376 THE PROSCRIBED. 



auditors, the progressive improvement impressed by the Most High 

 upon all nature. Aided by numerous passages drawn from holy 

 writ, and which he employed as commentaries on himself, in order 

 to express, by bold and sensible images, the abstract reasonings in 

 which he was deficient, he appeared as if brandishing the spirit of 

 God himself, like a torch of living fire, through the profoundest 

 recesses of creation, with an eloquence which was peculiar to him, 

 and whose accents excited the attention and enchained the conviction 

 of his auditory. Unfolding in this manner this mysterious system 

 in all its consequences, he gave the key to all the symbols, he justi- 

 fied the vocations, the particular gifts of genius in its various walks, 

 and the diversities of human talent. Become in an instant a physi- 

 ologist by instinct, he accounted for the animal resemblances inscribed 

 so often on the human countenance, by primordial analogies and by 

 the ascending impulse of all-created matter. He compelled you to 

 join, as it were, in the sport of nature, while he assigned a mission 

 and a future to minerals, plants, and animals. After having the 

 Bible in his hand spiritualized matter and materialized spirit, after 

 having shown an over-ruling Providence in all things, and imprinted 

 the seal of respect on his least works, he admitted the possibility of 

 advancing, by means of faith, from one sphere to another. 



Such was the first part of his discourse, whose doctrines he con- 

 trived to apply, by adroitly managed digressions, to the feudal 

 system. The poetry, religious and profane, and the rude, unpolished 

 eloquence of the times, might range at large in this immense theory, 

 in which all the philosophical systems of antiquity were confounded 

 in one general mass. Armed with the mystical demonstrations by 

 which he explained the actual world in which we live, the doctor 

 Sigier constructed another intermediate world, whose gradually ele- 

 vated spheres separated us from God, as the plant was divided from 

 us by an infinity of circles, all necessary to pass, before arriving at any 

 community. He peopled the heavens, the planets, the stars, the 

 sun. In the name of Saint Paul he invested man with a new 

 power. It was permitted to them to mount from world to world, 

 unto the sources of existence. The mystical ladder of Jacob was, 

 at the same time, the religious formula of this divine secret, and the 

 traditional proof of the fact. He was expatiating in the vast regions 

 of space, drawing after him en the wings of his own inspiration the 

 impassioned souls of his auditors, making infinity felt by them, and 

 plunging them in the celestial ocean. The doctor thus explained 

 very logically the nature and existence of Hell by other circles, in 

 an inverse order from the brilliant spheres which aspire to Heaven, 

 and in which suffering replaces light and mind. The tortures were 

 comprehended as well as the joys. The terms of comparison were 

 easily found in the transitions of an earthly existence, in its varying 

 atmospheres of grief and intelligence. Thus the most extraordinary 

 fables of Hell and Purgatory were found to be naturally realised. 

 He made an admirable deduction on the fundamental reasons of our 

 virtues. The pious man, treading the narrow path in poverty, 

 serene in his conscience, always at peace with himself, and persisting 

 in not belying himself, even in his secret heart, in spite of the dis- 



