of sorcery. He was released after a year; and quitting the country, experienced many vicissitudes. He died in great poverty in 1534, aged forty-eight years. While in the service of Margaret of Austria, he resided principally at Louvain, in which city he wrote his famous work on the Vanity and Nothingness of Human Knowledge. He also wrote, to please his royal mistress, a treatise upon the Superiority of the Female Sex, which he dedicated to her in token of his gratitude for the favors she had heaped upon him. The reputation he left behind him in these provinces was anything but favorable. A great number of the marvelous tales that are told of him relate to this period of his life. It was said, that the gold which he paid to the traders with whom he dealt, always looked remarkably bright, but invariably turned into pieces of slate and stone in the course of four-and-twenty hours. Of this spurious gold he was believed to have made large quantities by the aid of the devil, who, it would appear from this, had but a very superficial knowledge of alchemy, and much less than the Maréchal de Rays gave him credit for. Naudé, in his "Apology for the great Men who have been falsely suspected of Magic," takes a great deal of pains to clear Agrippa from the imputations cast upon him by Delrio, Paulus Jovius, and other such ignorant and prejudiced scribblers. Such stories demanded refutation in the days of Naudé, but they may now be safely left to decay in their own absurdity. That they should have attached, however, to the memory of a man who claimed the power of making iron obey him when he told it to become gold, and who wrote such a work as that upon magic, which goes by his name, is not at all surprising. PARACELSUS. THIS philosopher, called by Naudé "the zenith and rising sun of all the alchemists," was born at Einsiedeln, near Zurich, in the year 1493. His true name was Hohenheim; to which, as he himself informs us, were prefixed the baptismal names of Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastes Paracelsus. The last of these he chose for his common designation while he was yet a boy; and rendered it, before he died, one of the most famous in the annals of his time. His father, who was VOL. I, No. 6.-II to metallurgy; and he traveled into Sweden that he might visit the mines of that country, and examine the ores while they yet lay in the bowels of the earth. He also visited Trithemius at the monastery of Spannheim, and obtained instructions from him in the science of alchemy. Continuing his travels, he proceeded through Prussia and Austria into Turkey, Egypt, and Tartary, and thence returning to Constantinople, learned, as he boasted, the art of transmutation, and became possessed of the elixir vitæ. He then established himself as a physician in his native Switzerland at Zurich, and commenced writing works upon alchemy and medicine, which immediately fixed the attention of Europe. Their great obscurity was no impediment to their fame: for the less the author was understood, the more the demonologists, fanatics, and philosopher'sstone hunters seemed to appreciate him. His fame as a physician kept pace with that which he enjoyed as an alchemist, owing to his having effected some happy cures by means of mercury and opiumdrugs unceremoniously condemned by his professional brethren. In the year 1526, he was chosen professor of physics and natural philosophy in the University of Basle, where his lectures attracted vast numbers of students. He denounced the writings of all former physicians as tending to mislead; and publicly burned the works of Galen and Avicenna, as quacks and impostors. He exclaimed, in presence of the admiring and half-bewildered crowd, who assembled to witness the ceremony, that there was more knowledge in his shoe-strings than in the writings of these physicians. Continuing in the same strain, he said, all the universities in the world were full of ignorant quacks; but that he, Paracelsus, overflowed with wisdom. | "You will all follow my new system," said he, with furious gesticulations, "Avicenna, Galen, Rhazis, Montagnana, Memé -you will all follow me, ye professors of Paris, Montpelier, Germany, Cologne, and Vienna and all ye that dwell on the Rhine and the Danube-ye that inhabit the isles of the sea—and ye also, Italians, Dalmatians, Athenians, Arabians, Jewsye will all follow my doctrines, for I am the monarch of medicine!" But he did not long enjoy the esteem of the good citizens of Basle. It is said that he indulged in wine so freely, as not unfrequently to be seen in the streets in a state of intoxication. This was ruinous for a physician, and his good fame decreased rapidly. His ill fame increased in still greater proportion, especially when he assumed the airs of a sorcerer. He boasted of the legions of spirits at his command; and of one especially, which he kept imprisoned in the hilt of his sword. Wetterus, who lived twentyseven months in his service, relates that he often threatened to invoke a whole army of demons, and show him the great authority which he could exercise over them. He let it be believed that the spirit in his sword had custody of the elixir of life, by means of which he could make any one live to be as old as the antediluvians. He also boasted that he had a spirit at his command, called "Azoth," whom he kept imprisoned in a jewel; and in many of the old portraits he is represented with a jewel, inscribed with the word "Azoth," in his hand. If a sober prophet has little honor in his own country, a drunken one has still less. Paracelsus found it at last convenient to quit Basle, and establish himself