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A27004 The reasons of the Christian religion the first part, of godliness, proving by natural evidence the being of God ... : the second part, of Christianity, proving by evidence supernatural and natural, the certain truth of the Christian belief ... / by Richard Baxter ... ; also an appendix defending the soul's immortality against the Somatists or Epicureans and other pseudo-philosophers. Baxter, Richard, 1615-1691. 1667 (1667) Wing B1367; ESTC R5892 599,557 672

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be more evident to reason than that something must be Eternal without beginning nothing being more evident than that Nothing hath no power no action no effects and so can make nothing And therefore if ever there had been a time when Nothing was Nothing could ever have been imagine that there were Nothing now and it is certain there never would be any thing Obj. Something may oriri de novo without any Cause as well as God be eternally without any Cause Answ It s impossible For he that is eternally hath all perfection eternally in himself and needeth no Cause being still in being and being the Cause of Causes But Nothing hath no perfection or being and therefore needeth an Omnipotent Cause to give it a being Obj. If the world may be created of nothing materially it may be what it is without any thing efficiently Answ Impossible Pre-existent matter is not necessary to the first created matter for Matter may be caused of Nothing by an Omnipotent Efficient as well as the wonderful frame of all things be made out of Matter But without an Efficient no Being can arise de novo So that it is most evident seeing any thing now is there hath been something eternally And if something it must needs be the first Cause which is chief in excellency and first in order of production and therefore of existence § 10. The first Cause must needs be independent in being perfections and operations and so be absolutely self-sufficient For it were not the first if there were any before it and being caused by nothing else it was eternally sufficient in and for it self otherwise that which it were beholden to would have the place of a Cause to it And if it caused not all or needed the help of any other it is not absolutely the first Cause to all others nor perfect in it self That which could be eternally without a cause and it self cause all things is self-sufficient and independent § 11. The first Cause must needs be free from all imperfection of Corporeity or Materiality Composition Passibility corruptibility Mutability and Mortality and all other imperfections of defendent beings There is such a thing as a Living Principle and a pure spiritual Nature in the created world and the Maker of it must be life and Spirit in a higher purer sense than it and therefore must be free from all its imperfections and having no cause hath no defect and having no beginning can have no end All this Reason doth certainly apprehend § 12. This perfect first Cause must be Immense or Infinite in Being Not by corporeal extension as if God as a Body were in a place and being more extensive than all place were called Immense But in the perfect Essence of an eternall Life and Spirit and Mind he is every where without Locality and all things live and move and be in him The thought of space is but a Metaphorical help to our conception of his Immensity § 13. Therefore he must needs be Omnipresent Not by extension quantitative but in a sort transcendent and more excellent according to the transcendent way of his Existence For if we must have conceived of him as no better than a Body and of Magnitude as an Excellency we might well have concluded that he hath made nothing greater than himself Nemo dat quod non habet and therefore he must be more extensive than all the world and consequently absent from no part of it Much more when his Being which surpasseth corporeity directeth us to acknowledge a more noble kind of Omnipresence than Extensive § 14. Therefore is he Incomprehensible as to humane understanding or any other created intellect Of our own incomprehension experience sufficiently convinceth us here and Reason evinceth the same of all created Intellects for the less cannot comprehend the greater and between finite and infinite there is no proportion We know nothing purely-intelligible so easily and certainly as that God is But there is nothing that we are so far from comprehending As we see nothing more easily and certainly than the Sun which yet we see not with a comprehensive but a partial and defective sight § 15. This Infinite Being can be but One. For if there were many they could not be Infinite and so indeed there would be none nor would there be any one first Cause of all things For if one caused one part of the World and another another part no one were the first Cause of all And if they joyned in causing all together they would all conjunctly make but one first cause and each one several be but part of the Cause If there be no one that is sufficient to make and govern all the World there is no perfect Being nor no God but the effect sheweth the sufficiency and the unity of the World the Orbs being one frame the unity of the first cause Perfection consisteth more in the unity of one all sufficient Being than in a voluntary concurrence of many Beings The most learned Heathens who thought there were many to be named Gods did mean but subordinate particular Gods that were under the one universal God whom the Stoicks and Academicks took to be the universal Soul and the subordinate Gods the Souls of the particular Orbs and Planets § 16. The Power of this God must needs be Omnipotency He that hath given so great Power to the creatures as is exercised by them especially the Sun and fixed Stars in their several Vortices or Orbs and he that could make such a World of nothing and uphold the being and maintain the order and cause and continue the rapid motions of all the Vortices or Orbs which are to us innumerable and each of incomprehensible excellency and magnitude is certainly to be accounted no less than Omnipotent By his Omnipotency I mean that by which in it self considered in primo instanti he can do all things possible that is which belong not to Impotency but to Power And by which in secundo instanti he can do all things which his Infinite Wisdom judgeth congruous and meet to be done And in tertio instanti can do all that he will do and are pleasing to him § 17. The understanding of the first Cause must needs be Omniscient and infinite Wisdom 1. He that hath given so much wisdom to such a Worm as Man must have more than all the men in the World Whatever knowledge is in the whole Creation being given by Him doth prove that formally or eminently he hath more Were it all contracted into one Intelligence it must be less than His that caused it He hath not given more wisdom than he had to give nor so much as he had or is himself For if he should make any thing equal to Himself there would be two Infinites and there would be a perfect self-sufficient being which yet had lately no sufficiency or being and there would be a being independent in facto
and blessedness of the Life to come that they say nothing of it that is ever likely to make any considerable number set their hearts on Heaven and to live a heavenly Life 9. They were so unacquainted with the nature and will of God that they taught and used such a manner of Worship as tended rather to delude and corrupt men than to sanctifie them 10. They medled so little with the inward sins and duties of the heart especially about the holy Love of God and their goodness was so much in outward acts and in meer respect to men that they were not like to sanctifie the Soul or make the Man good that his actions might be good but only to polish men for Civil Societies with the addition of a little Varnish of Superstition and Hypocrisie 11. Their very style is either suitable to dead speculation as a Lecture of Metaphysicks or sleight and dull and unlike to be effectual to convert and sanctifie mens Souls 12. Almost all is done in such a disputing sophistical way and clogg'd with so many obscurities uncertainties and self-contradictions and mixt in heaps of Physical and Logical Subtilties that they were unfit for the common peoples benefit and could tend but to the benefit of a few 13. Experience taught and still teacheth the World that Holy Souls and Lives that were sincerely set upon God and Heaven were strangers amongst the Disciples of the Philosophers and other Heathens Or if it be thought that there were some such among them certainly they were very few in comparison of true Christians and those few very dark and diseased and defective with us a Childe at ten years old will know more of God and shew more true piety than did any of their Philosophers with us poor women and labouring persons do live in that holiness and heavenliness of minde and conversation which the wisest of the Philosophers never did attain I spake of this before but here also thought meet to shew you the difference between the effect of Christs doctrine and the Philosophers 2. And that all this is justly to be imputed to Christ himself I shall now prove 1. He gave them a perfect pattern for his holy obedient heavenly Life in his own person and his conversation here on Earth 2. His Doctrine and Law requireth all this holiness which I described to you You finde the Prescript in his Word of which the holy Souls and Lives of men are but a transcript 3. All his Institutions and Ordinances are but means and helps to this 4. He hath made it the condition of mans Salvation to be thus holy in sincerity and to desire and seek after perfection in it He taketh no other for true Christians indeed nor will save any other at the last 5. All his comforting Promises of mercy and defence are made only to such 6. He hath made it the Office of his Ministers through the World to perswade and draw men to this Holiness And if you hear the Sermons and read the Books which any faithfull Minister of Christ doth preach or write you will soon see that this is the business of them all And you may soon perceive that these Ministers have another kinde of preaching and writing than the Philosophers had more clear more congruous more spiritual more powerfull and likely to win men to Holiness and Heavenliness When our Divines and their Philosophers are compared as to their promoting of true Holiness verily the latter seem to be but as Glow-worms and the former to be the Candles for the Family of God And yet I truly value the wisdom and virtue which I finde in a Plato a Seneca a Cicero an Antonine or any of them If you say our advantage is because coming after all we have the helps of all even of those Philosophers I answer mark in our Books and Sermons whether it be any thing but Christianity which we preach It is from Christ and Scripture that we fetch our Doctrine and not from the Philosophers we use their helps in Logick Physicks c. But that 's nothing to our Doctrine He that taught me to speak English did not teach me the Doctrine which I preach in English And he that teacheth me to use the Instruments of Logick doth not teach me the doctrine about which I use them And why did not those Philosophers by all their art attain to that skill in this Sacred work as the Ministers of Christ do when they had as much or more of the Arts than we I read indeed of many good Orations then used even in those of the Emperour Julian there is much good and in Antonine Arrian Epictetus Plutarch more And I read of much taking-Oratory of the Bonzii in Japan c. But compared to the endeavours of Christian Divines they are poor pedantick barren things and little sparks and the success of them is but answerable 7. Christ did before hand promise to send his Spirit into mens Souls to do all this work upon all his Chosen And as he promised just so he doth 8. And we finde by experience that it is the preaching of Christs doctrine by which the work is done It is by the reading of the sacred Scripture or hearing the Doctrine of it opened and applyed to us that Souls are thus changed as is before described And if it be by the medicines which he sendeth us himself by the hands of his own Servants that we are healed we need not doubt whether it be he that healed us His Doctrine doth it as the instrumental Cause for we finde it adapted thereunto and we finde nothing done upon us but by that Doctrine nor any remaining effect but what is the impression of it But his Spirit inwardly reneweth us as the Principal cause and worketh with and by the Word For we finde that the Word doth not work upon all nor upon all alike that are alike prepared But we easily perceive a voluntary distinguishing choice in the operation And we finde a power more than can be in the words alone in the effect upon our selves The heart is like the Wax and the Word like the Seal and the Spirit like the hand that strongly applyeth it We feel upon our hearts that though nothing is done without the Seal yet a greater force doth make the impression than the weight of the Seal alone could cause By this time it is evident that this work of Sanctification is the attestation of God by which he publickly owneth the Gospel and declareth to the World that Christ is the Saviour and his Word is true For 1. It is certain that this work of Renovation is the work of God For 1. It is his Image on the Soul It is the life of the Soul as flowing from his Holy Life wherein are contained the Trinity of Perfections It is the Power of the Soul by which it can overcome the Flesh the World and the Devil which without it none is able to do It is the
hate such deceivers and make them a common scorn instead of being converted by them § 61. The foresaid impossibilities are herein founded 1. There is no effect without a sufficient cause 2. A necessary cause not sufficiently hindred will bring forth its answerable effect But the opposed supposition maketh effects without any sufficient cause and necessary causes without their adequate effects § 62. The providence of God permitted dissentions and heresies to arise among Christians and rivals and false Teachers to raise hard reports of the Apostles and the people to be somewhat alienated from them that the Apostles might by challenges appeal to miracles and future ages might be convinced that the matter of fact could not be contradicted The Romans had contentions among themselves the strong and the weak contemning or condemning one another about meats and days Rom. 14. and 15. The Corinthians were divided into factions and exasperated against Paul by false Apostles so that he is fain at large to vindicate his Ministry and he doth it partly by appealing both to miracles and works of power wrought among them and by the Spirit given to themselves 2 Cor. 12.12 and 13.3 4 5. and 1 Cor. 12.7 12 13. The Galatians were more alienated from Paul by Jewish Teachers and seemed to take him as an enemy for telling them the truth and he feared that he had bestowed on them labour in vain and in this case he vehemently rebuketh them and appealeth first to miracles wrought among them and before their eyes and next to the Spirit given to themselves Gal. 3.1 2 3 4 5. O foolish Galatians who hath bewitched you that you should not obey the truth before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth crucified among you This only would I learn of you Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law or by the hearing of faith He therefore that ministreth to you the Spirit and worketh miracles among you doth he it by the works of the law or by the hearing of faith Now if no such miracles were wrought among them and if no such Spirit was received by themselves would this argument have silenced adversaries and reconciled the minds of the Galatians or rather have made them deride the cause that must have such a defence and say Who be they that work miracles among us and when did we receive such a Spirit So to the Romans this is Paul's testimonial Rom. 15.18 19. For I will not dare to speak of any of those things which Christ hath not wrought by me to make the Gentiles obedient by word and deed Through mighty signs and wonders by the power of the Spirit of God c. And to the Corinthians he saith 1 Cor. 14.18 I thank my God I speak with tongues more than you all So Gal. 2.8 1 Cor. 14.22 Tongues are for a sign to them that believe not So Acts 2.43 and 4.30 and 5.12 and 7.36 and 8.13 and 14.3 and 6.8 and 8.6 13. and 15.12 and 19.11 1 Cor. 12.10 Miracles are still made the confirmation of the Apostles testimony and doctrine And in Heb. 2.3 4. you have the just method of the proof and progress of Christianity Which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord but how is that known and was confirmed to us by them that heard him But how shall we know that they said truth God also bearing them witness with signs and wonders and with divers miracles and gifts of the holy Ghost according to his own will And Act. 4.33 And with great power gave the Apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus 1 Joh. 1.1 2 3. That which was from the beginning which we have heard which we have seen with our eyes which we have looked upon and our hands have handled of the word of life for the life was manifested and we have seen it and bear witness and shew unto you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested unto us that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you that ye also may have fellowship with us c. § 63. III. The miracles of the Apostles are not only attested by the Churches which were eye-witnesses of them 1. By the way of most credible humane testimony 2. And by natural evidence of infallible certainty but also 3. By supernatural testimony of God himself as appeareth in these following evidences § 64. 