thus proceed Every thing in this world must either be caused by it self or be without cause or else be caused by something that was before and is above it self The two first are not only improbable but utterly impossible and therefore the truth must needs lie in the last For the first The rudest Non-sense that can impose it self upon any mans reason is to say that any thing ever caused or madâ— it self 'T is to make every thing it s own God and to cut uâ— by the roots all subordination and dependency of one thing upon another For were all things equally caused by themselves they must needs be equal in their superiority because equal in their independency 'T is likewise to make a thing impossible to have an end for what once made it self can by the same influence eternally make it self If any thing were once the reason of it self it may be ever so nor would any thing ever cease to be that had a power to preserve its own Being But besides all this there is this further absurdity never to be avoided to say thing made it self is to say it did act before it was and did operate before it had an existence and that it did the highest thing to it self which was to cause and make it self before it was it self The lowest sort of reason wears in antipathy to such an absurdity Secondly The world could not be without cause For then it must be what 't is impossible it should be which is eternal For causes and effects of which the world consists own themselves to a first cause and necessarily suppose time and priority in time The cause naturally precedes the effect They must have time to operate in Causes and effects that are in such existence necessarily conjoyned must needs cease to that denomination in eternity and so cease to be what they really are and therefore are impossible to be eternal if one be eternal the other must needs be so too And 't is evident an eternal cause and an eternal effect is an absurdity Now that the world could not be eternal and so consequently without cause may thus appear If the world be eternal 't is plain and undeniable it must ever have been in the posture that now it is and that is utterly impossible for the posture the world is now in is a course of generation and corruption and so corruption must as well have been eternal as generation And thence 't will evidently follow that things that do generate and corrupt must have eternally been and eternally not have been If the world have been from everlasting then the present state of the world in the propagation of it self must needs have been so too The present way of generation and a succession in that generation must needs have been everlasting too For if the world be eternal though individual persons and Beings cease and new come in their places yet the general round and course of the world in maintaining it self must needs have been the same for ever But to conceive that is directly to oppose our own reason and experience because we find daily that the way by which the world is now propagated and upheld could not have eternally been but plainly points us to some original cause we see not For if the Hen be produced by the Egg and that Egg produced by a Hen and the propagation of both run in such a circle common reason tells us there must be some first Hen or some first Egg to set that way of generation on work or else it could never have been As 't is in motion there must be some first mover or else an innate and self-originated principle of motion if there be an innate self-originated principle of motion then whatsoever so moves can never cease to move if not there can never be motion without a first mover We see nothing but what is produced by somewhat else and therefore must rationally conclude there must be some first producer The whole world can shew us the beginning originally of nothing so as to satisfie our reason about it and yet in its whole constitution palpably fathers it self upon some first begining Our reason therefore compels us to look out to some supreme Beginning that gave the first rise to all things we see and set them first on work A man begets a man and that man was begotten by another man but where is the first man to beget that was not begotten nor brought forth in the common way of Generation For such our reason tells us by this visible course of propagating the world there must needs have been 'T is utterly impossible in the way we see men begotten there should ever have been any men in the world without some first man Our reason is lost in the circiel of one mans begetting another without some first man that was not begotten 'T is non-sense to say that one man begat another from eternity because that one mans begetting another directly relates to time beginning and priority which are all perfectly destructive to the notion of Eternity and cannot be originated there Sometimes Aristotle himself confesseth there must be a first cause and that infinity of causes is a monstrous absurdity Either the Atheist must confess that this course of generation does point us to some first rise and begining of it and cannot be supposed by out reason to be without it and then there must be some first man that must begin the natural way of propagating mankind and that first man could not be begotten by any other for then he could not be the first for that rule is true primo non est prius and if so that first man must either cause himself or be caused by something above and before himself to say the first I have shewed is an absolute contradiction to say the latter is to bring us regularly to God If the Atheist denies that there was any beginning of things or any first in generation but saies that the world is eternal and the way of its generation is eternal likewise I shall plainly refute him as rendring himself grosly absurd and that several waies First he begs a thing for granted to be and must take it so to be which he never saw nor can have any assurance of The eternity of the world and the succession eternal of generation and corruption is not only unreasonable for any man to believe but impossible for any man to know 'T is unreasonable to believe because our selves and all we converse with have a visible beginning and ending and manner of production which directly fathers it self upon some first beginning and could not have its rise from eternity For whatever begins and ends to say it was eternal in that course is to say plainly there was eternal beginning and eternal ending which is to affirm a most ridiculous contradiction And 't is as impossible for any man to know unless he knew himself eternal and
