Select Discourses Treating 1. Of the true way or method of attaining to divine knowledge. 2. Of superstition. 3. Of atheism. 4. Of the immortality of the soul. 5. Of the existence and nature of God. 6. Of prophecy. 7. Of the difference between the legal and the evangelical righteousness, the Old and the New Covenant, &c. 8. Of the shortness and vanity of a Pharisaick righteousness. 9. Of the excellency and nobleness of true religion. 10. Of a Christians conflicts with, and conquests over, Satan ... As also a sermon preached by Simon Patrick (then Fellow of the same college) at the author's funeral: with a brief account of his life and death
London: J. Flesher, for W. Morden, 1660. Very Good. Item #25912
London: Printed by J. Flesher, for W. Morden Bookseller in Cambridg [sic], 1660. First Edition. Quarto; full contemporary blind-tooled calf, recently rebacked with mottled calf, red gilt spine label, new endpapers; liii,[3],526,[2]pp. (¶^4 - 3¶^4 * - 3*^4 A - 3X^4, collated presumed complete with publisher's advertisements on final leaf); title page printed within double rule, woodcut initials, head- and tail-pieces. Corners a bit bumped, bookseller ticket to front free endpaper; a Very Good copy, overall.
The author's only book, published posthumously after his untimely death in 1652 at the age of 35, the ESTC describing this as a "summary statement of Cambridge Platonism as a religious philosophy." Though mostly free of marginalia, a contemporary reader has added a faint manicule in pencil on p. 193 where Smith covers the topic of "wizzards" and witches: "There are some men whose Imaginative faculty is strong, either by Nature, or by some Artifice which they use to fortifie this Imaginative facultie with; and for such purpose are the artifices which Witches and such as have familiar Spirits do use, by the help whereof the similitudes of things, are more easily excited by the Imagination."
The author continues on the following page, "how that, so they [witches] may have more pregnant Phansies, they anoint themselves, and diet themselves with some such food as they understand from the Devil is very fit for that purpose" (p. 194).
ESTC R17087; WING S4117.
Price: $500.00