1. Many miracles were wrought by those first Churches who were the witnesses of the Apostles miracles which is a divine attestation to their testimony 1. The Scriptures fore-cited tell us that the same holy Ghost was given to them all though all had not the same gifts and that tongues and healing and miracles were the gifts of many though not of all which as I have shewed they could not themselves have believed of themselves if it had not been true Yea sufficient historical testimony telleth us that for three or four hundred years at least till Constantine owned and protected Christianity by Secular Power miracles were wrought in confirmation of the Christian faith It hath been the devils craft to seek to destroy the credit of them partly by hypocrites who have counterfeited miracles and partly by lying Legends of the carnal proud domineering part of the Church who have told the world so many palpable lies that they seemed to do it in design to perswade them to believe nothing that is true But yet all wise men will know the difference between History credible and incredible The many testimonies of the miracles of Gregory Thaumaturgus and many others mentioned by Eusebius and almost all other Christian Writers of those times and those mentioned by Augustine de Civitate Dei lib. 22 cap. 8. and Retract lib. 1. cap. 13. passim and by Cyprian Tertullian and many more will not be thought incredible by impartial considering men § 65. 2. The eminent sanctity of the Pastors of the Churches with the success of their testimony and doctrine for the true sanctification of many thousand souls is God's own attestation to their testimony and doctrine How far the sanctifying renewing success of the doctrine is a Divine attestation to its verity I have before opened and how far God owneth even the truths of Philosophy by blessing them with an adequate proportionable success The defective partial truths of Philosophy produce a defective partial reformation how far God accepteth it belongeth not to my present business to determine The more full and integral discovery of God's will by Jesus Christ doth produce a more full and integral renovation And 1. The cause is known by the effect 2. And God will not as is before said bless a lie to do the most excellent work in all the world Now it is a thing most evident that God hath still bless'd the Ministry of the Christian Pastors in all ages to the renewing of many thousand souls That this is truly so I shall somewhat fullier shew anon but that
second Cause 2. That the Somatists themselves say that in the Generation of Plants and Animals which they suppose to be totally Corporeal there is not the least degree of substance produced de novo and therefore there is none but what was totally of God and the Parents do but cause instrumentally the uniting of matter prae-existent Therefore if in the Generating of Man the Parents do but instrumentally cause the uniting of substance which is totally from God though not prae-existent it little differenceth the Case as to the consequents 3. Especially considering that what God doth he doth by an establisht Law of Nature As in his making of the World he made the Sun a Causa Vniversalis constantly to send forth the emanation of Light Heat and moving force upon passive matter and thereby to produce effects diversifyed by the preparations and reception of that matter as to soften Wax to harden Clay to make a Dunghill stink and a Rose smell sweet to produce a poysonous and a wholsom Plant a Nightingale and a Toad c. and this without any dishonour to the Sun So if God the Father of Spirits the Central efficient of Souls have made it the original Law of Nature that he will accordingly afford his communicative Influx and that in Humane Generations such and such Preparations of matter shall be as Receptive of his emanations for such and such Forms or spiritual substances and that he will be herein but an Vniversal Cause of Souls as Souls and not of Souls as clean or unclean and that this shall depend upon the preparation of the Recipient whether it be the Body or a sensitive foregoing Principle still keeping at his pleasure as a Voluntary Agent the suspension or dispose of the effect this would make no great alteration neither as to the point of original sin nor any other weighty consequent OBJECTION XIII OMne quod oritur interit That which is not eternal as to past duration is not eternal as to future duration But the Soul is not eternal as to past duration Ergo. Answ I confess this argument will prove that the Soul is not mortal ex necessitate suae naturae without dependance on a Voluntary preserver And therefore Cicero after most other Philosophers who useth the Major for a contrary Conclusion mistook in this that he thought the Soul was as natural an Emanation from God as the beams or light is from the Sun and therefore that it was naturally eternall both à parte ante à parte post which made Arnobius and other Ancients argue as much against the Platonists Immortality of the Soul as against the Epicureans Mortality so that as I said before one would think that they were heretical in this point that doth not make them well But it is only this natural Eternity which they confute And when the Philosophers say that Omne quod oritur interit they can mean or at least prove no more but this that it is not Everlasting ex necessitate naturae But yet 1. It may be in its nature fitted to be perpetual 2. And by the will of the Creator made perpetual Every Creature did oriri de novo and yet every one doth not interire OBJECTION XIV AMong all your Arguments for the Souls Immortality there are none but Morall ones Answ Morality is grown so contemptible a thing with some debauched persons that a very argument is invalidated by them or contemned if they can but call it Moral But what is Morality but the modality of Naturals And the same argument may be Natural and Moral Indeed we call that a Causa Moralis oft-times which doth not necessitate the effect And yet sometimes even moral Causes do infalibly and certainly produce the effect But causation and argumentation are different things and so is an effect and a Logical consequence Will you call the consequents of Gods own Wisdom Justice Veracity Goodness c. uncertain as coming from a Morali Cause The Soul is an Intellectual free agent and adapted to Moral operations And this is its excellency and perfection and no disparagement to it at all And if you will better read them over you will finde that my Arguments are both Physical and Moral For I argue from the Acts or operations of the Soul to its Powers and Nature And from its Acts and Nature to its ends with many such like which are as truly Physical media as if I argued from the nature of Fire and Earth that one if not hindered will ascend and the other descend And other men have given you other Arguments in their Physicks and Metaphysicks OBJECTION XV. YOu seem to confess that you cannot prove the endless duration of the Soul by any Argument from Nature alone But only that it shall live another Life which you call a Life of Retribution Answ I told you that a great probability of it I thus prove God hath made the Soul of a Nature not corruptible but apt to perpetual duration Ergo he thereby declareth his will that he intendeth it for perpetual duration because he maketh nothing in vain either for substance or quality It may be some other will think that this argument will inferre not only a probability but a certainty And if you go back to your objection of Materiality I now only adde that Aristotle and his followers who think that the Heavens are corporeal yet think that they are a quinta essentia and simple and incorruptible and therefore that they shall certainly be everlasting And he taketh the the souls of Bruits to be analogous to the matter of the Starrs and so to be of that everlasting quintessence And can you in reason say less of Rational Souls 2. It is sufficient that I prove by natural evidence a Life of Retribution after this which shall fully make the miserable ungodly ones repent tormentingly of their sin and fill the righteous with such Joyes as shall fully recompense all their labour and suffering in a holy life And that I moreover prove that duration of this life and all the rest by supernatural evidence OBJECTION XVI BOth Soul and Body are like a Candle in fluxu continuo and we have not the same substance this Week or Year as we had the last there being a continual consumption or transition and accretion Ergo being not the same we are uncapable of a Life of future Retribution Will you reward and punish the man that is or the man that was Answ It is a foolish thing to carry great and certain Truths into the dark and to argue against them à minus notis from meer uncertainties As to your simile I confess that the Oyl of your Candle is still wasting so is the wick but not that new is added to make it another thing unless it be a Lamp I confess that the lucid fume which we call the flame is still passing away But whether the fiery Principle in its essence not visible but only in its
great Theological Verity that God is Mans ultimate End and to be loved above our own Pleasure opened 598 c. Why I answer no more particular Objections as about Scripture-Texts c. 601 An Instance in some Strictures on a late Writing called Inquisitio in Fidem Christianorum hujus Seculi 604 Readers I intreat you whatever you do by all the rest following to correct with your pen these few greater Errata because they quite pervert the sense and some of them turn it directly contrary to some of the greatest Truths which I am defending PAge 85 l. 30. for no other end r. another end p. 208. l. 23. for Fire r. Air p. 173 l. 22. for thousands r. themselves p. 232. l. 4. for against i● r. of it p. 373. l. 15. for intelligible r. unintelligible p. 529. l. 33. blot out quoad formam p. 460. l. 34. for words r. works p. 567. l. 12 13. for mortal r. immortal p. 598. l. 27. for it is first good r. it is not first good p. 53. l. 5. for impudencies r. imprudences p. 111. l. 32. for or r. our p. 170. l. 11. for see● r. serve p. 220. l. 24. for or r. our p. 350. l. 16. for Accidentally r. Antecedently p. 558. for expurgency r. exurgency p. 545. l. 28. for and r. is p. 600. l. 8. for continues r. contrives p. 252. l. 19. for superficial r. supernatural p. 509. l. 16. for anatomized r. atomized p. 554. l 3. for debased r. disposed p. 593. l. 21. for missu r. injussu In the first Epistle p. 1. l. 14. r. indifferentis PAge 12. l. 36. for or r. are p. 49. marg l. 32. for at r. ut p. 80. l. 10. r. so full p. 157. marg l. antep r. animi morbi p. 178. l. 32. for sometimes r. 〈◊〉 minds p. 199. marg l. 1. r. Eunapius p. 201. l. 22. r. Texeira p. 236. marg l. 1. r. simulata and l. 26. r. his Disciples p. 240. l. 23. dele Telesius l. 30. r. Behmenists p. 246. l. 19. for Aristippus r. Aristotle p. 281. l. 22. for hath r. have p. 297. marg l. 40. for speculum r. specimen p. 346. l. 11. r. in the p. 349. l. 5. r. the godly p. 350. l. 36. r. Asellius p. 367. l. 32. r. These are the p. 417. l. 30. for since r. sure p. 418. l. 2. for wean r. turn p. 437. l. 4. for most r. more p. 498. marg l. 11. r. nolint and l. penult for Cartes r. Cortes p. 503. l. 19. for one r. a● p. 509. l. 9. for as r. an p. 514. l. 27. r. contemperatio p. 527. l. 24. r. Gradually p. 551. marg l. 1. r Cortes p. 553. l. 14. for Lud r. Lod p. 554. l. 1. for the r. that p. 557. l. 32. dele who p. 560. l. 34. r. Adiant●m p. 571. l. 17. r. nor no substance p. 576. l. 22. for Arphad r. Aphrod p. 578. l. 21. dele may p. 582. marg r. Cortes p. 587. l 7. for one reason r. our Reason p. 588. l. 8. for what r. which Take notice also that many of the marginal Citations are not put just over against the words which they referr to PART I. Of Natural Religion or GODLINESS CHAP. I. Of the Nearest Truths viz. of Humane Nature RESOLVING on a faithful search into the Nature and certainty of Religion as being the business which my own and all mens happiness is most concerned in being conscious of my weakness and knowing that truths have their certain order in which they give much light to one another I found it meet to begin at the most evident from whence I ascended in the order following § 1. I am past all doubt that I have sense cogitation understanding and will with executive operation Though I could not exactly define what these are yet I am satisfied that I have them and I discern that a simple term doth better express one of these to me than a definition doth because they are known so immediately in and of themselves partly by internal sensation and partly by intuition And words are but to make known my mind about them to another and anothers to me but the things themselves are otherwise to be known What it is to see to hear to smell to taste I know better by seeing hearing smelling tasting than by any definitions of them and the bare denomination when I understand the term is my best expression And if I could not answer a Sceptick who denied the certainty of my judgment by sensation and reflexive intuition yet nature would not suffer me to doubt Or if any such should really make me doubt whether I may not possibly live in a continual delusory dream and all my senses and understanding be deceived yet would it satisfie me in the main that I must judge by such powers as I have and can do no better and therefore should be no further sollicitous If any would perswade me that I feel not when I am sick or wounded or see not when I see or taste not when or what I taste yet must I be persuaded that fallible or infallible this sense must be used and serve for the ends to which it is given me And that I have no better faculties to use § 2. By my actions I know that I am and that I am a sentient intelligent thinking willing and operative being or a wight that hath these powers For ab operari ad posse esse the consequence is undoubted Nothing is no agent and none doth that which he cannot do § 3. This mind or foresaid power is found in or conjunct with an organized body He that doubteth not of his sense and intellection need not doubt of his body which is the object of both § 4. This body is a quantitative or extensive nutrite changeable corruptible matter Of which my senses and experience will not suffer me to doubt § 5. This mind is fitted to the use of KNOWING and is desirous of it delighted in it and the more it knoweth the more it is able and disposed to know All this our actions and experience testifie Knowing is to the mind as seeing is to the eye One act of knowledge promoteth and facilitateth another § 6. Being and verity are its direct objects As light and colours are the objects of our sight To these it hath power and inclination § 7. When I know the effects I have an inclination to know the cause not onely the lower but the very first Though it be possible that some sensual sluggish person may be so taken up with present earthly things as to drown these desires and scarce to think of any first cause or take any pleasure in the exercise of his higher faculties yet as I feel it otherwise in my self so I find it otherwise in multitudes of others and in all that have free minds and in the worst at certain times so that I perceive it is