Emperours who triumphed most in pretending Atheism threatned the wind if it blew upon them and the clouds if they rained upon them betrayed upon every small occasion the dreadfullest fears imaginable Julian the Apostate at last cryed out The Galilaean had overcome him The great Hector of the Gods Epicurus himself was the most eminent coward that ever lived in those things he most defied nothing ever frighted any man more than those two things did him Death and the Gods so you shall find it reported in Cicero His Atoms had not solved his conscience nor cured him it seems of his fears he was certain of them though he bottom'd all the world upon chance How many are to be seen daily that when they think they have safely interred their conscience when they come to any extremity soon find a revival of it again There is nothing so universally certain amongst mankind but what is subject to variation in individuals which strongly proves that the world has not immutability nor eternity affixed to it Sometimes we see such members of the body and such faculties of the soul cease to exert themselves in particulars but yet such monsters for they are no better ought not to destroy the general character and definition we give of natural Beings In this matter of conscience which does plainly admit the Being of a God to which it hath immediate relation two things strongly plead for the generality of it in all men above the generality of any one thing that belongs to them First That 't is the great Trustee for God in the world And unless it be in some very extraordinary case where God concurrs with a man to extinguish it as a special and signal judgement upon him it seems plain that no man can totally obliterate it in himself Secondly 'T is the great medium he will judge the world by He will deal with men according to their light and the consciences of men shall perform that great office of accusing or excusing in the great day He that either actually has a principle of conscience or ever had such a thing or comes hereafter to find that such a principle is within him gives a witness sufficient to the Being of such a principle and I believe the Atheist will undertake a hard task to find one individual man well in his wits that is not included in that compass He that tells me he hath no conscience and expects I should believe him may as well expect that I should take his word if he should tell me he is not of the same composition with other men and does not see nor hear though he has eyes and ears visibly as other men have A fourth Argument to prove the truth of a supreme Being above the world is the miracles that have been wrought in the world This stabs the Atheist and mortally wounds him If ever in fact there were such a thing as a miracle the Atheist is irrecoverably gone All his Hypotheses fall to the ground all the fig-leaves he can get will never hide him from apparent nakedness and folly To give this argument its due force I shall endeavour two things First To prove that a miracle leads us directly to God and is in its being destructive to all an Atheist sayes And secondly That the fact of such miracles is true and that we have good reason to believe it is so and that there have been often such in the world A miracle is properly that which could not come to pass by any natural cause If a man actually dead should be raised again it were a thing could not be brought to pass in any natural way nor could any natural account be given of it If a man born blind and that had no eyes should by a word speaking be made to see 't were a thing out of all humane reach to do You must step out of the world and take a view of something above it to know how such a thing could come to pass The working of a miracle is the doing of that which apparently to our senses and our reason nothing visible in the world could do And if so it must needs be done by somewhat that is superiour to the world Nay 't is sometimes the doing of that which is quite contrary to the natural motion and constant tendency of the whole universe If a man be once dead and that principle of life and motion that was in him be gone 't is natural for his body to corrupt and vary the form of its matter Now to make such a man live again who by the standing Law of Nature died and must by the same Law corrupt is not only a thing above all natural power but a thing directly contrary to nature and perfectly inverts the whole course of it For 't is as much the reason and course of nature for a man to die as 't is at the first for him to live If therefore any such thing were ever done in the world it must necessarily be brought to pass by a Power above all natural causes and the utmost ability of all natural Beings We must needs erect a Throne for a power superiour to nature and such a power as must directly lead us to God 'T is as much a miracle and as far above all natural power to