absolutely is, or absolutely is not. But the Latin is stronger:posse etiam infinita Hominum sensibus imponere, si ea in Miraculum ornare, exaltare, & vellemus,literally "we could impose on men's senses an infinite number of things if we wanted to present these things as, and exalt them into, a miracle."(19) The scientists would not have to be evil men to use such a method to promote a religion they themselves disbelieved; they would only have to be willing, as Plato's philosopher-kings are, to deceive the populace for its own good. Such a suspicion may have crossed Bacon's mind. But he is not likely to have entertained it long. A man has to believe in something.

Notes

(1)The Works of Francis Bacon,ed. James Spedding et al.(Boston: Brown and Taggard, 1862), V, 370.

(2)History of the Royal Society,ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold W. Jones (Saint Louis:Washington U.P., 1959), 55-56.

(3)"Sainthood Closer for Father Serra,"San Francisco Chronicle12 Dec.1987,2.

(4)James Anthony Froude, History of England(new York: Scribners, 1873),III, 268-69.

(5)Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord,2nd American ed. (new York: D. Appleton, 1855), 46, note.

(6)Religio Medici,I, 27, in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne,ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London:Faber and Gayer, 1928),I, 36.

(7)James I, Daemonologie(1597); Newes from Scotland...(1591)ed. G.B.Harrison(London:Bodley Head Quartoes,1924), 66. Unfortunately, James did not think that appearances of devils or evil spirits had ceased.

(8) Edward Lord Herbert, Autobiography reprint from Kennet's fol.ed. 1719(London:Alexander Murray, 1870), 93.

(9)B. Robert Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions and Ecclesiastical Politics in Eighteenth Century Paris(Princeton, N.J.:Princeton U.P.,1978), 181.

(10)Other dates suggested before the controversy finally died out were ca. 250 A.D., ca. 300,323,383. See Arthur Ashley Sykes, The Two Questions Previous to Dr. Middleton's Free Inquiry Impartially Censured,Part II(London:J. and P. Knapton, 1752),5.

(11)See, for example, Institutes III.xxi.2.4;xxii.3,4.In the latter place Augustine is championed against Ambrose, Origen, Jerome, and the "subtilite de Thomas d'Aquin."

(12)The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J.B.Bury (London: Methuen, 1896) II, 30-31.

(13) Bound with Sylva Sylvarum(London:William Lee,1628),9.

(14) London: John Haviland, 1638, bound with Operum Moralium et Civilium Tomus(London:Edward Griffin, 1638),361.

(15)"History and Plan of this Edition," in Works,I, xvii.

(16)Areopagiticain Worksed. Frank Allen Patterson, et al.(New York: Columbia U.P., 1931)IV, 337.

(17)"...rogamus...ut ab intellectu puro...divinis oraculis...subdito et prorsus dedititio, fidei dentur quae fidei sunt."--Praefatio toInstauratio Magna ed. Spedding in Works, I, 208.

(18)"The oil still flows; I have some of it in my possession; it is medicinal still,"wrote Cardinal Newman in 1864 (Apologia pro Vita Sua, ed. Charles Frederick Harrold[Toronto:Longmans, Green, 1947],273). St. Walburga died in 777.

(19)Nova Atlantis,383.