Again, my apologies,
Isaac Barrow
3 April 1687
York
To His Grace,
The Most Reverend Dr. Isaac Newton,
By Divine Providence the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury
My Lord Archbishop,
May I take this opportunity to give you my earnest and heartfelt thanks for the copy of your great work which you so graciously sent; I shall treasure it always.
May I say, your Grace, that, once I had begun the book, I found it almost impossible to lay it down again. In truth, I could not rest until I had completed it, and now I feel that I shall have to read it again and again.
In my humble opinion, your Grace is the greatest theological logician since the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas. And as for beauty and lucidity of writing, it ranks easily with "De Civitate Deo" of St. Augustine of Hippo, and "De Imitatione Christi" of St. Thomas à Kempis.
I was most especially impressed by your reasoning on the mystical levitation of the soul, in which you show clearly that the closer a human soul approaches the perfection of God, the greater the attraction between that soul and the Spirit of God.