revive a man actually dead as to make a man out of a stone or form him from a lump of earth Consider the world in which of the Atheists notions of it you will if there be nothing above it nor besides it then 't is plainly impossible that any thing should happen or come to pass but what has its rise and foundation from somewhat within it For if there be nothing existing but this world there can be nothing produced but what this world can produce But that we call a miracle is such a thing as is quite beyond the worlds production neither the reasonable part nor the sensible part nor the whole together can produce a miracle Not the reasonable part for the great and genuine business of reason is to place things in their due dependencies each upon other and to know causes producing effects and means suited to ends Reason can never elevate any thing in its operation beyond it self nor force an act from it beyond the compass of its own Being That reason has an innate antipathy to 't were to set reason against it self and say reason shall produce things without reason and against reason Reason cannot the imagined to deal in that for which no reason can be given And therefore when we see a miracle a thing that can have no natural cause or reason directs us to look to somewhat above the world that must needs be the cause of it Not the sensible part of the world for that can never alter its course Nature is a perfect Law to it self which it can never repeal This we are assured of not only by our experience of the constant course that
Atoms had been rational Atoms and truly he might as well have begged and supposed them into reason as motion for bare matter can no more be proved to have an intrinsique motion in it which would make it absolutely necessary for all matter to move at all times than it can be proved to think will and reason and he that beggs and takes things for granted without the trouble of proof should take all that would serve his turn I say had Epicurus his Atoms been reasonable Atoms they would never have done any thing by chance because they had a superiour principle to do it by they would never have put that to the venture which might have been made certain Their own principle would have instructed them not to have put that to the venture of chance whether it should be or should not be which by reason might have been made certain to be A man that hath eyes would never shut them and go to discover colours by feeling Every superiour principle must needs act above an inferiour Whatever did happen by meer chance to be had a power to be and by reason might have been made certain to be How monstrously unreasonable is it to believe that these Atoms that had nothing in themselves but bare matter and motion upon the best supposition should produce in man and in nothing else a rational soul and that that in man which we call the rational soul should be nothing else but the more active and generous part of these Atoms which became so by being more smooth and round than the rest which you must believe fell by chance all to the share of men and no other Being had the hap to have any of them in their compositions We must also believe these eternal Atoms to be some of one size and some of another some of one quality and some of another and yet all eternal which is a flat contradiction to all notion of eternity Fourthly Suppose in these Atoms matter and motion the world could never come to be made fortuitously thereby For First all motion in every thing must either be from a superiour mover or from an innate and self-originated principle of motion in it self If from a superiour mover then we come to God If from an innate motion that any thing hath in and from it self that motion must needs be eternal For nothing can move that is not set on work or that doth not infinitely set it self on work If motion have beginning it must own it self to some beginner if it have no beginning it must be infinite and eternal and there needs no better or other argument to prove that any motion had a beginning than when we see it has an ending for as all mechanick motion by its coming to an end shews plainly it had a primum movens and was set on work so does all other motion by its perioding and ending declare plainly it had its beginning ab extra and is not self-originated and eternal So that if the motion of these Atoms came from a first mover then they came from a cause and their motion must needs be regular and corresponding to that first cause If they had no first mover then their motion must be eternal as Epicurus sayes it is and nothing that moves eternally can move by chance because it must needs have the highest perfection of motion And where that is 't is impossible to suppose any such thing as chance For whatever did eternally move can never cease so to move and so can have no such thing as chance conversant about it Secondly Matter it self cannot be moved fortuitously by motion supposed inherent in it that is utterly impossible because all matter determines its own motion Heavy things move downward and cannot fortuitously move upward Had there been nothing but chance to sement the world the heavy part would have been sure to have gone downward and the light part upward and they would never have met nor pieced together The motion of things is determined in the nature of their being And therefore we cannot reasonably say that bare matter and motion ever caused any thing by chance unless you will say it caused every thing to be by chance just as it must needs be and necessarily be which is a contradiction Who can believe chance the cause and certainty the effect We see all things moving in perfect order and not only our experience assures us of this but our reason shews