and marital union of substances, gold’s fixed spirit, having become volatile, receives all the conditions and qualities of the mercurial spirit; conversely, mercury’s volatile, silvery species becomes permanent, incorruptible solar gold. The manner is somewhat similar, although the example is coarse and bears very little relation to God: God can in no way be compared with his work unless the comparison is slight. Through the association of his unstained divinity with our humanity, God took within his mother’s womb a body subject and exposed to every assault of heat, cold, lack of food, pain, languor, fear, and death itself.

What more should we expect from this inexhaustible source of God’s love for us, which no mortal can drain? Who, I ask you, can penetrate these hidden mysteries unless enlightened by our natural philosophy? From it the Rabbis drew all their knowledge; the whole

cabala of the Egyptians was devoted to it; the Hebrews’ [mucabals?] professed it. From no other source did they draw all the knowledge we have of divine mysteries and of those of natural philosophy. We too can draw these same mysteries from the same source, so that anyone may set them forth more boldly than people who have spent their whole lives explaining Aristotle’s difficulties. We deceive and are deceived when we deny what we see with our own eyes, or what falls—I do not say under our senses—but what we hold in our hands. No more august throne or firmer support can be assigned to the Catholic faith, one that can never be overthrown by demons’ malice or overturned by human artifice.

Who, provided he is neither pagan nor unbelieving, can excuse himself from reading the secrets traced upon nature’s visible, perceptible brow, since our first fathers devoted so many vigils to transmitting them to us? You do not blush

O Christian, that even profane men, after dispelling the veils and shadow obscuring nature from us, have seen her as she is, naked and uncovered. Once more, you do not blush to be ignorant of things the pagans know and in which they are thoroughly accomplished. You let what God presents to you as his servant and son pass to those to whom he refused it.

O age! O manners! O crime deserving eternal punishment! You know that God himself sent his only son to explain these things to all ordinary people and leave them these same mysteries, once disclosed, which had been buried beneath nature’s coverings and known only to the sages before his coming. Do you not know that he himself is the true triangular stone upon which he established the truth and faith of the whole Church, unshakable through every age? He sealed it with the venerable, sacred mystery of his incarnation, the holy, sacred seal of Almighty God and the key, foundation

and support of these mysteries, which we must revere with fear and awe, honor with joy and love, approach with respect and humility, and finally believe with firm faith.

Let those therefore be silent who ask how virginity remains unstained together with motherhood in a single subject; how a wife conceives without a husband; how a child is generated without corruption; how a woman gives birth without pain or corruption; how God became man and man God; and so forth. For these things are disclosed in the work of nature and even of art—at least to all philosophical chemists—and appear clearer than daylight and the Sun.