Selected quad for the lemma: cause_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
cause_n	effect_n	evil_a	good_a	4,841	5	4.5571	4	true

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A43990	An historical narration concerning heresie and the punishment thereof by Thomas Hobbes.	Hobbes, Thomas, 1588-1679.	1680 (1680)	Wing H2238; ESTC R30774	11,947	20

AN Historical Narration Concerning HERESIE And the Punishment thereof BY THOMAS HOBBES OF MALMSBVRY LONDON Printed in the Year 1680. AN HISTORICAL NARRATION Concerning HERESIE And the PUNISHMENT thereof THe word Heresie is Greek and signifies a taking of any thing and particularly the taking of an Opinion After the study of Philosophy begun in Greece and the Philosophers disagreeing amongst themselves had started many Questions not onely about things Natural but also Moral and Civil because every man took what Opinion he pleased each several Opinion was called a Heresie which signified no more than a private Opinion without reference to truth or falshood The beginners of these Heresies were chiefly Pythagoras Epicurus Zeno Plato and Aristotle men who as they held many Errours so also found they out many true and useful Doctrines in all kinds of Learning and for that cause were well esteemed of by the greatest Personages of their own times and so also were some few of their Followers But the rest ignorant men and very often needy Knaves having learned by heart the Tenets some of Pythagoras some of Epicurus some of Zeno some of Plato some of Aristotle and pretending to take after them made use thereof to get their Living by the teaching of Rich mens Children that happened to be in love with these famous Names But by their ignorant Discourse sordid and ridiculous Manners they were generally despised of what Sect or Heresie soever they were whether they were Pythagoreans or Epicureans or Stoicks who followed Zeno or Academicks Followers of Plato or Peripateticks Followers of Aristotle For these were the names of Heresies or as the Latines call them Sects à sequendo so much talkt of from after the time of Alexander till this present day and that have perpetually troubled or deceived the people with whom they lived and were never more numerous than in the time of the Primitive Church But the Heresie of Aristotle was more predominant than any or perhaps than all the rest nor was the name of Heresie then a disgrace nor the word Heretick at all in use though the several Sects especially the Epicureans and the Stoicks hated one another and the Stoicks being the fiercer men used to revile those that differed from them with the most despightful words they could invent It cannot be doubted but that by the preaching of the Apostles and Disciples of Christ in Greece and other parts of the Roman Empire full of these Philosophers many thousands of men were converted to the Christian Faith some really and some feignedly for factious ends or for need for Christians lived then in common and were charitable and because most of these Philosophers had better skill in Disputing and Oratory than the Common people and thereby were better qualified both to defend and propagate the Gospel there is no doubt I say but most of the Pastors of the Primitive Church were for that reason chosen out of the number of these Philosophers who retaining still many Doctrines which they had taken up on the authority of their former Masters whom they had in reverence endeavoured many of them to draw the Scriptures every one to his own Heresie And thus at first entred Heresie into the Church of Christ. Yet these men were all of them Christians as they were when they were first baptized Nor did they deny the Authority of those Writings which were left them by the Apostles and Evangelists but interpreted them many times with a bias to their former Philosophy And this Dissention amongst themselves was a great scandal to the Unbelievers and which not onely obstructed the way of the Gospel but also drew scorn and greater persecution upon the Church For remedy whereof the chief Pastors of Churches did use at the rising of any new Opinion to assemble themselves for the examining and determining of the same wherein if the Author of the Opinion were convinced of his Errour and subscribed to the Sentence of the Church assembled then all was well again but if he still persisted in it they laid him aside and considered him but as an Heathen man which to an unfeigned Christian was a great ignominy and of force to make him consider better of his own Doctrine and sometimes brought him to the acknowledgment of the Truth But other punishment they could inflict none that being a right appropriated to the Civil Power So that all the punishment the Church could inflict was onely Ignominy and that among the faithful consisting in this that his company was by all the Godly avoided and he himself branded with the name of Heretick in opposition to the whole Church that condemned his Doctrine So that Catholick and Heretick were terms relative and here it was that Heretick became to be a Name and a name of disgrace both together The first and most troublesome Heresies in the Primitive Church were about the Trinity For according to the usual curiosity of Natural Philosophers they could not abstain from disputing the very first Principles of Christianity into which they were baptized In the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Ghost Some there were that made them allegorical Others would make one Creator of Good and another of Evil which was in effect to set up two Gods one contrary to another supposing that causation of evil could not be attributed to God without Impiety From which Doctrine they are not far distant that now make the first cause of sinful actions to be every man as to his own sin Others there were that would have God to be a body with parts organical as Face Hands Fore-parts and Back-parts Others that Christ had no real body but was a meer Phantasm for Phantasms were taken then and have been ever since by unlearned and superstitious men for things real and subsistent Others denied the Divinity of Christ. Others that Christ being God and Man was two Persons Others confest he was one Person and withal that he had but one Nature And a great many other Heresies arose from the too much adherence to the Philosophy of those times whereof some were supprest for a time by St. John's publishing his Gospel and some by their own unreasonableness vanished and some lasted till the time of Constantine the Great and after When Constantine the Great made so by the assistance and valour of the Christian Souldiers had attained to be the onely Roman Emperour he also himself became a Christian and caused the Temples of the Heathen gods to be demolished and authorized Christian Religion onely to be publick But in the latter end of his time there arose a Dispute in the City of Alexandria between Alexander the Bishop and Arius a Presbyter of the same City wherein Arius maintained first That Christ was inferiour to his Father and afterwards That he was no God alleadging the words of Christ My Father is greater than I. The Bishop on the contrary alleadging the words of St. John And the Word was God and the words