us it must necessarily so come to pass For such causes do produce such effects suitable to the nature and being of things and an intrinsique causality and innate dependence upon each other which must needs be the effect of the supreme and great cause of all Let any man consider that noble principle in man the rational soul with the suitableness of it to govern himself and the rest of the world and how all things in their being and dependency lie proportioned to such a superiority Let him view the make of a man and a woman and see how suitable and how necessary they are one to another in their very composition and how the male and the female in all other creatures are adapted to propagate their own kind and to be useful each to other and the instinct they carry about them so to be Let him look upon the faces of men and women and consider them there never having been yet seen any two without some variety Let him look above him and below him and round about him and see what harmony there is between the Heavens and the Earth how the well-being of the one depends upon the influence of the other and how certain and regular those are by which all times and seasons are exactly determined Let him look upon the Sea and consider how useful that is to the world to introduce a trade and commerce among all Nations and to make each one capable of enjoying the good of all the rest Let him view the constant course of its ebbings and flowings and the standing Law of its Boundaries whereby such a mass of waters are still kept in one channel and continued in their proper station And when he has viewed these and a thousand things more that lye obvious to his reasonable contemplation if he then think the composition of the whole universe and all the parts of it and the grand oeconomy that is in it came from nothing but meer chance he renders himself a person fitter for Bedlam than disputation Yet such wretched shifts are men forced to fly to when they are labouring to exclude the notion of God and banish a Deity out of the world The Epicurean Atomist falls plainly under the heavy stroaks of several gross absurdities First He makes his Atoms which are the matter of which he will have the world to consist to move about in his ultra-mundan-space without a tendency to a center Which is perfectly impossible that any matter should move by a motion
innate in it without tendency to some center or other He affirms his Atoms could never discontinue their motion but when they encountred other Atoms and were by that impulse deflected into another course To believe this were to deny one of the plainest experimental truths in Philosophy and to suppose matter moving without either a terminus à quo or a terminus ad quem Secondly He ascribes that to dull matter and sensless motion which we ascribe to God infinitely perfect For he supposes his Atoms infinite and in an infinite space And so he makes things mutable and things imperfect infinite For if these Atoms had not been so they must needs have continued without variation or change as once they were and as he saies eternally they were Whatever he objects against us about the infinity of God with ten times more force he objects the same against himself for the infinity of his own Atoms and supposed inanity Thirdly He makes more to arise out of his matter and motion than is contained in the matter and motion themselves which is the rational soul of man Fourthly He makes first eternal causes to have chanceable effects and then those chanceable effects to be the cause of all certainty and regularity He makes eternal causes to have chanceable effects for he saies himself His Atoms and his ultra-mundan space are eternal and the motion of these Atoms eternal likewise in it And the effect of these eternal causes is that by chance they make this world and this chance in making the world hath produced all the certainty constancy order beauty and regularity of it There cannot be two things more ridiculously said than first to make chance the effect of an eternal cause and so the most certain cause and secondly to make chance the cause of all order and certainty 'T is as true to say the Sun is the cause of all darkness and wisdom the true Mother of all folly Lastly He makes things to cause themselves which is the supremest of all Non-sense For saies he these moving particles this matter and motion make up the universe And so if there be nothing above them they must needs make themselves the universe If this matter and motion be made and moved 't is not eternal if you suppose it is eternal then that which is eternal varies it self into all forms and compositions and so is not unchangeable which all eternal things are Although that which is infinite may beget variety of other things distinct from its own being as God himself doth yet that which is infinite cannot do so by varying it self which these Atoms do and so become changeable which cannot be annexed to what is infinite When these Atoms turn themselves by their motion into bodies and all other parts of the world supposing all the principles of the Atomical Philosophy that they destroy not themselves they alter the form and manner of their existence and so I am sure are not as they eternally were Nor could they indeed be eternal because had they been eternal in the posture they were they would have had perfection in that posture and so could never have changed from what was infinitely perfect In short therefore either the world was eternal in some pre-existing matter to what we see either Atoms or what you will or it was eternal just in the course we now see it If it were eternal in any pre-existing matter that matter must needs cease to be so by varying it self into this world unless you