at Strasbourg. The immediate cause of this change of residence was as follows. A citizen lay at the point of death, and was given over by all the physicians of the town. As a last resource Paracelsus was called in, to whom the sick man promised a magnificent recompense, if, by his means, he were cured. Paracelsus gave him two small pills, which the man took, and rapidly recovered. When he was quite well, Paracelsus sent for his fee; but the citizen had no great opinion of the value of a cure which had been so speedily effected. He had no notion of paying a handful of gold for two pills, although they had saved his life, and he refused to pay more than the usual fee for a single visit. Paracelsus brought an action against him, and lost it. This result so exasperated him, that he left Basle in high dudgeon. He resumed his wandering life, and traveled in Germany and Hungary, supporting himself as he went on the credulity and infatuation of all classes of society. He cast nativities— told fortunes-aided those who had money to throw away upon the experiment to find the philosopher's stone-prescribed remedies for cows and pigs, and aided in the recovery of stolen goods. After residing successively at Nuremburg, Augsburg, Vienna, and Mindelheim, he retired, in the year 1541, to Saltzbourg, and died in abject poverty, in the hospital of that town. If this strange charlatan found hundreds of admirers during his life, he found thousands after his death. A sect of Paracelsists sprang up in France and Germany, to perpetuate the extravagant doctrines of their founder upon all the sciences, and upon alchemy in particular. The chief leaders were Bodenstein and Dorneus. The following is the summary of his doctrine, founded upon the supposed existence of the philosopher's stone; it is worth preserving from its very absurdity, and is altogether unparalleled in the history of philosophy. First of all, he maintained that the contemplation of the perfection of the Deity sufficed to procure all wisdom and knowledge; that the Bible was the key to the theory of all diseases, and that it was necessary to search into the Apocalypse to know the signification of magic medicine. The man who blindly obeyed the will of God, and who succeeded in identifying himself with the celestial intelligences, possessed the philosopher's stone; he could cure all diseases, and prolong life to as many centuries as he pleased, it being by the very same means that Adam and the antediluvian patriarchs prolonged theirs. Life was an emanation from the stars-the sun governed the heart, and the moon the brain. Jupiter governed the liver, Saturn the gall, Mer cury the lungs, Mars the bile, and Venus the loins. In the stomach of every human being there dwelt a demon, or intelligence, that was a sort of alchemist in his way, and mixed, in their due proportions, in his crucible, the various aliments that were sent into that grand laboratory, the belly. He was proud of the title of magician, and boasted that he kept up a regular correspondence with Galen from hell; and that he often summoned Avicenna from the same regions to dispute with him on the false notions he had promulgated respecting alchemy, and especially regarding potable gold and the elixir of life. He imagined that gold could cure ossification of the heart, and, in fact, all diseases-if it were gold which had been transmuted from an inferior metal by means of the philosopher's stone, and if it were applied under certain conjunctions of the planets. The mere list of the works in which he advances these frantic imaginings, which he called a doctrine, would occupy several pages. JACOB BOHMEN. confounding the confusion of that writer. The philosopher's stone might, he contended, be discovered by a diligent search of the Old and New Testaments, and more especially of the Apocalypse, which alone contained all the secrets of alchemy. He contended that the divine grace operated by the same rules, and followed the same methods, that the divine providence observed in the natural world; and that the minds of men were purged from their vices and corruptions in the very same manner that metals were purified from their dross, namely, by fire. Beside the sylphs, gnomes, undines, and salamanders, he acknowledged various ranks and orders of demons. He pretended to invisibility and absolute chastity. He also said that, if it pleased him, he could abstain for years from meat and drink, and all the necessities of the body. It is needless, however, to pursue his follies any further. He was reprimanded for writing this work by the magistrates of Görlitz, and commanded to leave the pen alone and stick to his wax, that his family might not become chargeable to the parish. He neglected this good advice, and continued his studies; burning minerals and purifying metals one day, and mystifying the word of God on the next. afterward wrote three other works, as sublimely ridiculous as the first. One was entitled Metallurgia, and has the slight merit of being the least obscure of his compositions. Another was called The Temporal Mirror of Eternity; and the allegories and metaphors : "All strange and geason, Devoid of sense and ordinary reason." He JACOB BÖHMEN thought he could discover the secret of the transmutation of metals in the Bible, and invented a strange heterogeneous doctrine of mingled alchemy and religion, and founded upon it the sect of the Aureacrucians. He was born at Görlitz, in Upper Lusatia, in 1575, and followed till his thirtieth year the occupation of a shoemaker. In this obscurity he remained, with the character of a visionary and a man of unsettled