all which we are seeking after For what any Cause doth by a power received from a higher Cause and consequently ordered by it that is done principally by that first or highest Cause And if God had made the world by an Angel or Intelligence it would have been nevertheless his Creature nor any thing the less to his honour than if he had made it by himself alone § 11. The summ of all is that There is certainly a first uncaused independent Cause of Man and all things else besides that Cause CHAP. V. What this Cause is in it self That it is God § 1. THe first Cause is known to us imperfectly and by the effects Man is so conscious of his ignorance herein and of the perplexities and diversities of opinions which follow thereupon and of the necessity of beginning downward at the effects and rising upward in his enquiry that I need not prove this Proposition to any man § 2. Though God or the first Cause is to be searched after in all his works yet chiefly in the chiefest of them within our reach which is Man himself If any shall say that the Sun and other creatures are more excellent than Man and therefore God or the first Cause is to be searched after rather in them and his Attributes denominated from them I answer There is no doubt but secundum quid the Sun is a nobler Creature than Man But what it is simpliciter we cannot tell unless we knew it better The highest exellencies known to man in the Sun is the Potentia Motiva Illuminativa Calefactiva Motion Light and Heat with their effects do tell us what we know of it That which we are conscious of in Man is Posse Scire Velle Power Intellection and Will with their Perfections which are an higher excellency than Motion Light and Heat § 3. He that giveth Being to all else that is must needs be the first Being formally or eminently Himself Entity must needs be in the noblest sense or sort in the Primum Ens the original of Being rather than in any derived Being whatsoever For it cannot give better than it hath so that Ens or I am is his first Name § 4. He that hath made Substances more noble than Accidents is Himself a Substance either formally or eminently and a Living Substance yea Life it self Once for all by Eminently I mean somewhat more excellent or transcendent which yet Man hath no better Name for or fitter Notion of God is thus a Substance Life transcendently if not formally § 5. He that hath made Intelligences or Spirits or Minds more noble and excellent than Bodies is himself a Mind Intelligence or Spirit either formally or transcendently and eminently We find that corporeal gross and dense Beings are most dull and passive and have least of excellency The Body of it self in comparison of the Mind is a dull and dirty clod Though we have no adequate conception of a Spirit we know not onely Negatively that it containeth a freedom from the baseness and inconveniences of corporeity but also we know by its essential acts that positively it is a pure active Life Intelligence and Will and therefore a more excellent sort of Being than things meerly corporeal which have no such action So that we have found as to his Being that the first Cause is Ens Substantia Vita Spiritus § 6. There must needs be in the first Cause an Esse Posse Operari If there were no Operation there were no Causation If there were no Power there could be no Operation and if there were no Being there could be no Power Not that these are things so various as to make a composition in the first Cause but they are transcendently in it without division and imperfection by a formal or virtual distinction § 7. Seeing the noblest Creatures known to us are Minds that have a Posse Scire Velle active executive Power with an Vnderstanding to guide it and a Will to command it God hath either formally or eminently and transcendently such a Power Intellect and Will which is his Essence For nothing is more certain than that no Cause can give more than it had to give If the first Cause had not Power Understanding and Will either formally or eminently in a higher and nobler kind he could not have endowed all mankind with what he had not 1. That the first Cause is most powerful is evident by his works he that gave Man his measure of power and much more to many other creatures hath himself much more than any of them He that made this marvellous frame of all the Orbs and causeth and continueth their being and their constant rapid motion is incomprehensibly potent Whatsoever Power there is in all the Creatures visible and invisible set together there must be more or as much in their first Cause alone because nothing can give more Power than it hath 2. His works also prove that the first Cause is an Vnderstanding for the admirable composure order nature motions variety and usefulness of all his Creatures do declare it He that hath given Vnderstanding to Man hath formally or eminently more himself than all men and all his creatures have If Intellection were not an excellency above meer natural or bruitish motion Man were not better than the inanimates or bruites but if it be the Giver of it cannot want it Not that his Intellection is univocally the same thing with ours But it is something incomparably more noble which expresseth it self in humane Intellection as its Image and is seen by us in this Glass and can be expressed by us no better than by this name 3. And as it is a nobler nature which acteth by Volition or Free-will than that which hath no Will at all and so no voluntary choice and complacency so the first Cause which hath given this noble faculty to Man hath certainly himself though not a Will univocally the same with ours yet a Will of a transcendent excellency which expresseth it self in ours as its Image and must be something better and greater but cannot be lower or less And though such Indetermination as proceedeth from imperfection and consequently such Liberty belongeth not to the first Cause which hath no defects yet all that Liberty which belongeth to perfection must undoubtedly belong to Him He that did what we see hath done it willingly and freely § 8. What ever the first Cause is it must needs be in absolute Perfection It must needs have in it more than the whole world besides because it giveth all that to the whole Creation which it hath received and is An imperfect cause could never have made such a world as we behold and partly know And were the first Cause imperfect there would be no perfection in being § 9. The perfection of the first Cause in Being requireth that it be Eternal without Beginning or End of duration Nothing in the world can
the flames of Troy that ript up his own Mother that he might see the place where once he lay Did Caligula think so Did Commodus Caracalla Heliogabalus think so Did the Spaniards think so by the Indians who are said by their own Writers to have murdered in forty two years space no less than fifty millions of them Did King Philip think so who put his own Son and Heir to death by the Inquisition besides so many thousands more in Spain and the Low Countreys by that and other wayes How full of such bloody instances is the World If it were a Tyrants interest that kept him under some moderation to the people of his own Dominions it might yet possibly leave him a bloody destroyer of other Nations in his Conquests The World hath not wanted men that think the lives of many thousands a little sacrifice to a proud design or furious passion and are no more troubled at it than a Pythagorean would be to kill a Bird. It hath had such as Sylla Messala Catiline and the Conquerours of Jerusalem who as Josephus saith crucified so many thousands till they wanted Crosses for men and place for Crosses besides the greater numbers famished Obj. But if Chief Governours be under no Law they are under Covenants by which they are obliged Answ What shall make their Covenants obligatory to their consciences if they be under no government of God The reason why mens Covenants bind them is because they are under the government of God who requireth all men to keep their Covenants and condemneth Covenant-breakers But if God had never commanded Covenant-keeping nor forbad Covenant-breaking they could never be matter of duty or sin So that this Doctrin that God hath made no Laws for man and is not his Governour doth leave all Soveraigns from under the least conscientious restraint from any acts of cruelty or injustice and tendeth to deliver up the world to be a sacrifice to their lusts when it is the government of the universal Soveraign that is their restraint § 9. VI. If God have not the Soveraignty over all the world then no man on earth can have any Governing Power But Princes and Rulers have a Governing Power Therefore the Soveraignty is in God The reason of the major is because Kings can have no power but what they receive from some or other there is no effect without a cause And if they receive it it is either from God or Man as the Original Not from Man for the people themselves have no governing power to use or give as to the government of Commonwealths for their personal power over themselves is of another species and cometh short of this in many respects as else-where I have proved And if it were otherwise yet they have nothing themselves but derivatively from God as is proved before and therefore they themselves must have their power from him from whom they are and have all that they possess But God cannot give that which he hath not himself either formally or eminently Therefore he hath governing power formally or eminently or else no Prince or Man or Angel can have any no more than they can have being or reason without him And though his power be transcendent his exercise of it must be according to the capacity of the subject and therefore morally by Laws and Executions So that as all things else in the creature are derived so is power And as in beings aut Deus aut nihil is an undeniable truth so as to governing power or Soveraignty either it is Primitively Supremely and Transcendently in God or there is none in any Prince or Parents for if they have it not from Him they can have none at all Obj. Governing by Laws is caused by humane impotency because man is not every where present nor of power to effect himself in and by others all the things which he commandeth But were man Omnipresent and Omnipotent as God is he would make all men do well and not command them to do it Therefore it is so in the Government of God Answ It is granted that man is impotent and God Omnipotent and Omnipresent and therefore that God could indeed do as is here intimated even make all men do well and not command it But 1. it is apparent that de facto he doth not so 2. And his wisdom being more eminently to be manifested in the work of Government than his Omnipotency doth shew us partly why he doth not so even because the sapiential way is more suitable to his ends and to the subject Creation did most eminently glorifie or manifest Omnipotency Government doth most eminently glorifie God's Omniscience or Wisdom as our Perfection or Glorification will most eminently manifest and glorifie his Love and Goodness Each Attribute shineth most eminently in its proper work and mans conceits must not confound this perfect order Yet let it be here noted that all this while I meddle not with the controversie of the Liberty of man's will and so whether God's sapiential government by Laws do operate also by necessitation and Physical causation as the natural motions of the Orbs or the artificial motions of an Engine I only argue that whether God thus operate by his Government by secret necessitation or not yet it is most certain that he governeth Morally and useth the Means of Doctrin Laws and Judgments which might consist with Physical necessitating efficacy in all that do obey indeed if God's wisdom and man's freedom of will did inferr nothing to the contrary But if it had been granted that all God's government is by Physical efficacy it would stand good nevertheless that Laws and Judgment are part of the means which he maketh so effectual But yet I shall go further in the next Argument § 10. VII Experience satisfieth all the rational world that there is de facto a course of Duty appointed by God for men which they do not eventually fulfil Therefore there is not only a Moral Government which is effectual but also which is separated from necessitating efficacy They that deny this and plead for Physical Government only must affirm that nothing is any man's Duty but what he actually performeth and that nothing is any man's sin which he doth or omitteth to do that is that there is no sin or moral evil in the world For all that God Physically effecteth is good and they suppose him to have no Law which commandeth any thing but what he Physically effecteth and he will not Physically effect that which he forbiddeth And if there be no such thing as moral evil or sin in the world then no man should fear any or avoid any Let but a man leave any thing undone if it be nourishing his children defending his King loving God or man and he may thence conclude that it never was his duty Let him but do any thing that he hath a mind to if it be killing Father or Mother or his Prince or Friend
but as a means to a higher end viz. his complacency in his glory shining in it Ergo it is not his ultimate end The ultimate end hath no end but the creatures have an end viz. the complacency of God in his glory shining in the creature Obj. But you confound the final Object and the final Act God's complacency of love is his final Act but our enquiry is of the final Object Answ The finis cui or personal end is most properly the ultimate he for whose sake or for whom the thing is done But this is God only and therein he is both the act and object He that did velle creaturas did velle eas ad complacentiam propriae voluntatis The question is not of the actus complacentiae but of the actus creandi vel volendi creaturarum existentiam which he doth propter voluntatis impletionem inde complacentiam which is the final act and the final object of the creating act But for the actus complacentiae it is not actus intentionis but fruitionis and therefore hath no end above it self And the final object of that Complacency is not the Creature it self but the Impletion of the Divine will in the Creature yea the Image of his Omnipotency Wisdom and Goodness shining in the Creation is not loved propter se ultimately but for the sake of that Divine Essence and Perfection of which it is the Image as we love the Image of our friend for his sake so that when all is done God himself is his own end in all his works so farr as very improperly he may be said to intend an end Or if you could prove the Creature to be the Objectum finale that proveth him not to be properly the finis ultimus For that is a difference between Mans agency and Gods Man is an Agent made and acting for his final Object and more ignoble than his Object as the eye of a Flie that beholdeth the Sun But God is an Agent more noble than the Object who gave the Object it self its being and made it of nothing for himself and so the Object is for his final Act. Obj. But God being Perfect needeth nothing nor can receive any addition of perfection or blessedness and therefore it is not any addition of Good to himself which he intendeth in the Creation and consequently it is his ultimate end to do the Creature good Answ All the antecedent part is granted and is anon to be further asserted But the last consequence is denyed because there is no other end beside the addition of Good to himself which God may intend so farr as he may be said to intend an end He doth all the Good to the Creature which it receiveth but not ultimately for the Creatures sake II. That man should have no ultimate End but God that is ultimate ultimus as its called is proved in what is said and the fuller opening of it belongeth to the next Chapter III. It is God in all his Perfections Omnipotency Wisdom and Goodness that is mans ultimate end but it is the last which supposeth both the other and to which mans will which must perform the most perfect final act is most fully suited And therefore is in a special sort our ultimate end The Omnipotency of God is truly the efficient dirigent and final Cause of all things but it is most eminent in Efficiency The Wisdom of God is truly the efficient dirigent and final cause of all things but it is most eminent in Direction and Government The Goodness of God is truly the efficient dirigent and final cause But it is most eminent in being the perfective efficient and final Cause § 4. Gods ultimate end in Creation and Providence is not any supply or addition of Perfection or Blessedness in himself as being absolutely perfect in himself and capable of no addition But those who think that God doth produce all things ex necessitate naturae from Eternity say that as the Tree is not perfect without its fruits so neither is God without his works They say with Balbus in Cicero and other Stoicks that the World is the most excellent Being and that God is but the soul of the World and though the Soul be a compleat soul if it had no body yet it is not a compleat Man and as the Tree is compleat in genere causae without the fruit yet not as a Totum containing those effects ab essentia which are its Part and End So say they God may be perfect without the World as he is only the Soul and part of the World but he is not a compleat world nor in toto Answ 1. That God is not the soul or constitutive cause of the World but somewhat much greater is proved before And also that it was not from Eternity and consequently that he created it not by naturall necessity The foundation therefore being overthrown the building falleth Those that hold the foresaid opinion must hold that God is in point of duration an eternall efficient matter form and end and that in order of Nature he is first an Efficient principle causing matter and secondly he is an efficient with matter and in the third instant he is the form of the effected matter and in the fourth instant he is the end of his operations herein And if you call the efficient Principle only by the name of God then you grant what I prove and you seemed to deny But if he be not God as the meer efficient and end but also as the matter then you make every stone and Serpent and every thief and murderer and devil to be part of God and make him the subject of all the sin and evil all the weakness folly and mutations which be in the World with the other absurdities before mentioned And if you say that he is God as efficient form and end and not as matter then you contradict your self because the form and matter are parts of the same being And whether you call him God as the form only and so make him but part of Being and consequently imperfect and consequently not God or as matter and form also and so make him a compounded being still you make him imperfect in denying his simplicity or unity and as guilty of all the imperfections of matter and of composition And you make one part of God more imperfect than the rest as being but an effect of it All which are inconsistent with the nature of God and with the nature of Man and every Creature who is hereby made a part of God 2. If this had been true of the World as consisting of its constitutive causes that it is God in perfection and eternal c. yet it could not be true of the daily-generated and perishing beings There are millions of men and other animals that lately were not what they are Therefore as such they were no eternall parts of God because as such they were not eternall Therefore
