Page 39 - Treatise on Salt

certain composed of the sun, and even of its rays, it is easy to conjecture
what a transcendent virtue it has above all other remedies, since it is the
sun alone, throughout all nature, that kindles and preserves life; for
without the sun all things would be frozen, and nothing in the world
would grow; the beams of the sun give a verdure, and increase to all
things: the sun likewise gives life to all sublunary bodies, makes them
shoot, vegetate, move, and multiply, which is performed by the vivifying
irradiation of the sun. But then this solar virtue is a thousand times
stronger, more efficacious and salutary in his true Son, which is the
subject of the philosophers; for it is requisite that where he is generated,
the beams of the sun, the moon, the stars, and of all the virtues of nature,
should be accumulated in that magnetic place during many ages, and that
they should as it were have shut themselves up together in a well closed
vessel, which being afterwards hindered from going out, and being
repressed and contracted, transform themselves into this admirable
subject, and generate of themselves the vulgar gold; this sufficiently
declares with how many virtues its origin is replete, since he absolutely
triumphs over the greatest effort of the fire, though ever so violent,
insomuch that there is not anything to be found in the whole world of a
more consummate perfection after our subject; and if it were at any time
found in its last degree of perfection, made and composed by nature, and
that it were fusible like wax, or butter, and that its redness, diaphaneity,
and clearness appeared outwardly, it would be then truly our blessed
stone; which it is not, however if it be taken in its first principle, it may
be carried to the highest perfection imaginable, by the mean of that
sovereign philosophical art, fundamentally explained in the books of the
ancient sages.

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