will make things changeable and imperfect infinite which is impossible Whatever eternally was must eternally remain as it was or else 't is not eternal 'T is monstrously absurd to talk of a changeable eternity If you take the other way to make the world eternal just as we see it you must unavoidably make corruption generation and all parts of the round and course of the world eternal too unless you admit priority and posteriority which are plainly enough destructive to all notion of eternity If any thing had been unchangeable and unalterable and caused other things distinct from it self as we say Gods does it had altered the case but to say the world is eternal when every part that makes the whole of its self and all the matter of the world is perpetually altering and varying 't is utterly impossible without making the course of it in changes in generating and corrupting particular forms eternal too Though God created variety of creatures that several waies alter and change yet he in his own being is unchangeable and still the same he ever was If he had dilated his own being and spread it into the variety of the world and made the world out of himself and subsisted only in it it had been impossible he should have been eternal because then he would not now have been what he ever before had been A third Argument to prove that God is and that he made the world is that witness that he hath left to himself and his own Being in the CONSCIENCES of men This is so safe and so sure a way to bring us to God that unless we had seen him face to face there could not have been any thing that could possibly have given us a clearer evidence of the being of God and of the relation our own beings have to him than this hath done The understanding faculty of man is the noblest part of the world and in that faculty God hath established the knowledge of himself Conscience in a man is nothing but the true result of his understanding about himself in reference to a supreme Being above him Which if there were no God were to no purpose and the noblest exercise of man in his rational part would be wholly in vain which Aristotle would not endure to have thought of the meanest and lowest product of nature He rightly denied that nature did the least thing in vain That we call conscience is not only seated in the understanding of man but has a preculiarity in the exercise of that understanding purely relating to its self For Conscience is not only an ability in the understanding as 't is relating to other matters when a man will make use of it to determine his actions and his condition in reference to God and a superiour Being But conscience carries in its description an innate instinct and necessary inclination in the understanding to operate this way and to pass a continual judgement upon a mans self in all a man does with reference to God and that primary and supreme concern of pleasing him and corresponding to his will Can we suppose this great wheel of the understanding should move this way without a first mover And move about nothing Move in vain Whence should this principle in man come We find it written in fair characters all the world over Man sees nothing in the world but what is inferiour to him and under his jurisdiction If God had not been
ability in mine understanding to reason all the world up to him and derive all things from him Secondly When I consider that this supreme Being does necessarily exist he must then be infinite for God and infinite are inseparate And if he be infinite he must also be then invisible to a finite Being If he were visible to any thing finite he could not himself be infinite and then he could not be God How absurd therefore to our reason is it to desire to see such a Being as we ascribe to God! I cannot grasp infinite in my mind much less then can I make it the object of my sight Infinite could not be infinite were it any way comprehendsible Mine eye cannot view the whole world at once which yet is finite and circumscribed much less what is boundless and infinite 'T is a mean and narrow design to confine the notion of God and his Being to our eye-sight when we have so much a nobler capacity to give us a view of him Especially when we consider we cannot see the noblest part of our selves which is our own souls nor are we able to converse by our sight with such things as are proper objects for it but we are soon at a loss We cannot look upon the heavenly bodies so as to incompass their dimensions in our eye-fight What small things are the Sun Moon and Stars to him that is no otherwise informed than by his eyes The least distance out-does our sight and deceives us And yet nothing will serve the Atheist but an ocular view of an infinite Being 'T were much more practicable and reasonable to say he would not believe there was such a thing as the Sea unless he could take it up in the palm of his hand Nor will not be satisfied that the Sun is a body of light by the beams of it unless he can put it into a Lanthorn This discovers to us the grounds of that natural Religion that directly opposeth an Atheist in the whole of his undertaking The fundamentals of this natural Religion are fixed and secured First In that original impression God left of himself upon us at our first make And Secondly In the true exercise of that faculty we call reason 'T is this natural universal Religion by which God intended to uphold the frame and being of the world and without which it cannot subsist Here ought uniformity to be expected and strictly required Things supernatural have not had that universality but have been the peculiar happiness and advantage of some times and some places and are not essentially necessary to the frame and being of the world Nor will the