kept it out of the world and saved the Individuals from it will confess that man's interest is not the Measure of God's goodness especially considering what consequents also follow sin both here and hereafter 3. And as to this lower part of the Vniverse how many Nations of the Earth are drown'd in woful ignorance and ungodliness how few are the wise and good and peaceable When God could have sent them Learning and Teachers and Means of Reformation and have blessed all this Means to their deliverance So that the far greater part of this lower world hath not so much good as God could give them and the infirmities of the best do cause their dolorous complaints It is certain that God is infinitely good and that all his works also are good in their degree but withall it is certain that God in himself is the Simple Primitive Good and that created goodness principally consisteth in a conformity to his Will which is the standard and measure of it § 16. God as considered in the Infinite Perfections of his Nature and his Will is most Amiable and the object of our highest love § 17. But he is not known by us in those Perfections as seen in themselves immediately but as demonstrated and glorified expressively in his works in which he shineth to us in his goodness § 18. His works therefore are made for the apt revealing of himself as amiable to the intelligent part of his Creation They are the Book in which he hath appointed us to read and the Glass in which he hath appointed us with admiration to behold the Infinite power Wisdom and Goodness of the Creator and in which we may see that he is not only our Chief Benefactor but the Vltimate Object of our Love and so the End of all our Motions § 19. This third Relation of God to us as our Chief Good efficiently and finally is the highest and most perfective to us but is not separated from the former two but they are all marvelously conjunct and concur in the production of most of the subsequent effects of Gods providence As the Elements are conjuct but not confounded in mixed bodies and in themselves are easily to be distinguished where they are not divided and their effects sometimes also distinct but usually mix'd as are the causes so is it in the case of these three Great Relations though God's Propriety extend further than his Government because Inanimates and Bruites are capable of one and not of the other yet as to the Rational Creatures they are in reality of the same extent God is as to Right the Owner and the Ruler of all the world and also their real Benefactor and quoad debitum their ultimate end But as to consent on their parts none but the godly give up themselves to him in any one of these Relations In order of Nature God is first our Owner and then our Ruler and our chief Good or End His work in the first Relation is Arbitrary Disposal of us his work in the second is to Govern us and in the third Attraction and Felicitating But he so Disposeth of us as never to cross his rules of Government and so governeth us as never to cross his absolute Propriety and attracteth and felicitateth us in concent with his Premiant act of Government and all sweetly and wonderfully conspire the perfection of his works § 20. All these Relations are oft summed up in one name which principally importeth the last which is the persective Relation but truly includeth both the former and that is That GOD is Our FATHER As the Rational Soul doth ever include the Sensitive and Vegetative Faculties so doth God's Fatherly Relation to us include his Dominion and Government A Father is thus a kind of Image of God in this Relation For 1. he hath a certain Propriety in his children 2. He is by nature their rightful Governour 3. He is their Benefactor for they are beholden to him for their being and well-being Nature causeth him to love them and bindeth them again to love him And the Title OVR FATHER which art in Heaven includeth all these Divine Relations to us but specially expresseth the Love and Graciousness of God to us Obj. But I must go against the sense of most of the world if I take God to be infinitely or perfectly good for operari sequitur esse He that is perfectly good will perfectly do good But do we not see and feel what you said before The world is but as a wilderness and the life of man a misery We come into the world in weakness and in a case in which we cannot help our selves but are a pity and trouble to others we are their trouble that breed us and bring us up we are vexed with unsatisfied desires with troubling passions with tormenting pains and languishing weakness and enemies malice with poverty and care with losses and crosses and shame and grief with hard labour and studies with the injuries and spectacles of a Bedlam world and with fears of death and death at last Our enemies are our trouble our friends are our trouble our Rulers are our trouble and our inferiours children and servants are our trouble our possessions are our trouble and so are our wants And is all this the effect of perfect Goodness And the poor Bruits seem more miserable than we they labour and hunger and die at last to serve our will we beat them use them and abuse them at our pleasure And all the Inanimates have no sense of any good and which is worst of all the world is like a Dungeon of ignorance like an Hospital of mad-men for folly and distractedness like a band of Robbers for injury and violence like Tygers for cruelty like snarling Dogs for contention and in a word like Hell for wickedness What else sets the world together by the ears in wars and bloudshed in all generations what maketh peace-makers the most neglected men what maketh vertue and piety the mark of persecution and of common scorn how small a part of the world hath knowledge or piety And you tell us of a Hell for most at last Is all this the fruit of perfect Goodness These thoughts have seriously troubled some Answ He that will ever come to knowledge must begin at the first Fundamental Truths and in his enquiry proceed to lesser Superstructures and reduce uncertainties and difficulties to those points which are sure and plain and not cast away the plainest certain truths because they over-take some difficulties beyond them The true method of enquiry is that we first try whether there be a God that is perfectly Good or not If this be once proved beyond all controversie then all that followeth is certainly reconcilable to it for Truth and Truth is not contradictory Now that God is perfectly Good hath been fully proved before He that giveth to all the world both Heaven and Earth and all the Orbs all that Good whether Natural
himself our Benefactor nor nevertheless near us What nearness to us they have we are much uncertain but that he himself is our total Benefactor and always with us as near to us as we are to our selves is past all question and proved before 2. There neither is nor can be any object so suitable for our LOVE as God he hath all Goodness in him and all in the creature is derived from him and dependeth on him and he hath given us all that ever we our selves received and must give us all that ever we shall receive hereafter He is all-sufficient for the supply of all our wants and granting all our just desires and making us perfect all that he doth for us he doth in Love as an intellectual free Agent and he is still present with us upholding us and giving us the very Love which he demandeth and he created us for Himself to be his Own and gave us these faculties to know and love him And can any then be a more suitable object of our love 3. Do you not find that your understandings have a suitableness or inclination to Truth and Knowledge and would you not know the best and greatest things and know the cause of all the wonderful effects which you see and what is this but to know God And do you not find that your Wills have a suitableness to good as such in the general and to your own felicity And do you not know that it should not be unnatural to any man to love the best which is best and especially which is best for him and to love him best who is his greatest Benefactor and most worthy of his love in all respects And can you doubt whether God be most worthy of your love All this is plain and sure And will mens averseness to the love of God then disprove it It is natural for man to desire knowledge as that which perfecteth his understanding and yet Boys are averse to learn their Books because they are slothful and are diverted by the love of play What if your servants be averse and slothful to your service doth it follow that it is not their duty or that you hired them not for it What if your wife and children be averse to love you is it therefore none of their duty so to do Rebels are averse to obey their Governours and yet it is their duty to obey them If your child or any one that is most beholden to you should be averse to love and gratitude to you as thousands are to their Parents and Benefactors will it follow that Nature obliged them not to it 4. What can you think is suitable to your love if God be not is it lust or play or meat and drink and ease A Swine hath a nature as suitable to these as you Is it only to deal ingenuously and honourably in providing for the flesh and maintaining the fuel of these sensualities by Buildings Trading Manufactures Ornaments and Arts All this is but to have a reason to serve your sense and so the swinish part still shall be the chief for that which is the chief and ruling object with you doth shew which is the chief and regnant faculty If sensual objects be the chief than Sense is the chief faculty with you And if you had the greatest wit in the world and used it only to serve your guts and throats and lusts in a more effectual and ingenious way than any other men could do this were but to be an ingenuous beast or to have an Intellect bound in service to your bellies And can you think that things so little satisfying and so quickly perishing are more suitable objects for your love than God 5. What say you to all them that are otherwise minded and that take the Love of God for their work and happiness They find a suitableness in God to their highest esteem and love and are they not as fit Judges for the affirmative as you for the negative Obj. They do but force themselves to some acts of fancy Answ You see that they are such acts as are the more serious and prevalent in their lives and can make them lay by other pleasures and spend their days in seeking God and lay down their lives in the exercise and hopes of Love And that it is you that follow fancy and they that follow solid reason is evident in the reason of your several ways That world which you set above God is at last called Vanity by all that try it Reason will not finally justifie your choice but I have here shewed you undeniable reason for their choice and love and therefore it is they that know what they do and obey the Law of Nature which you obliterate and contradict Obj. But we see the Creature but God we see not and we find it not natural to us to love that which we do not see Answ Is not Reason a nobler faculty than sight if it be why should it not more rule you and dispose of you Shall no Subjects honour and obey their King but those that see him You can love your mony and land and friends when they are out of sight Obj. But these are things visible in their nature Answ They are so much the more vile and less amiable Your own Souls are invisible will you not therefore love them You never saw the life or form of any Plant or living Wight you see the beauty of your Roses and many other flowers but you see not the life and form within which causeth all that beauty and variety which yet must be more excellent than the effect Can you doubt whether all things which appear here to your sight have an invisible Cause and Maker or can you think him less amiable because he is invisible that is more excellent 6. In a word it is most evident that all this averseness of mens hearts to the Love of God is their sin and pravity and the unsuitableness of their nature is because they are vitiated with sensuality and deceived by sensible things a disease to be cured and not defended Their sin will not prove the contrary no duty 7. And yet while we are in flesh though God be not visible to us his works are and it is in them the frame of the world that he hath revealed and exposed Himself to our love It is in this visible Glass that we must see his Image and in that Image must love him and if we will love any Goodness we must love his for all is his and as his should be loved by us CHAP. XIII Experiments of the difficulty of all this Duty and what it will cost a man that will live this holy life HItherto I have proved that there is a GOD of Infinite Power Wisdom and Goodness the Creator and consequently the Owner the Ruler and the Father or Chief Good of Man and that Man as his creature is absolutely his own and
every man to labour for an uncertain endless Glory with Angels more than for the certain pleasures of the World which are of so short continuance and to do more to scape uncertain everlasting misery than a certain trouble to the flesh for so short a time And thus a life of Godliness spent in seeking future Happiness and in escaping future Punishment is naturally made the duty of all men in the World Obj. But you seem here to forget that you had before made Godliness to be a Mans loss and undoing if so be there were no life to come when now you make the loss and hurt to be as nothing Answ 1. I spake before especially of those that suffer persecution for their fidelity I speak here especially of all the multitude of the World who get nothing but the pleasures of sin by their sensuality 2. When I speak of all the pleasures profits and honours of this World and life it self as next to nothing I do not say that they are simply nothing They are nothing compared to everlasting Joy or Misery But they are something to him that shall have no more The ease and life of a poor Bird or Beast is naturally desirable to it One of the best of Christians said that If in this life only we had hope in Christ we were of all men most miserable and yet that The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the Glory which shall be revealed in us There is no contradiction between these two that these short-lived pleasures are not worth one thought in comparison of the life to come and yet that they would be considerable if there were no other to be had and hoped for 3. And now the consequence is proved in what is said before If it should by common Reason and Nature be made all mens duty in the World to seek to attain a happiness which is not to be attained and to scape a misery which never was or will be unto any and this with the chiefest care and labour of their lives then the whole life of Man should be vanity and a lie Nature should have formed him for meer delusion to tire him out in following that which is not The World should not only be totally governed by deceit but formed principally for such a life And whereas indeed it is the Worldling that pursueth vanity and spendeth his life in a dream or shew this opinion would make mens wisdom and honesty and piety to be the vanity dream and shew But none of this can be imputed to the most wise and gracious God He need not set up a false deceitfull hope or fear before his Creatures to keep them in obedience nor hath he appointed their lives for so vain a work § 11. XI If the perfection of mans faculties to which Nature formed him be not attained in this life then is there another life where it is to be attained But the Antecedent is true Ergo so is the Consequent The reason of the consequence is because God who maketh nothing in vain made not man in vain nor his natural inclination to his own perfection His will is signified by his works As a man that makes a knife or sword or gun or ship doth tell you what