doxical than myself: but in divinity I love to keep the
road; and, though not in an implicit, yet an humble
faith, follow the great wheel of the church, by which I
move; not reserving any proper poles, or motion from
the epicycle of my own brain. By this means I have
no gap for heresy, schisms, or errors, of which at pre-
sent, I hope I shall not injure truth to say, I have no
taint or tincture. I must confess my greener studies
have been polluted with two or three; not any begotten
in the latter centuries, but old and obsolete, such as
could never have been revived but by such extravagant
and irregular heads as mine. For, indeed, heresies perish
not with their authors; but, like the river Arethusa,<8>
though they lose their currents in one place, they rise
up again in another. One general council is not able
to extirpate one single heresy: it may be cancelled for
the present; but revolution of time, and the like aspects
from heaven, will restore it, when it will flourish till it
be condemned again. For, as though there were metemp-
psychosis, and the soul of one man passed into another,
opinions do find, after certain revolutions, men and
minds like those that first begat them. To see our-
selves again, we need not look for Plato's year:* every
man is not only himself; there have been many
Diogenes, and as many Timons, though but few of that
name; men are lived over again; the world is now as
it was in ages past; there was none then, but there hath
been some one since, that parallels him, and is, as it
were, his revived self.