Atheist in the least invalidate the truth of this natural Religion by saying There are very few that have such an exercise of reason as to arrive at such principles For when we say any thing is reasonable we need say no more of it than that it is attainable by reason We speak of what is vertually in that principle what it may do not what every individual man does in the exercise of it What is in it self intrinsically reasonable and will appear so to men when they make use of their reason we may well call reasonable though there be never so few that attain to an understanding of it How many conclusions are there in Geometry and Mathematicks that are in themselves perfectly reasonable and true and will appear so to every mans reason when he will make a right use of it And yet there are perhaps at the present very few in the world that understand them And were he not a very vain man that would therefore deny the reason of them and so consequently admit nothing to be reasonable or true but what every individual person actually comprehends and assents to Thus my Lord I have led you through a wilderness a discourse unpolished without the common high waies of method and such artificial ornaments as we have to please us in those places where we chuse to live beyond what we find where we are sometimes forced to travel When you reflect upon the Journey you have had through these papers I can provide nothing to make you admit it tolerably pleasant but to tell you that you have all the way seen a pillar of fire and pillar of cloud you have seen a dark side and a light side the Atheists dark side the cloud of absurdity and folly that hangs over him how weak that man is that fights against God his own reason disarms him and he becomes a captive to himself You have seen a light side also those clear perspicuous evidences we have of God and that he walks not in the dark but has lighted us to himself by the bright beams of our understandings and has commissioned the meanest creature we converse with and made it his Ambassadour to treat with us about him and written his credential characters upon the whole world and given it in charge to declare his Being This we have made Canonical by two good Authors David tells us The Heavens declare the glory of God and the Firmament sheweth his handy work And St. Paul delivers it as a great Oracle of Divine Truth that the invisible things of God from the creation of the world are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made even his eternal Power and Godhead In man above all the rest he has fixed a perpetual memorial of himself and obliged him to a peculiar adherence to his Creator in that he has honoured him with his Image that so he should never deny his God but he should fall below himself nor blaspheme that supreme Being without defiling his own He has stamped his image and superscription upon man that so he might know whose he is and to whom as a due tribute he ought still to render himself That divine spark that heavenly image that rational soul is that noblest part of the world wherein God chiefly inthrones himself and by which he puts in his claim to the whole that he has made Nor can man that is so qualified that finds a tincture of divinity in his composition that carries about him such internal rayes of rational light and moves under that conduct when he is truly himself ever make this visible world his ultimate center The more vigorous and enlarged the soul is the sooner it surfeits with the whole of the world and when it has tryed the utmost of it denies it self satisfied and claims a relation to somewhat above it and beyond it Had the whole of the world been for ever nothing but a continued circle of it self were mankind at the top of their Pedigree in things visible could they derive themselves no higher than bare matter and motion the mind could never travel beyond those confines Were this world the highest original of man it must needs contain his ultimate satisfaction and be the perfect boundary of his soul No cause ever produced an effect with a principle beyond it self
reasons must needs know by that act that he is he needs no other demonstration of his own Being to himself and with great ease may he inform himself of the actual existence of all other things But the souls enquiry will still reach further the proper food of craving reason is a reasonable knowledge of things such as the subject is capable of Reason travels to reduce things First To the truth of their existence Secondly To the reason of their existence And Thirdly To the right manner and method of their existence in their relation to and dependance upon each other The whole truth of no existence can be known so as reason may justly challenge a knowledge of it without knowing the cause of it or else knowing there was no cause of it because the great and supreme distinction of Beings lies in the absoluteness and dependency of them To know any visible existence to be without cause is to know it to be that which no man can rationally know any visible Being to be which is to know it to be eternal And if it have some first cause without some reasonable account of that to our selves we can never tell from what nor from whence to date it nor how to answer many other questions reason will ask about it Things are never in their proper station till they are made a right object for knowledge and reduced to a due correspondence to reason Then they bear their proportion to the great and universal harmony 'T is reason puts the world into regular motion sorts each thing places causes before effects finds out causes by effects and necessary conclusions from their own natural premises and still pursues things to the highest and supremest cause of all