he maketh it for by the usefulness and form of it so when God made man with faculties fitted to know him and love him he shewed you that he made him for that use and that therein he would employ him Obj. It would perfect the wit of a Bruit if it were raised as high as a Mans and yet it followeth not that so it shall be Answ I deny the antecedent It would not perfect him in his kinde but make him another thing of another kinde Man is more than a perfect Bruit and a Bruit is not an imperfect man But I speak of perfecting man in his own kinde according to his Nature Obj. A Chicken hath a desire to live to full maturity and yet you kill it before And Grass and Plants may be cut down before they come to perfection Answ I speak in my argument of the species of man and the objection speaketh only of some individuals If there be no higher stature for any Chicken or Plant to grow up to then that is the state of its perfection It s natural inclination to a perfecter state doth shew that nature formed it for a perfecter state and that such a state there is to be attained however by accident it may be killed or cut down before it do attain it which never befalleth all the kind but some individuals So I confess that by ill accidents by sin men may fall short of their natural perfection But natures inclination sheweth that there is such a state And the Antecedent is manifest 1. In our nature 2. In all mens experience 1. We feel in our natures a capacity of knowing all that of God which I have before laid down and that it is improvable by further light to know much more We feel that our hearts are capable of loving him and of delighting in the contemplation of the glory of his perfections And we find all other things so far below the tendancy of our faculties and the contentment of our minds that we know that this is it that we were made for and this is the proper use that our Vnderstandings and Wills were given us for 2. And we find that we attain not any such perfection in this life as we are capable of and do desire but that our encrease of virtue and holiness is an encrease of our desires after more and the better any man is the more he still desireth to be better and the more he knoweth and loveth and delighteth in God the more he desireth it in a far higher degree And even of our knowledge of nature we find that the more we know the more we would know and that he that knoweth the effect would naturally fain know the cause and that when he knoweth the nearer cause he would know the cause of that and so know the first cause God himself And the little that we here attain to of Knowledge Love and Delight is far short of the perfection in the same kind which our faculties encline unto § 12. XII Another illustration or confirming argument may be gathered from the great disparity which God hath made between Men and Beasts If God had intended us for no more knowledge and fruition of himself hereafter than the Beasts have then he would have given us no more Capacity Desire or Obligation to seek it than the Beasts have But he hath given us more Capacity Desire and Obligation to seek it Ergo. A Beast hath no knowledge that there is a God no thoughts of a Life to come no desire to know God or love him or enjoy him no obligation to take care for another life nor to provide for it nor once to consider
them to perceive its holyness and worth Where it is indeed sincerely practised And is most dishonoured and misunderstood through the wickedness of Hypocrites who profess it As the Impress on the Wax doth make the Image more discernable than the Sculpture on the Seal but the Sculpture is true and perfect when many accidents may render the Impressed image imperfect and faulty So is it in this case To a diligent Enquirer Christianity is best known in its Principles delivered by Christ the Author of it and indeed is no otherwise perfectly known because it is no where else perfectly to be seen But yet it is much more visible and taking with unskilfull superficial Observers in the Professors Lives For they can discern the good or evil of an action who perceive not the nature of the Rule and Precepts The vital form in the Rose-tree is the most excellent part but the beauty and sweetness of the Rose is more easily discerned Effects are most sensible but causes are most excellent And yet in some respect the Practice of Religion is more excellent than the Precepts in as much as the Precepts are Means to Practice For the end is more excellent than the Means as such A poor man can easilyer perceive the worth of Charity in the person that cloatheth and feedeth and relieveth him than the worth of a treatise or sermon of Charity Subjects easily perceive the worth of a wise and holy and just and mercifull King or Magistrate in his actual Government who are not much taken with the Precepts which require yet more perfection And among all descriptions historical Narratives like Zenophons Cyrus do take most with them Doubtless if ever the Professors of Christianity should live according to their own Profession they would thereby overcome the opposition of the World and propagate their Religion with greatest success through all the Earth Because no man can well judge of the Truth of a doctrine till he first know what it is I think it here necessary to open the true nature of the Christian Religion and tell men truly what it is Partly because I perceive that abundance that profess it hypocritically by the meer power of Education Laws and Custom of their Countrey do not understand it and then are the easilyer tempted to neglect or contemn it or forsake it if strongly tempted to it even to forsake that which indeed they never truely received And because its possible some Aliens to Christianity may peruse these lines Otherwise were I to speak only to those that already understand it I might spare this description § 7. The CHRISTIAN RELIGION containeth two Parts 1. All Theological Verities which are of Natural Revelation 2. Much more which is supernaturally revealed The supernatural Revelation is said in it to be partly written by God partly delivered by Angels partly by inspired Prophets and Apostles and partly by Jesus Christ himself in person § 8. The supernatural Revelation reciteth most of the Natural because the searching of the great Book of Nature is a long and difficult work for the now-corrupted dark and slothfull minde of the common sort of men § 9. These supernatural Revelations are all contained 1. Most copiously in a Book called The Holy Bible or Canonical Scriptures 2. More summarily and contractedly in three Forms called The Belief The Lords Prayer and the Ten Commandements and most briefly and summarily in a Sacramental Covenant This last containeth all the Essential parts most briefly and the second somewhat fuller explaineth them and the first the holy Scriptures containeth also all the Integral parts or the whole frame § 10. Some of the present Professors of the Christian Religion do differ about the authority of some few Writings called Apocrypha whether they are to be numbred with the Canonical Books of God or not But those few containing in them no considerable points of doctrine different from the rest the controversie doth not very much concern the substance or doctrinal matter of their Religion § 11. The sacred Scriptures are written very much Historically the Doctrines being interspersed with the History § 12. This sacred Volume containeth two Parts The first called The Old Testament containing the History of the Creation and of the Deluge and of the Jewish Nation till after their Captivity As also their Law and Prophets The second called The New Testament containing the History of the Birth and Life and Death and Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus Christ The sending of his Apostles the giving of the Holy Ghost the course of their Ministry and Miracles with the summ of the doctrine preached first by Christ and then by them and certain Epistles of theirs to divers Churches and persons more fully opening all that doctrine § 13. The summ of the History of the Old Testament is this That in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth with all things in them Viz. That having first made the Intellectual superiour part of the World and the matter of the Elementary World in an unformed Mass he did the first day distinguish or form the active Element of Fire and caused it to give light The second day he separated the rarified Passive Element called Fire expanding it from the Earth upwards to be a separation and medium of action between the superiour and inferiour parts The third day he separated the rest of the Passive Element Earth and Water into their proper place and set their bounds and made individual Plants with their specifick forms and virtue of generation The fourth day he made the Sun Moon and Starrs for Luminaries to the Earth either then forming them or then appointing them to that Office but not revealing their other uses which are nothing to us The fifth day he made Fishes and Birds with the power of generation The sixth day he made the terrestrial Animals and Man with the like generative Power And the seventh day he appointed to be a Sabbath of Rest on which he would be solemnly worshipped by Mankinde as our CREATOR Having made one Man and one Woman in his own Image that is with Intellects Free-will and executive Power in wisdom holiness and aptitude to Obey him and with Dominion over the sensitive and vegetative and inanimate Creatures he placed them in a Garden of pleasure wherein were two Sacramental Trees one called The Tree of Life and the other the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil And besides the Law of Nature he tryed him only with this positive prohibition that he should not eat of the Tree of Knowledge Whereupon the Devil who before this was fallen from his first state of innocency and felicity took occasion to perswade the Woman that Gods Threatning was not true that he meant not as he spake that he knew Man was capable of greater Knowledge but envyed him that happiness and that the eating of that Fruit was not the way to death as God had threatned but to Knowledge and
the rude and ignorant part of the world All the truth which any Philosopher teacheth is God's truth and it is no wonder if a God of so much goodness do bless his own truth according to its nature and proportion who ever be the messenger of it Whether the success of Philosophy be ever the true sanctification and salvation of any souls is a thing that I meddle not with it belongeth not to us and therefore is not revealed to us But it is visible in the Gospel that all that part of practical doctrine which the Philosophers taught is contained in the doctrine of Christ as a part in the whole and therefore the impress and effect is more full and perfect as the doctrine and the impress and effect of the Philosophers doctrine can be no better than the cause which is partial and defective and mixt with much corruption and untruth All that is good in the Philosophers is in the doctrine of Christ but they had abundance of false opinions and idolatries to corrupt it when Christianity hath nothing but clean and pure So that as no Philosopher affirmed himself to be the Saviour so his doctrine was not attested by the plenary and common effect of Regeneration as Christ's was but as they were but the Ministers of the God of Nature so they had but an answerable help from God who could not be supposed however had they wrought miracles to have attested more than themselves asserted or laid claim to Object But Mahomet ventured on a higher arrogation and pretence and yet if his doctrine sanctifie men it will not justifie his pretences Answ 1. It is not proved that his Doctrine doth truly sanctifie any 2. The effect which it hath can be but lame defective and mixt with much vanity and error as his doctrine is for the effect cannot excell the cause 3. That part of his doctrine which is good and doth good is not his own but part of Christs from whom he borrowed it and to whom the good effects are to be ascribed 4. Mahomet never pretended to be the Son of God and Saviour of the World but only to be a Prophet Therefore his cause is much like that of the Philosophers forementioned saving that he giveth a fuller testimony to Christ 5. If Mahomet had proved his Word by antecedent Prophesies Promises and Types through many ages and by inherent purity and by concomitant Miracles and by such wonderfull subsequent communications of renewing sanctifying grace by the Spirit of God so ordinary in the World we should all have had reason to believe his Word But if he pretend only to be a Prophet and give us none of all these proofs but a foppish ridiculous bundle of Non-sense full of carnal doctrines mixt with holy truth which he had from Christ we must judge accordingly of his Authority and Word notwithstanding God may make use of that common truth to produce an answerable degree of Goodness among those that hear and know no better These Objections may be further answered anon among the rest And thus much shall here suffice of the great and cogent Evidences of the truth of the Christian Faith CHAP. VII Of the subservient proofs and means by which the forementioned Evidences are brought to our certain knowledge THE witness of the Spirit in the four wayes of Evidence already opened is proved to be sure and cogent if first it be proved to be true that indeed such a witness to Jesus Christ hath been given to the World The Argument is undenyable when the Minor is proved He whose Word is attested by God by many thousand years predictions by the inherent Image of God upon the frame of his doctrine by multitudes of uncontrolled Miracles and by the success of his Doctrine to the true Regeneration of a great part of the World is certainly to be believed But such is Jesus Christ Ergo I have been hitherto for the most part proving the Major Proposition and now come to the Minor as to the several branches § 1. I. The Prophetical Testimony of the Spirit is yet legible in the Promises Prophesies and Types and main design of the Old Testament § 2. The Books of Holy Scripture where all these are sound are certain uncorrupted records thereof preserved by the unquestioned tradition and care and to this day attested by the generall confession of the Jewes who are the bitterest enemies to Christianity There are no men of reason that I have heard of that deny the Books of Moses and the Psalms and the Prophets c. to be indeed those that went under those titles from the beginning And that there can be no considerable corruption in them which might much concern their testimony to Christ the comparing of all the Copies and the Versions yet extant will evince together with the testimony of all sorts of enemies and the morall impossibility of their corruption But I will not stand to prove that which no sober adversary doth deny To these Books the Christians did appeal and to these the Jews profess to stand § 3. II. The constitutive inherent image of God upon the Gospel of Christ is also still visible in the Books themselves and needeth no other proof than a capable Reader as afore described § 4. The preaching and Writings of the Ministers of Christ do serve to illustrate this and help men to discern it but adde nothing to the inherent perfection of the Gospel for matter or for method § 5. III. The testimony of the age of Miracles fore-described can be known naturally no way but by sight or other senses to those present and by report or history to those absent § 6. The Apostles and many thousand others saw the Miracles wrought by Christ and needed no other proof of them than their senses The many thousands who at twice were fed by Miracle were witnesses of that The multitude were witnesses of his healing the blinde the lame the paralitick the Demoniacks c. The Pharisees themselves made the strictest search into the cure of the man born blinde Joh. 9. and the raising of Lazarus from the dead and many more His miracles were few of them hid but openly done before the World § 7. The Apostles and many hundreds more were witnesses of Christs own Resurrection and needed no other proof but their sense At divers times he appeared to them together and apart and yielded to Thomas his unbelief so farre as to call him to put his finger into his side and see the print of the Nails He instructed them concerning the Kingdom of God for forty dayes Act. 1. He gave them their Commission Mar. 16. Mat. 28. Joh. 21. He expostulated with Peter and engaged him to feed his Lambs He was seen of more than five hundred brethren at once And lastly appeared after his ascension to Paul and to John that wrote the Revelations § 8. The Apostles also were eye-witnesses of his ascension Act. 1. What he had foretold
