A scholar, pitying the blindness and folly of those who live to themselves in the cares and pleasures of this vain life, thinks himself divinely employed, and to have escaped the pollutions of the world, because he is, day after day, dividing, dissecting, and mending church- opinions, fixing heresies here, schisms there; forgetting all the while, that a carnal self and natural reason have the doing of all that is done by this learned zeal, and are as busy and active in him, as in the reasoning infidel, or projecting worldling. For where self is wholly denied, there nothing can be called heresy, schism, or wickedness, but the want of loving God with our whole heart, and our neighbor as ourselves; nor anything be called truth, life, or salvation, but the Spirit, nature, and power of Christ living and manifesting itself in us, as it did in him. But where self or the natural man is become great in religious learning, there the greater the scholar, the more firmly will he be fixed in their religion, whose God is their belly. I write not to reason, says the blessed Jacob Behmen; O enthusiasm! says the mouth of learning: and yet Jacob said as sober a truth, as if he had said, I write not to self and own will; for natural reason, self and own will, always did, and always must see through the same eyes, and hear through the same ears. Now let it only be supposed, that Behmen and myself, when we speak of natural reason, mean only the natural man (as is over and over declared by us) and then Behmen's saying, that he writes neither from reason, nor to the natural reason of others, is only saying that very same thing as St. Paul says, that "the natural man receiveith not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him, (N.B.) neither can he know them, (N.B.) because they are spiritually discerned."