would find it so little in accord with what their fancy would like to hear, that they would condemn that which future centuries will know and perceive to be true. As the true Saviour said, Give not that which is holy unto dogs, nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet and turn and rend you.[1] This has been the cause of my withholding my tongue from the vulgar and my pen from paper.
6. Later, because of the vulgar advent,[2] I decided to give way and, by dark and cryptic sentences, tell of the causes of the future mutation of mankind, especially the most urgent ones, and the ones I perceived, and in a manner that would not upset their fragile sentiments. All had to be written under a cloudy figure, above all things prophetic.
7. Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and the prudent, that is, from the powerful and from kings, and hast revealed them to the small and the weak.[3] And to the Prophets. By means of the immortal God, and his good Angels, they received the spirit of prophecy, by which they see distant things and foresee future events. For nothing can be accomplished without Him whose power and goodness to his creatures is so great that as long as these dwell in them, much as they may be exposed to other influences, on account of their good genius this prophetic heat and power approaches us.[4] It approaches us like the rays of the sun, which cast their influence on bodies both elementary and non-elementary.
8. As for ourselves, who are but human, we can discover nothing of the obscure secrets of God the Creator by our own unaided knowledge or by the bent of our ingenuity. It is not for you to know times or hours, etc.[5]
9. However, now or in the future there may be persons to whom God the Creator, through fanciful impressions, wishes to reveal some secrets of the future, integrated with judicial astrology, in much the same manner that in the past a certain power and voluntary faculty came over them like a flame, causing them to judge human and divine inspirations alike. For of the divine works, those which are absolute God completes; those which are medial, the angels; and the third kind, the evil spirits.
10. But, my son, I speak to you here a bit too obscurely. Hidden prophcies come to one by the subtle spirit of fire, sometimes through the understanding being disturbed in contemplating the remotest of stars, while remaining alert. The pronouncements are taken down in writing, without fear, without taint of excess verbiage. But why? Because all these things proceeded from the divine power of the great eternal God, from whom all goodness flows.
11. Furthermore, my son, though I have mentioned the name prophet,