was once as improbable as the Calling of the Jews is and yet it was done 3. And many of those Prophecies are hereby fulfilled it being not a worldly Kingdom as the carnal Jews imagined which the Prophets foretold of the Messiah but the spiritual Kingdom of a Saviour When the power and glory of the Roman Empire in its greatest height did submit and resign it self to Christ with many other Kingdoms of the world there was more of those Prophecies then fulfilled than selfishness will suffer the Jews to understand And the rest shall all be fulfilled in their season But as in all Sciences it is but a few of the extraordinarily wise who reach the most subtile and difficult points so it will be but a very few Christians who will understand the most difficult prophecies till the accomplishment interpret them Obj. XXIII But the difficulties are as great in the Doctrines as in the Prophecies Who is able to reconcile Gods Decrees foreknowledge and efficacious special Grace with mans Free-will and the righteousness of Gods Judgement and the reasonableness of his Precepts Promises and Threats How Gods Decrees are all fulfilled and in him we live and move and be and are not sufficient for a good thought of our selves but to believe to will and to do is given us and he will have mercy on whom he will have mercy and whom he will he hardeneth and it is not of him that willeth nor of him that runneth but of God that sheweth mercy And yet that he would not the death of a sinner but rather that he repent and live and that he would have all men saved and come to the knowledge of the truth and layeth all the blame of their misery on themselves Ans First consider these things apart and in themselves and then comparatively as they respect each other 1. Is it an incredible thing that all Being should be from the First Being and all Goodness from the Infinite Eternal Good and that nothing should be unknown to the infinite omniscient Wisdom and that nothing can overcome the Power of the Omnipotent or that he is certainly able to procure the accomplishment of all his own Will and that none shall disappoint his Purposes nor make him fall short of any of his Councils or Decrees Go no further now and do not by false or uncertain Doctrine make difficulties to your selves which God never made and then tell me whether any of this be doubtfull 2. On the other side is it incredible that Man is a rational free Agent and that he is a Creature governable by Laws and that God is his Ruler Law-giver and Judge and that his Laws must command and prohibit and the sanction contain rewards and punishments and that men should be judged righteously according to their works or that the Messengers of Christ should intreat and perswade men to obey and that they should be moved as men by motives of good or evil to themselves Is there any thing in this that is incredible or uncertain I think there is not And these difficulties will concern you nevertheless whether you are Christians or not They are harder points to Philosophers than to us and they have been their controversies before Christ came into the World They are points that belong to the natural part of Theology and not that which resteth only on supernatural Revelation and therefore this is nothing against Christ 2. But yet I will answer your question Who can reconcile these things 1. They can do much to the reconciling of them who can distinguish a meer Volition or Purpose or Decree from an efficacious pre-determining influx 2. And can distinguish between those effects which need a positive cause and purpose or decree and those nullities which having no cause but defective do need no positive purpose or decree 3. And can distinguish between the need we have of Medicinal Grace for holy actions and the need we have of common help for every action natural and free 4. And can distinguish between an absolute Volition and a limited Volition in tantum ad hoc and no further 5. They that can distinguish between mans Natural liberty of self-determination and his Civil liberty from restraint of Law and his moral liberty from vicious habits 6. They that can well difference mans Natural power or faculties from his moral power of good and holy disposition 7. They that know what a free Power is and how far the causer of that Power is or is not the cause of the act or its omission 8. They that can distinguish between those acts which God doth as our Owner or as our free Benefactor and those which he doth as Rector 9. And between those which he doth as Rector by his Legislative will antecedent to mens keeping or breaking of his Laws and by his Judicial and executive will as consequent to these acts of man 10. He that can distinguish between Gods method in giving both the first Call of the Gospel and the first internal Grace to receive it and of his giving the Grace of further sanctification justification and glory 11. And between the manner of his procuring our first faith and the procuring our following sanctification 12. And he that knoweth how easie it is with God to attain what he willeth without destroying the Liberty of our wills As a Miller can make the stream of water turn his Mill and grinde his Corn without altering any thing in the inclination of the water 13. And withall how incomprehensible the nature and manner of Gods operation is to Man and how transcendently it is above all Physical agency by corporeal contact or motion I say he that understandeth and can apply these distinctions can reconcile the Decrees and concourse of God with his Government and mans Free-will as farre as is necessary to the quieting of our understandings Obj. XXIV But the Christian Faith doth seem to be but Humane and not Divine in that it is to be resolved into the Credit of Men Even of those men who tell us that they saw Christs miracles and saw him risen and ascend and of those who saw the miracles of the Apostles and of those who tell us that the first Churches witness that they saw such things The certainty cannot exceed the weakest of the Premises And this is the argument The Doctrine which was attested by Miracles is of God But the Christian Doctrine was attested by Miracles Proved The spectators averred it to others who have transmitted the Testimony down to us So that you are no surer of the Doctrine than of the Miracles and no surer of the Miracles than of the Humane Testimony which hath delivered it to you Ans If you will be at the labour to read over what I have written before you shall finde a threefold testimony to Christ besides this of Miracles And you shall finde the Apostles testimony of Christs Miracles and Resurrection attested by more than a
they have done fair though afterwards they consider not that interest of his in all operations which their own concessions necessarily infer 10. Lastly I perceive that they proceed not methodically in their collections but confound all by mixing certainties with uncertainties Whereas the first the great the most discernable truths should be first congested as CERTAINTIES by themselves and the uncertainties should not be pleaded against them nor suffered to stand in contest with them Perceiving all these general Reasons to distrust this sort of Philosophers above others though I resolve to be impartial I cannot willingly be so foolish as to over-look their disadvantage in the present cause II. The particular reasons which disswade me from believing the Epicurean sufficiency of Matter and Motion are these following 1. They all with whom I have now to do are constrained to confess an incorporeal intellectual substance even that there is a God and that GOD is such Epicurus himself doth not deny it yea seemeth to speak magnificently of God and in honour to him would excuse his providence from the minding of inferiour things For 1. They know that matter did not make it self and motion is but its mode and therefore matter cannot be made by its own motion It s being is in order of nature before its motion And matter is in it self so dull a thing and by the adversaries stripped of all forms which are not caused by motion that if it were said to be from eternity in its duration they will confess it could be but as an eternal effect of some nobler cause So that at the first word they grant that matter hath an incorporeal cause 2. And motion as it is found in matter could not cause it self though it be but of the mode of matter it is such a mode as must have a cause And the passive matter yet unmoved is supposed by themselves to be void of all antecedent moving power So that they are all fain to say that God made the matter and gave it the first push And so all matter and motion is reduced to a first efficient who is incorporeal And therefore an incorporeal being is acknowledged 2. I meet with none of them who dare deny this God to be an intellectual free Agent so that though it be granted them that intelligere velle be not in God the same thing formally as it is in man yet is it something which eminently must be so called man having no fitter conception or expression of it than from these acts of his own soul Epicurus will not make God defectively ignorant impotent or bad When themselves divide all things into such as have understanding and such as have none of which part do they suppose GOD to stand Things that are void of understanding formally or eminently are below the dignity of things that have understanding So that they confess there is existent an incorporeal intelligent free Agent 3. As they confess that this intellectual Agent is the first cause both of matter and motion so they cannot deny that he still causeth both by his continued influx or causing efficacy For there can be no effect without a cause and therefore when the cause ceaseth the effect must cease The material part of a moral cause may cease and yet the effect continue But that moral causation continueth which is proportioned to the effect The Parent may die while the child surviveth but there is a continued cause of the life of the child proportioned to the effect Matter is not an independent being To say that God hath made it self-sufficient and independent is to say that he hath made it a God Suppose but a total cessation of the Divine emanation influx and causation and you must needs suppose also the cessation of all Beings If you say that when God hath once given it a Being it will continue of it self till his power annihilate it I answer if it continue without a continuing causation it must continue as an independent self-sufficient being But this is a contradiction because it is a creature GOD is no effect and therefore needeth no cause of subsistence but the creature is an effect and cannot subsist a moment without a continued cause As the beams or communicated light cannot continue an instant if there were a total cessation of the emanation of the luminary because their being is meerly dependent and they need no other positive annihilation besides the cessation of the causation which did continue them It was from one of your own Poets that Paul cited In him we live and move and have our being for we are his off-spring And nothing is more abhorrent to all common reason than that this stone or dirt which was nothing as yesterday should be a God to it self even one independent self-sufficient being as soon as it is created and so that God made as many demy-gods as atoms We see past doubt that one creature cannot subsist or move without another on which it is dependent how much less can any creature subsist or move without its continued reception of its Creator's influx If you could suppose that for one moment there were no God you must suppose there would be nothing If I thought any would deny this besides those inflated vertiginous brains that are not to be disputed with I would say more for the illustration of it Object But though matter subsist not without a continued divine causation or emanation or efficacious volition yet motion may continue when all divine causation of it ceaseth Because when God hath given it one push that causeth a motion which causeth another motion and that another and so in infinitum if there were no stop Answ 1. If this were so it must be on supposition of a vis motiva communicata vel impressa for if there had been no such the first motion would have not been or all have presently ceased for want of a continued cause As there is no motion sine vi motiva so none can be communicated but by the communication of that force Action is not nothing nor will be caused by nothing As the delapsus gravium would presently cease if we could cause the pondus or gravity to cease so is it in all other motions If there be no vis or strength communicated along with the motion there would be nothing in that motion to cause another motion nor in that to cause another And if it were by way of traction if the cause cease which is the prima trahens all the motion ceaseth and so also if it be by way of pulsion So that in every motion there is something more than matter and motion 2. All motion of things below within our reach hath many impediments and therefore would cease if the first cause continued not his powerful efficacy It is tedious and needless to enumerate instances 3. The moving power of the noblest creatures is not purely active but partly passive and partly
active and must receive the influx of the highest cause before it can act or communicate any thing Therefore as soon as the first mover should cease the rest would be soon stop'd though some active power was communicated to them As we see in a Clock when the poise is down and in a Watch when the spring is down the motion ceaseth first where it first began 4. Can you constrain your reason to imagine that God is the sole principal active cause for the first touch and as it were for one minute or instant while he causeth the first motus and is an unactive being or no cause ever after save only reputativè because he caused the first This is to say that God was God till he made the world and ever since he hath done nothing but left every atom or creature to be God Is God so mutable to do all for one instant and to do nothing ever after 5. The infiniteness and perfection of God fully proveth that all continued motion is by the continuance of his efficiency For it is undeniable that he who made all things is every where or present to all his creatures in the most intimate proximity And it is certain that he cannot but know them all and also that his Benignity maintaineth all their beings and well-beings and therefore that he is not an unactive being but that his power as well as his wisdom and Goodness is continually in act How strangely do these Epicureans differ from Aristotle who durst not deny the Eternity of the World lest he should make God an unactive Being ad extra from Eternity till the Creation When-as these men feign him to have given but one instantaneous push and to have been coetera otiosus or unactive from Eternity Seeing then it cannot by sober reason be denyed that God himself is by a continued Causation the Preserver and intimate first mover of all things it must needs thence follow that matter and motion are still insufficient of themselves and that this is to be none of the Controversie between us but only whether it be any created Nature Power or other Cause by which God causeth motion in any thing or all things or whether he do it by his own immediate Causation alone without the use of any second Cause save meer motion it self so that the insufficiency of Matter and Motion to continual alterations and productions must be confessed by all that confess there is a God 4. It is also manifest in the effect that it is not a meer motion of the first Cause which appeareth in the being and motions of the Creature There is apparently a tendency in the Creatures motion to a certain end which is an attractive Good and there is a certain Order in all motions to that end and certain Laws or Guidances and overrulings to keep them in that Order so that Wisdom and Goodness do eminently appear in them all in their beings natures differences excellencies order and ends as well as Motion the effect of Power 1. It is certain that God who is unmoved himself is the first mover of all 2. And if God were not unmoved but by self-motion caused motion yet he exerteth Wisdom and Goodness in his Creation and Providence as well as Motion 1. He that is Infinite and therefore not properly in any place or space or at least is limited in none can himself by Locomotion move himself in none which methinks none should question And they that make the World infinite or at least indefinite as they call it methinks should not deny the Infinitenesse of God And they acknowledge no motion themselves but Locomotion or migratio a loco in locum But saith Gassendus Vol. 1. pag. 337. Et certè captum omnem fugit ut quippiam quantumvis sit alteri praesens conjunctumque ipsum moveat si in seipso immotum maneat c. Itaque necesse omnino videtur ut cum in serie moventium quorum moventur alia ab aliis procedi in infinitum non possit perveniatur ad unum primum non quod immotum moveat sed quod ipsum per se moveatur Answ You gather from hence that it is the contexture of the most subtile Atomes which is the form and first mover in physical beings But you granted before that God moved those Atomes and also put a moving inclination into them And atomes are far from being unum or primum You said before sufficiat Deum quidem esse incorporeum ac pervadere fovereq universam mundi machinam And if so then movere etiam as well as fovere Either you mean as you speak in confessing a God or not If not it is unworthy a Philosopher to dissemble for any worldly respects whatsoever If you do then Is it beyond your capacity to conceive that God being unmoved moveth all things or not If not why should it be beyond your capacity to conceive the same in a second Order of a second spiritual being The reason as to motion is of the same kinde If yea then either you believe God is the first Mover or not If not withdraw your former Confession If yea what Locomotion for you deny all other can you ascribe to God who is unbounded and infinite what place is he moved from and what place is he moved into And is his motion rectus vel circularis is it one or multifarious or rather will you not renounce all these 2. And as God moveth being unmoved so he doth more than move He moveth Orderly and giveth Rules and Guidances to motion and moveth graciously to the felicity of the Creature and to a desireable end A Horse can move more than a man for he hath more strength or moving power But he moveth not so regularly nor to such intended ends because he hath not wisdom and benignity or goodness as Man hath He that buildeth a House or Ship or writeth such Volumes as Gassendus did doth somewhat more than barely move which a Swallow or a Hare could have done as swiftly And he that looketh on the works of God even to the Heavens and Earth as Gassendus hath himself described them and seeth not the effects of Wisdom and Goodness in the Order and tendency and ends of motion as well as Power in motion it self did take his survey but in his dream saith Balbus in Cicero de Nat. Deor. l. 2. p. 62. Hoc qui existimat fieri potuisse that is for the World to be made by meer fortuitous motion of atomes c. non intelligo cur non idem putet si innumerabiles unius viginti formae literarum aliquo coniciantur posse ex his in terram excussis Annales Ennii ut di●inceps legi possint effici quod nescio an in uno quidem versu possit tantum valere fortuna Quod si mundum efficere potest concursus atomorum cur porticum cur templum cur domum cur navem non potest quae sunt minus