Search the world without this Candle and it will appear nothing but a heap of confusion God seems to have placed this sublime faculty in man for two ends First That a man might rule himself and the rest of the world in such a manner and method as might carry some proportion to the eternal reason above of which mans rational soul is an image And Secondly That by the use of it he might ascend to the knowledge of his Maker and have every thing he saw as well as himself made a step to help him upward The ground of all our homage to God lies in the knowledge we have of a Supreme Being before us and above us Without that 't is impossible ever to introduce Religion into the world Two things seem to be but a reasonable collection from the natural composition of mankind and the pure issues of a reasoning soul abstractly taken from all helps of revelation First That 't is not possible for that noble and impartial faculty of mans reason to be true to it self in its own actings and to arrive at its own necessary satisfaction about it self and all other Beings without a strict inquiry into the primary reason and first cause of the Being of it self and all other things And Secondly That the single exercise of natural reason in such an inquiry will safely conduct a man to the conclusion of some first cause and some one Supreme Being the cause of all Beings which we call God To prove there Positions undoubted truths shall be the first endeavour of the following discourse If we can happily bring mankind to God by this high-way of their reason and light a man to his Creator by this Lamp that continually burns in his own soul we shall then prove Atheism a very lye and the Atheist a most unnatural lyer towards his God and towards himself I shall proceed First affirmatively and positively and then negatively in giving a full answer to all the Atheist has to object Consider in the first place 't is not a thing within any compass of supposition that mankind in the use of their reason should fail to fix upon that as their first and great enquiry how things came to be in the posture they are now found and what original they owe themselves to That faculty that reasons about causes and effects must needs ascend by that method to the highest cause of all things No satisfying knowledge which the soul still labours after can be had of any thing unless we can trace it to its original without that it proves but a vexation to reason and reproaches it with ignorance in that grand fundamental in the knowledge of things which must give the truest inlet to all the subsequent comprehension we can have of them That reason in its operation must needs move this way will appear by these several considerations First There is no more obvious enquiry for whatever we see than to know whether it have a beginning or were without a begining If it had beginning when it did begin and how it came first to exist in the world and from whence it had the donation of it self No mans reason can acquiesce without some answer to this Secondly Finding out the original of things determines the property of them and so fills the mind with a satisfaction in that great concern reason has about every thing to know whose it is Whatever was the first cause of a thing and the original maker of it must needs have the property of it 'T is impossible there should be a claim made with so much justice to any thing as by the first maker of it 'T is not possible to disseize him of his right to a thing that gave it its existence and caused it first to be He that first produced a Being had that Being first entirely existing in himself and in his own power Whatever is made can have no property in it self The right must needs be in the maker Here reason sits down satisfied and fully acquiesces in that particular Thirdly The knowing the original of any thing gives us the true boundaries and limits of it Nothing can rise higher than its original No effect can out-reach the cause Nay there must be ever a necessary inferiority in whatever is caused to the first causer of it This is a necessary direction to all the searches of reason about the nature of any thing to know the first cause of such a Being and the true original it derives it self from Fourthly The knowledge of things in their prima causa quiets our reason because it gives us the utmost and ultimate knowledge that is to be had about them To know a thing in it self and to know it in its first cause and original is to know all that reason can expect to know about any visible Being This brings things to hold their due proportion to the rational soul and rectifies us in our knowledge in placing causeâ— and effects in their due Stations Secondly If the being of reason be such as that it must necessarily make out it selâ— into such enquiries and that the first cause of things is the most proper object for a rational soul that trades in causes and effects we will
