THE FIRST BOOK. 41 



to thrones, principalities, and the rest, which are all angels 

 of power and ministry; so as the angels of knowledge 

 and illumination- are placed before the angels of office and 

 domination. 



(4) To descend from spirits and intellectual forms to sensible 

 and material forms, we read the first form that was created 

 was light, which hath a relation and correspondence in nature 

 and corporal things to knowledge in spirits and incorporal 

 things. 



(5) So in the distribution of days we see the day wherein 

 God did rest and contemplate His own works was blessed above 

 all the days wherein He did effect and accomplish them. 



(6*) After the creation was finished, it is set down unto us 

 that man was placed in the garden to work therein ; which 

 work, so appointed to him, could be no other than work of 

 contemplation; that is, when the end of work is but for 

 exercise and experiment, not for necessity ; for there being 

 then no reluctation of the creature, nor sweat of the brow, 

 man s employment must of consequence have been matter of 

 delight in the experiment, and not matter of labour for the 

 use. Again, the first acts which man performed in Paradise 

 consisted of the two summary parts of knowledge ; the view of 

 creatures, and the imposition of names. As for the knowledge 

 which induced the fall, it was, as was touched before, not the 

 natural knowledge of creatures, but the moral knowledge of 

 good and evil ; wherein the supposition was, that God s com 

 mandments or prohibitions were not the originals of good and 

 evil, but that they had other beginnings, which man aspired 

 to know, to the end to make a total defection from God and 

 to depend wholly upon himself. 



(7) To pass on : in the first event or occurrence after the fall 

 of man, we see (as the Scriptures have infinite mysteries, not 

 violating at all the truth of the story or letter) an image of 

 the two estates, the contemplative state and the active state, 

 figured in the two persons of Abel and Cain, and in the two 

 simplest and most primitive trades of life ; that of the shep 

 herd (who, by reason of his leisure, rest in a place, and living 

 in view of heaven, is a lively image of a contemplative life), 

 and that of the husbandman, where we see again the favour 

 and election of God went to the shepherd, and not to the tiller 

 of the ground. 



(8) So in the age before the flood, the holy records within 

 those few memorials which are there entered and registered 

 have vouchsafed to mention and honour the name of the 

 inventors and authors of music and works in metal. In the 