operosa multo quidem faciliora Certè ita temere de mundo effutiunt ut mihi quidem nunquam hunc admirabilem coeli ornatum qui locus est proximus suspexisse videantur Where he brings in this passage as from Aristotle that if we should imagine men to have lived in some Dungeon or Cavern in the Earth and never to have seen the Sun or Light or World as we do and if there should be a doubt or dispute among them whether there be a God and if you should presently bring up these men into our places where they might look above them and about them to the Sun and Stars and Heaven and Earth they would quickly by such a sight be convinced that there is a God But as he truly addeth Assiduitate quotidiana consuetudine oculorum assuescunt animi neque admirantur neque requirunt rationes earum rerum quas semper vident perinde quasi novitas nos magis quam magnitude rerum debeat adexquirendas causas excitare But I suppose it will be granted me that the first mover doth more than meerly move the effects of Wisdom and Goodness being so legible on all the World but you 'l say that to do it wisely and to attain good ends by it c. is but the modus of action with the effect and therefore matter and motion rightly ordered may be nevertheless sufficient to all effects To which I answer that the Creatures motion requireth not only that the Creator move them but that he place and order them and move them rightly and that he remove and overcome impediments c. Therefore there is necessary in the first mover both Wisdom and Love as well as Power And neither his Power Wisdom or Love are Locomotion in himself And this much being proved that in every motion there is Divine Power Wisdom and Love which is more than matter and motion it self I proceed next to enquire 5. Do you think there is any thing existent in the World besides matter and motion or not As to meer site and figure and other such order or modes of matter I know you will not deny them to have now a being as well as motion But is there no different tendency to motion in the parts of matter Is there not in many Creatures a Power an Inclination or aptitude to motion besides motion it self Is there not a reason à priore to be given why one Creature is more agile and active than another and why they act in their various wayes Why is fire more active than earth and a Swallow than a Snail If you say that the different ratio motus is in some extrinsecal agent only which moveth them you will hardly shew any possibility of that when the same Sun by the same virtue or motion as you will say is it that moveth all And if it were so you must go up to the first Cause to ask for the different motions of those movers when our enquiry now is de natura moventium motorum Creatorum If you say that it is the Ratio recipiendi in the different magnitudes or positions of the parts of matter which is the cause of different motions I would know 1. Whether this difference of magnitude and figure and site being now antecedently necessary to different motions was not so heretofore as well as now If you say No you feign without proof a state of things and order of Causes contrary to that which all mens sense perceiveth to be now existent And who is the wiser Philosopher he that judgeth the course and nature of things to be and have been what he now findeth it till the contrary be proved or he that findeth it one thing and feigneth it sometime to have been another without any proof That which is now antecedently necessary to diversity of motion it 's like was so heretofore 2. And then how could one simple equal act of God setting the first matter into motion cause such an inequality in motions to this day if it be true that you hold that only that which is moved or in motion it self can move and that motion is all that is necessary to the diversity 3. Either the first matter was made solid in larger parcels or all conjunct or in Atomes If it was made first in Atomes then Motion caused not Division If it was made conjunct and solid then motion caused not conjunction and solidity And if the first division or conjunction site and figure of matter was all antecedent to motion and without it we have no reason to think that it is the sole Cause of all things now But surely quantity figure and site are not all that now is antecedent to motion Doth not a man feel in himself a certain Power to sudden and voluntary motion He that sate still can suddenly rise and go And if you say that he performeth that sudden motion by some antecedent motion I answer that I grant that but the question is whether by that alone or whether a Power distinct from motion it self be not as evidently the Cause For otherwise the antecedent motion would proceed but according to its own proportion It would not in a minute make so sudden and great an alteration I can restrain also that motion which some antecedent motion e.g. passion urgeth me to Surely this Power of doing or not doing is somewhat different from doing it self A power of not-moving is not motion And what is the Pondus which Gassendus doth adde to magnitude and figure as a third pre-requisite in Atomes I perceive he knoweth not what to make of it himself But in conclusion it must be no natural Gravity by which the parts are inclined to the whole in themselves but the meer effect of pulsion or traction or both At the first he was for both conjunct pulsion of the Air and traction of the Atomes from the Earth But of this he repented as seeing impulsionem aeris nullam esse and was for the traction of Atoms alone Than which his Friends conceit of the pulsive motion of the Sun in its Diastole or whatever other motion is the cause doth seem less absurd But that man that would have me believe that if a Rock were in the air or if Pauls Steeple should fall the descent would be only by the traction of the hamuli of invisible Atomes or by the pulsion of Air and Sun conjunct must come neerer first and tell me how the hamuli of atomes can fasten upon a marble rock and how they come to have so much strength as to move that rock which no man can move in its proper place if there be no such thing as strength or power besides actual motion and why it is that those drawing atomes do move so powerfully Earthwards when at the same time it is supposed that as many or more atomes are moving upwards by the Suns attraction and more are moved circularly with the Earth why do not these stop or
Marble feeleth no more than the solid stone nor the air than the earth for any proof that we have of it The boys that whip their tops and the women that turn their wheels so swiftly that the motion shall not be discerned yet put no feeling into either though the motion be swifter than that of the heart or lungs or blood What the learned Dr. Ward hath said of this against Mr. Hobs I refer you to peruse and excuse me for transcribing it Scaliger Sennertus and many others have heretofore challenged these Philosophers to shew the world how atoms by motion or elements by mixture can get that sense which neither matter motion nor mixture have but we can meet with no account of it yet worth the reading not by Cartesius not by Regius or Berigardus not by Gassendus nor any other that we can get and read How unsatisfactory is it to tell us that facultas sentiendi movendi quae anima sensitiva vulgo dicitur est partium animalis in spiritus nervos alia sensoria c. talis attemperatio conformatio qua animal ab objectis variis motibus affici potest as Regius l. 4. c. 3. p. 267. This is an easie solving of the Phaenomena indeed But qualis est illa contemperatio quomodo potest contemperantia insensibilium sensibile constituere Nonne dat ista contemperatio quod non habet Perhaps you will say with him in Cicer. de Nat. Deor. that by this argument God must be a Fidler because he maketh men that are such Answ By this argument no fidler nor any other man hath more wisdom than God or can do that which God cannot do but because God is above him in his skill doth it follow that the names which signifie humane imperfection must be put on God Can God enable a man to that which he is not able to do himself and can he give that which he hath not to give Object None of the parts of a clock can tell the hour of the day and yet all set together can and none of the letters of a book are Philosophy and yet the whole may be a learned system and no atoms in a Lute can make melody as the whole can do Answ This is but to play with words In all these instances the whole hath nothing of a higher kind in nature than the several parts but only a composition by the contribution of each part The clock telleth you nothing but per modum signi and that signum is only in the sound or order of motion And sound and motion belongeth to the whole by vertue or contribution of the parts and is not another thing above them And that the motion is so ordered and that man can by it collect the time of the day is from the power of our understandings and not from the matter of the engine at all So the book is no otherwise Philosophy at all but per modum signi which signum is related to mans understanding both as the cause and orderer and as the receiver and apprehender So that the letters do nothing at all but passively serve the mind of man And so it is in the other instance the strings do but move the air and cause the sound which is in the ear that this is melody is caused only by the mind of man who first frameth and then orderly moveth them and then suo modo receiveth the sound and maketh melody by the aptitude of his apprehension If you had proved that Clock or Book or Lute do make themselves and order and use themselves and know the time or understand or delight in themselves you had done something But by the deceitful names of Philosophy and Melody to confound the bare natural sound and sign with that ordering and that reception which is the priviledge of a mind is unfit for a Philosopher Moreover I expect from Matter and Motion an account of motions great concomitants that is of Light and Heat Mistake me not I am not undervaluing the effects of motion I take it for a most noble and observable cause of most that is done or existent in the corporeal world but must it therefore be the solitary cause I have long observed amongst wranglers and erroneous zealots in Divinity that most of their error and misdoing lieth in setting the necessary co-ordinate causes or parts of things as inconsistent in opposition to one another It would make one ashamed to hear one plead that Scripture must be proved by it self and another that it must be proved by reason and another that it must be by miracles and another by the Church and another by general History and Tradition c. As if every one of these were not necessary concurrent parts in the proof Such work have we among poor deluded women and ignorant men while the Romanists say that they are the true Church and the Greeks say it is they and the Lutherans say it is they and the Anabaptists say it is they as if my neighbours and I should contend which of our houses it is that is the Town And so do these Philosophers about the Principles and Elements The Intellectual nature which is the Image of God hath notoriously three faculties Vnderstanding Will and Executive Power and men think that they cannot understand the one without denying the other two and the fiery nature which constituteth the Sun and other Luminaries and is the image of the vital nature hath three notorious powers or properties Light Heat and Motion and they cannot understand Motion without making nothing of Light and Heat or greatly obscuring and abusing them Cull out into one and set together but what Patricius hath said of Light and what Telesius hath said of Heat and Campanella after him and what Gassendus and Cartesius have said of Motion and cut off all their superfluities and you will have a better entrance into sound Philosophy than any one book that I know doth afford you I confess that as wisdom must lead the will and determine its acts quoad specificationem and the will must set a work the same intellect and determine its acts quoad exercitium and the active power doth partly work ad intra in the operations of both these and ad extra is excited by the imperium of the will so that these three faculties as Schibler Alsted and many others truly number them are marvellously conjunct and co operative Even so it is in the Motion Light and Heat of the active element or fiery or aethereal nature I know motion contributeth to light and heat but it 's as true that light and heat have their proper coequal and co-ordinate properties and effects and that heat contributeth as much to motion at least as motion doth to heat indeed in one essence they are three coequal vertues or faculties the Vis Motiva Illuminativa Calefactiva And so vain is their labour who only from matter
