In I678 my wife Sabrina died of natural causes and was buried in our family crypt, mourned by all. As for myself, I am alone at present. Our children are abroad; our son teaches Medicine and Natural Philosophy at the University of Prague, where he is greatly honoured; my elder daughter is in London as an ambassadress (there, I gather, her salon is famous and she enjoys the friendship of the Queen), and my younger daughter is married to a successful physician in Lџbeck.
To my subjective eye, the Pain of the World is a degree less terrible than it was some thirty years ago, when our Germany was left in ruins. If Lucifer did not lie to me, I pray to Him with all my heart and soul that He can lead mankind to Reason and Humanity and towards that Harmony which might, with great efforts, one day be ours.
I pray, in short, that God exists, that Lucifer brings about His own Redemption and that mankind therefore shall in time be free of them both forever: for until Man makes his own justice according to his own experience, he will never know what true peace can be.
With this, my testament, I consign my soul to Eternity, offering it neither to God nor to Lucifer but to Humanity, to use or to discard as it will. And I urgently beg any man or woman who reads this and who believes it to continue that which my wife and myself began: Do you the Devil's work.
And I suspect that you will see Heaven sooner than ever shall your Master.
Signed by my own hand in this Year of Our Lord Sixteen Hundred and Eighty;
BEK