mind, until the promulgation of the Rosicrucian philosophy | last, his Theosophy Revealed, full of in his part of Germany, toward the year 1607 or 1608. From that time he began to neglect his leather, and buried his brain under the rubbish of metaphysics. The works of Paracelsus fell into his hands; and these, with the reveries of the Rosicrucians, so completely engrossed his attention, that he abandoned his trade altogether, sinking, at the same time, from a state of comparative independence into poverty and destitution. But he was nothing daunted by the miseries and privations of the flesh; his mind was fixed upon the beings of another sphere, and in thought he was already the new apostle of the human race. In the year 1612, after a meditation of four years, he published his first work, entitled Aurora, or the Rising of the Sun; embodying the ridiculous notions of Paracelsus, and worse Their heresy Böhmen died in 1624, leaving behind him a considerable number of admiring disciples. Many of them became, during the seventeenth century, as distinguished for absurdity as their master; among whom may be mentioned Gifftheil, Wendenhagen, John Jacob Zimmermann, and Abraham Frankenberg. rendered them obnoxious to the Church of Rome; and many of them suffered long imprisonment and torture for their faith. One, named Kuhlmann, was burned alive at Moscow, in 1684, on a charge of sorcery. Böhmen's works were translated into English, and published, many years afterward, by William Law. THE LEGEND OF THE CHRISTMAS-TREE. "TIs Christmas Eve, and through the ancient Neath some more modest roof, where warmer A nook may spare, [hearts And gladly own that sharing joy imparts Hark! 't is a burst of hearty merriment- "Tis from a burgher's simple tenement. He watches the glad group of faces bright, He thinks the fir-tree once was deck'd with lights; His eyes grow dim, And timidly he knocks, again to tell Alas! for him-on stony ears it fell The door is closed against him, and in vain, He gazes through the latticed window pane- Weeping he turns away, and passes by From many a humble roof and mansion high Then pauses meekly by the lowliest door, Where a faint ray Breaks through, and shows how fast the little store Of tapers wear away. IN THE TIMES. our last article on this subject, we affirmed that the great requisite of the Church, in this age, is a wider and profounder realization of the spiritual life of Christianity that the materialistic tendencies, especially the materialistic infidelity of the times, do not require the old polemic defenses of Christianity so much as its more general spiritual demonstration in the life of the Christian world. We contended that this resuscitation of the primitive spiritualism of the Church, as an offset to the materialism of modern life, is the only security of Christianity in this and the coming age -that the fact must not be admitted merely with the ordinary religious commonplaces, but become a powerful conviction of the Christian world, and work out a revolution in its condition-that the next characteristic phase of Christendom must be either a general and thorough renewal of its spiritual life, subordinating to this its usual dogmatic, sectarian, and economical modes of defense, or general and materialistic Rationalism, with a correspondent loss of spiritual energy and moral VOL. I, No. 6.—II a purity. One thing is certainly obvious, viz.: that the dogmatic and sectarian characteristics of the Church cannot, in their present form, long survive these times; they must give way; they must be substituted by something better, or something worse; and let all good men rejoice that the providence of God is pressing the Church up to this necessity. It is a good augury. 66 We endeavored to show, also, in our last article, that such a restoration of the 'primitive ideal" of the Church would, first, present an invincible reply to the prevalent infidelity by verifying the spiritual pretensions of Christianity; second, it would promote dogmatic orthodoxy, though without attaching fastidious importance to it-for the heart, rather than the head, is the source of heterodoxy ; and, third, it would give increased energy to all the practical schemes of Christianity. Thus is it the great and final vindication of Christianity. Devout men intuitively see it to be such. Alas, that the sheer truism of the sentiment should render its admission as heedless almost as it is universal! Next to this great general truth, and inseparable from it, these times require, as we have intimated, an abatement of the sectarianism of the Church. We place our foot here, we are aware, on very delicate ground; but we must be allowed to do it with an unhesitating step. We have bespoken a liberal exemption from fastidious criticism in these articles; presenting, as we do, a plea for our common Christianity, allow us to do it without petty precautions. In no form would we present that plea more fearlessly than in a protest against the driveling, the enormous, the intolerable sectarianism of the times, and especially of our own country. There are some advantages alleged in favor of this great evil, and it would be anomalous, indeed, even among disasters, if it had no good tendencies. War, famine, and pestilence have some in the providence of God; but most of the usual apologies for this sad deformity of the Church are, we think, of very questionable character, and Christian men would help their cause better by acknowledging and lamenting the occasion of objection which it affords their opponents, than by disguising, or excusing the evil. One of its alleged advantages is the |