if you respect only actual matter he made all actual matter out of no matter but potentially by himself who does not consist of matter And when we say all things were made of nothing nothing by a supposition supplies the place of the term from whence and not of the matter whereof they were made If we look then no further than this world and only to â—hat nothing can be produced but by matter and motion because there is nothing in â—t but matter and motion and therefore â—o say any thing were caused any other way were to say something were caused by nothing which were impossible But if we prove a supreme Being above the world 't is no destruction to this maxim to say that matter and motion it self were caused out of no other matter and motion yet not from nothing but from the active potentiality of such a supreme and infinite Being that can from himself cause and produce whatsoever is possible to be caused and produced who being without all cause and above all cause may well be supposed to be the author of all causes So that this maxim determines the main question no way but may be an appurtenant to it and very well solved either way Having thus endeavoured to make those two first things proposed evident First That things could not make or cause themselves And that the world could never be its own original And Secondly That nothing in the world nor the whole of the world it self could be without cause and so be eternal I shall proceed to prove the third thing proposed which was that the world was caused by something before it and above it and that there is one supreme eternal Being which we call GOD that did cause and make the world And this I make good several waies First The universal agreement and consent that has been amongst mankind in all places times and ages in this matter all concurring in the existence of a Deity strongly affirms this Where was there by record of experience any people in any Nation under the Sun found that did not pay some homage to the notion of a Deity Where did ever avowed Atheism possess any part of the world or fix its habitation The whole world have ever subscribed their subjection to a superiour Being All the Idolatry and Polythism that has been in the world has been founded in this for though their worship hath not been rightly directed and their homage not regularly paid where it became due yet this general principle still lay uppermost in the spirits of mankind That a worship was to be performed and a homage to be paid to somewhat that was before them and is above them You may as soon find a Nation without their souls as without their Gods Nay they would set up a Leek an Onion a Calf or an Oxe or any creature to subject themselves to a supreme Deity by and make it a medium to vent that pressing sense of a subjection to somewhat above them rather than not do it Men would have an Altar to an unknown God rather than none which when they had nothing visible declares a pure innate principle to somewhat above them They were so filled with such an apprehension that they would have a Deity for every thing for their corn and their wine and every thing they dealt with The Romans by that method had multiplied their Gods to above thirty thousand and other Nations not much behind them Which can speak no other thing unto us than that men saw somewhat of a Deity in themselves and every thing else under whose rule and dispose all things lay subjected and in whom they lived and moved and had their being Nor would they undertake any thing in peace or war private or publick without a previous application to a Deity whose right to dispose them and all their actions they did thereby fully own and assent to If we enquire into the true and primary grounds of this we shall find them to lie in three things First The universal exercise of the Reason of mankind about themselves and all they saw in the world necessarily fixed in them this conclusion That there must be a first Cause and a supreme beginner of things The general reason of the world has concenter'd in this and proceeded upon it as an universal maxim agreeing to the truth of our natural faculties Secondly All mankind live and exist with an instinct of a Deity in their very nature and being A God runs in the veins and blood of men So saith Cicero In omnium animis Deorum notionem impressit ipsa Natura De N. Deor. l. 1. We have discovered parts of the world where men have lived without clothes and without most humane circumstances that attend mankind but never any without some God God has stamped a character of himself upon us in our very make He has made us in his own image We can never run away from that no more than we can take leave of our selves and shake hands with our own Beings Whatever God the wise Maker has made they carry the marks of him about them But to man especially he has secured his claim in his very Composition and Constitution Nor is this a supposition begged and taken for granted like an Atheists Hipothesis but a thing evidently so The fears and hopes of all men are naturally guided to somewhat above them When men are in danger they naturally run to their God Man in all his fears and sorrows naturally shelters himself under a supreme Being above him He soon finds himself at the utmost confines of his own protection but sits not down there still looks further and higher The workings of his soul as well as the form of his body are still upward they have a divine tendency Extremities are this truth's opportunities Though the Atheists dispute yet he cannot sometimes forbear to tremble The notion of a Deity has made mankind in all ages fall before it Would the Atheist be but so true to himself as to confess it his own fears sometimes confute his unbelief and his own unavoidable practice forbids his principles When the messengers of death come to treat with him they will bring him tidings of another world and awaken him with apprehensions of that Deity he has so mock'd at If there were nothing beyond this world and on the other side the grave mens thoughts of futurity were very vain and the trouble of most men were easily cured they might not only possibly but easily make themselves what they seem to be and what they have really a mind to be Thirdly Another ground of this may be reasonably supposed to be an universal tradition amongst men not only of Gods making the world but of Gods sometimes appearing to and conversing with the world Which he hath often done and given a witness to himself that way We may not only reasonably imagine it a thing to have been but we cannot with any good