Page:A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings of Dr. Henry More.djvu/160

118 wall: His attempting to ravish another, who excusing her self, and saying, My Cuntius, thou seest how old, wrinckled and deformed I am, and how unfit for those kinds of sports, he suddenly set up a loud laughter and vanished.

9. But we must not insist upon these things; onely we will adde one passage more that is not a little remarkable. His grave-stone was turned of one side, shelving, and there were several holes in the earth, about the bigness of mouse-holes, that went down to his very Coffin, which however they were filled up with earth and all made plain over night, yet they would be sure to be laid open the next morning.

It would be a tedious business to recite all these things at large, and prosecute the Story in all its particular Circumstances. To conclude therefore, their calamity was such from the frequent occursions of this restless Fury, that there was none but either pitied them or despised them; none would lodge in their Town, trading was decayed, and the Citizens impoverished by the continual stirs and tumults of this unquiet Ghost.

10. And though the Atheist may perhaps laugh at them as men undone by their own Melancholy and vain imaginations, or by the waggery of some ill neighbours; yet if he seriously consider what has been already related, there are many passages that are by no means to be resolved into any such Principles: but what I shall now declare, will make it altogether unlikely that any of them are.

To be short therefore, finding no rest nor being able to excogitate any better remedy, they dig up Cuntius his body, with several others buried both before and after him. But those both after and before were so putrifi'd and rotten, their Sculls broken, and the Sutures of them gaping, that they were not to be known by their shape at all, having become in a manner but a rude mass of earth and dirt; but it was quite otherwise in Cuntius: His Skin was tender and florid, his Joynts not at all stiff, but limber and moveable, and a staff being put into his Hand, he grasped it with his fingers very fast; his Eyes also of themselves would be one time open and another time shut; they opened a vein in his Leg, and the blood sprang out as fresh as in the living; his Nose was entire and full, not sharp, as in those that are gastly sick or quite dead: and yet Cuntius his body had lien in the grave from Feb. 8. to July 20. which is almost half a year.

11. It was easily discernible where the fault lay. However, nothing was done rashly, but Judges being constituted. Sentence was pronounced upon Cuntius his Carcase, which (being animated thereto from success in the like case some few years before in this very Province of Silesia, I suppose he means at Breslaw where the Shoemakers body was burnt) they adjudged to the fire.

Wherefore there were Masons provided to make a hole in the wall near the Altar to get his body through, which being pulled at with a rope, it was so exceeding heavy that the rope brake, and they could scarce stir him. But when they had pull'd him through, and gotten him on a Cart without, which Cuntius his Horse that struck him (which was a Rh