The Epistle Dedicatory.
for the justification of the belief of Witches, it suggesting palpable and currrent evidence of our Immortality, which I am exceedingly sollicitious to have made good.
For really, my Lord, if we make our compute like Men, and do not suffer our selves to be abused by the flatteries of Sense, and decietful gayeties that steal us away from God, and from our selves, there is nothing that can render the thoughts of this odd life tolerable but the expectation of another. And wise Men have said that they would not live a moment if they thought they were not to live again This perhaps some may take to be the discontented Paradox of a melancholick, vext, and of mean Condition, that is pinched by the straitness of Fortune, and envies the heights of others Felicity and Grandures; but by that time those that judge so, have spent the heats of frolick Youth, and have past over the several Stages of Vanity; when they come to sit down and make sober Reflections upon their Pleasures and Persuits, and sum up the accompt of all that is with them, and before them, I doubt not but their considering thoughts will make Solomon's Conclusion, and find that 'tis but a misery to live, if we were to live for nothing else. So that if the content of the present Life were all I were to have for the hopes of Immortality, I should even upon that account be very unwilling to believe that I was Mortal: For certainly the Pleasures that result from the thoughts of another World in those that not only see it painted in their Imaginations, but feel it begun in their Souls, are as far beyond all the titillations of Sense as a real lasting happiness