to assure us that he will never create any thing hereafter Cannot a workman look on his house and see that it is well done and say I have finished it without obliging him never to build another nor to make any reparations of that as there is cause May not God create a new Heaven and Earth may he not create a new Star or a new Plant or Animal if he please without the breaking of any word that he hath spoken For my part I never saw a word which I could discern to have any such signification or importance The argument from Genes 1. is no better than theirs who from Christ's consummatum est do gather that his death and burial which followed that word were no part of his satisfactory meritorious humiliation On the contrary there have been both Philosophers and Divines who have thought that God doth in omni instanti properly create all things which he is said to conserve of whom the one part do mean only that the being of the creatures is as dependant on his continual causation as the life of the branches is on the tree but that the same substance is continued and not another daily made But there are others who think that all creatures who are in fluxu continuo not per locomotum but ab entitate ad nihilum and that they are all but a continual emanation from God which as it passeth from him tendeth to nothing and new emanations do still make such a supply as that the things may be called the same as a River whose waters pass in the same Channel As they think the beams or light of the Sun doth in omni instanti oriri festinare ad nihilum the stream being still supplied with new emanations Were it not for the overthrow throw of individuation personality rewards and punishments that hence seemeth to follow this opinion would seem more plausible than theirs who groundlesly prohibit God from causing any more new beings But though no doubt there is unto all beings a continual emanation or influx from God which is a continued causation it may be either conservative of the being first caused or else restorative of a being continually in decay as he please for both ways are possible to him as implying no contradiction though both cannot be about one and the same being in the same respect and at the same time And our sense and reason tell us that the conservative influx is his usual way 2. But it is commonly and not without reason supposed that generation produceth things de novo in another sense not absolutely as creation doth but secundum quid by exalting the seminal virtue into act and into perfection New individuals are not made of new matter now created but the corporeal part is only pre-existent matter ordered compounded and contempered and the incorporeal part is both quoad materiam suam metaphysicam formam vel naturam specificam the exaltation and expurgency of that into full and perfect existence which did before exist in semine virtuoso When God had newly created the first man and woman he created in them a propagating virtue and fecundity this was as it were semen seminis by this they do first generare semen separabile which suppositis supponendis hath a fecundity fit to produce a new suppositum vel personam and may be called a person seminally or virtually but not actually formally and properly and so this person hath power to produce another and that another in the same way And note that the same creating word which said Let there be light and Let us make man did say also to man as well as to other creatures Increase and multiply not create new souls or bodies but by generation Increase and multiply which is the bringing of many persons out of two and so on as out of a seminal pre-existence or virtual into actual formal existence He knoweth not the mysteriousness of this wonderful work of God nor the ignorance of mankind who knoweth not that all generation of man bruits or plants hath much that is to us unsearchable And they that think it a dishonour to a Philosopher not to undertake or pretend to render the just causes of this and all other the Phaenomena in nature do but say I will hide the dishonour of my ignorance by denying it that is by telling men that I am ignorant of my ignorance and by aggravating it by this increase and the addition of pride presumption and falsity This much is certain 1. That whatsoever distinct parts do constitute individuals which are themselves of several natures so many several natures in the world we may confidently assert though we understand not whether they all exist separatedly or are found only in conjunction with others 2. We certainly find in the world 1. An intelligent nature 2. A sensitive nature 3. A fiery active vegetative nature 4. A passive matter which receiveth the influx of active natures which is distributed into air and water and earth 3. The most active nature is most communicative of it self in the way of its proper operations 4. We certainly perceive that the Sun and fiery nature are active upon the air water and earth which are the passive Elements And by this activity in a threefold influx Motion Light and Heat do cause the sensible alterations which are made below and so that it is as a kind of life or general form or soul to the passive matter 5. We also find that Motion Light and Heat as such are all different totâ specie from sensation and therefore as such are not the adequate causes of it And also that there is a sensitive nature in every animal besides the vegetative 6. Whether the vegetative nature be any other than the fiery or solar is to man uncertain But it is most probable that it is the same nature though it always work not to actual vegetation for want of prepared matter But that the Sun and fiery nature is eminenter vegetativè and therefore that vegetation is not above the nature of fire or the Sun and so may be an effect of it 7. In the production of vegetatives by generation it is evident that as the fiery active nature is the nearest cause efficient and the passive is the matter and recipient So that this igneous nature generateth as in three distinguished subjects three several ways 1. As in Parentibus semine into which God ab origine in the creation hath put not only a spark of the active virtucus fiery nature in general but also a certain special nature differencing one creature from another 2. The Sun and superiour globes of the fiery nature which cast a paternal though but universal influx upon the foresaid semen 3. The calor naturalis telluris which may be called as Dr. Gilbert and others do its soul or form which is to the seed as the anima matris is to the infant And all these three the
fiery nature of the semen of the Sun and of the calor naturalis telluris are generally the same and by their agreeableness do meet in co-operation for generation 8. Herein all three as conjunct are the cause of Life as Life the Sun the seed and the calor telluris communicating conjunctly what in their natures they all contain that is an active nature having a power by motion light and heat to cause vegetation and its conjunct effects But the calor motus solis and the calor telluris are but universal causes of life as life but the virtus seminalis is both a cause of life in genere and a specifying cause of this or that sort of Plants in specie the reason why e. g. an Oak an Elm a Rose-tree and every plant is what it is in specie being to be fetch'd from the seed alone and the Creator's will 9. Though the seed be the chief or only specifying cause why this is Adeantum and that Betonica and that Calendula c. yet the Sun and Earth the universal causes do contribute much more to the life as life than the seed it self 10. This fiery or solar active nature is so pure and above the full knowledge of mortals that we have no certainty at all whether in all this generative influx it communicate to vegetatives from it self a pre-existent matter and so draw it back to it self again by circulation or whether it do only by the substantial contact of its active streams cherish and actuate and perfect the substance which it findeth in semine materiâ passivâ or whether per influxum virtutis it operate only by that which is commonly called Quality without any communication or contact of substance 11. In all this operation of the Solar or fiery nature in generation it is quid medium between the passive matter and the animal nature and is plainly an image of the animal nature and its operations so like it that it hath tempted many to ascribe all animal operations only to the Solar or fiery nature and hath caused wise men to doubt whether this nature be to be numbred with things corporeal or incorporeal and to place it between both as participating in several respects of both 12. If the sensitive nature be really above or specifically different from the fiery we may in what is said conjecture much at the order of the generation of things sensitive viz. by a three-fold cause co-operating one specifying and two universal and cherishing The specifying is the virtus seminalis maris foeminae conjunct and of neither alone the same God which bless'd the single seed of a plant with the gift of multiplication bless'd only the conjunct seeds of male and female animals with that gift The superiour universal cause is either some anima universalis ejusdem naturae or God immediately By an Anima universalis I mean not an anima totius mundi but of that superiour vortex or part which this earth belongs to Either this is the Sun or some invisible soul If it be the Sun it is not by its simple fiery nature before mentioned because sensation seemeth to be somewhat totâ specie different from motion light and heat and then it must prove that the Sun is compound and hath a superiour form and nature which either formaliter or eminenter is sensitive and that by this it is that it animateth inferiour sensitives But of this we mortals have no certainty It seemeth very improbable that a worm or flie should have a nature superiour to any that the Sun hath but probabilities are not certainties there are things highest and things lowest in their several kinds But remember that if it should be the Sun it is by that nature superiour to fire by which it doth it The maternal universal Cause of the sensitive life is the Mother Whether the spirits of a sensitive Creature have more in them than the spirits of a Plant and do more by nutrition than cause Vegetation whether they nourish sensitive Life as such is doubtfull But if they do so they be but an universal and not a specifying Cause that is the Cause of Life as Life but not of the vita bovis equi canis felis aquilae qua talis And therefore if the late-discovered trick of passing all the blood of one animal into another be prosecuted to the utmost tryal possibly it may do much to the advantage of Life and Sense as such but never to the alteration of the species to turn a Dog into a Swine or any other sort of Animal 13. Whether the sensitive nature be most refined-corporeal or totally incorporeal is past the reach of man to be assured of 14. The foresaid difficulty is greater here than in the Vegetative Generation viz. Whether in the multiplication of sensitive souls there be an addition of substance communicated from the Universal Causes or a greater quantity or degree of matter physical or metaphysical propagated and produced into existence by generation than there was before It seemeth hard to say that a pair of Animals in Noahs Ark had as much matter or substance in their souls as the millions since proceeding from them But whether such souls have quantitive degrees or by what terms of gradation the souls of millions are distinct from one besides the number or whether God in the blessing of multiplication hath enabled them to increase the quantity of matter which shall serve for so many more forms are things which we cannot fully understand 15. In the like manner we may rise up and conceive of the Generation of Mankind We are sure that he hath an intelligent nature much nobler than the sensitive And we know that homo generat hominem And we know that in his Generation there is an Vniversal Cause and a specifying Cause for though there be but one species of men yet there are more of Intelligences and that one may have an Vniversal Cause producing that and other effects and an Univocal special Cause We know that because he is Generated the specifying Cause is the fecundity or propagating power of the Parent generating a separable seed which seed in conjunction as aforesaid suppositis supponendis is semen hominis and is man seminally and virtually but not actually that is Hath both Passive and Active Power and virtue by reception of the influx of the universal Cause to become a man The universal inferior or feminine Cause is the Mothers Body and Soul or the whole Mother in whom the Infant is generated and cherished I call it Vniversal For it is only the semen that specifieth And therefore by a false or bruitish semen a woman may produce a Monster The Vniversal Paternal Cause is certainly GOD ut prima and it is probable also ut sola For he made Mans Soul at first by that immediate communication which is called Breathing it into him And the Intellectual nature though specified into Angels and Men is the
be cast out except when it may hazard the Church § 45. The means of increasing the Church must ultimately be intended alwayes to the increase of the Church mystical for Holiness and Salvation § 46. These means are 1. All the fore-mentioned means of holiness for holiness is the Church's glory the Image of God which will make it illustrious and beautiful in the eyes of men when they are sober and impartial and will do most to win them home to Christ 2. Especially the great abilities holiness patience and unwearied diligence of the Ministers of Christ is a needful means 3. The advancements of Arts and Sciences doth much to prepare the way 4. The agreement and love of Christians among themselves 5. Love to the infidels and ungodly and doing all the good we can even to their bodies 6. A spiritual pure rational and decent worshipping of God 7. And the concord of Christian Princes among themselves for the countenancing and promoting the labours of such Preachers as are fitted for this work § 47 The hinderances then of the Church's increase and of the conversion of the heathen and infidel world are 1. Above all the wickedness of professed Christians whose falshood and debauchery and unholiness perswadeth the poor Infidels that Christianity is worse than their own Religion because they see that the men are worse that live among them And 2. the badness of the Pastors especially in the Greek and Latine Churches and the destruction of Church-discipline and impurity of the Churches hereupon together with the ignorance and unskilfulness of most for so great a work is a great impediment 3. The defectiveness in Arts and Sciences 4. The many divisions and unbrotherly contentions of Christians among themselves either for Religion or for worldly things 5. Not devoting our selves and all that we have to the winning of Infidels by love and doing them good 6. A carnal irrational or undecent manner of worshipping God for they will contemn that God whose worship seemeth to them ridiculous and contemptible 7. The discords wars or selfishness of Christian Princes who unite not their strength to encourage and promote this noble work but rather hinder it by weakening the hands of the labourers at home 8. Especially when the very Preachers themselves are guilty of covetous or ambitious designs and under pretence of preaching Christ are seeking riches or setting up themselves or those that they depend on These have kept under the Church of Christ and hindred the conversion of the world till now § 48. The attempts of the Jesuits in Congo Japon and China were a very noble work and so was the Portugal Kings encouragements but two things spoiled their suceess which Protestants are not liable to 1. That when they took down the Heathens Images they set them up others in the stead and made them think that the main difference was but whose Image they should worship And withall by their Agnus Dei's and such like trinkets made Religion seem childish and contemptible 2. But especially that they made them see that while they seemed to promote Religion and to save their souls they came to promote their own wealth or the Popes dominion and to bring their Kings under a forein power § 49. The honest attempts of Mr. Elliots in New-England is much more agreeable to the Apostles way and maketh more serious spiritual Christians But the quality of place and people and the greatness of wants doth hinder the multiplication of Converts And higher attempts were very desireable § 50. The translating of fit Books into the language of the Infidels and dispersing them may in time prove the sowing of a holy fruitful seed § 51. Prosperity useth greatly to encrease the Church extensively in the number of visible members and adversity and persecution to encrease it intensively by increasing holiness in the tried and refined Therefore God useth to send vicissitudes of prosperity and adversity like Summer and Winter to the Churches that each may do its proper work § 52. Every true Christian should daily lament the common infidelity and impiety of the world that the interest of true Christianity is confined into so narrow a room on earth and to pray with his first and earnestest desires that more labourers may be sent forth and that God's Name may be hallowed his Kingdom come and his will be done on earth that it may be liker Heaven which now is grown so like to Hell But yet to comfort himself in considering as is before said that as this earth is to all the nobler world but as one mole-hill to all England so if God had forsaken all it had been but as the cutting off a cancer from a man or as the casting away of the paring of his nails in comparison of all the rest Therefore should we long for the coming of our Lord and the better world which we have in hope HOW long Lord holy and true how long Come Lord Jesus come quickly Amen For we according to his promise look for new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness 2 Pet. 3.11 12 14. Exod. 6.12 Behold the children of Israel have not hearkned to me how then shall Pharaoh hear me Ezek. 3. Not to many people of a strange speech and of an hard language whose words thou canst not understand surely had I sent thee to them they would have hearkned unto thee But the house of Israel will not hearken unto thee for they will not hearken unto me for all the house of Israel are impudent and hard-hearted Octob. 16. 1666. THE CONCLUSION Defending the Soul's Immortality against the Somatists or Epicureans and other Pseudophilosophers THough in this Treatise I have not wilfully balked any regardable objections which I thought might stick with an intelligent Reader about the truth of the things here delivered yet those which are proper to the Somatical irreligious sect of Philosophers I thought fitter to put here as an Appendix by themselves that they might not stop the more sober in their way As to the Subject and Method of this Discourse it consisteth of these four parts 1. The proof of the Deity and what God is 2. Of the certain obligations which lie upon man to be holy and obedient to this God 3. The proofs of a life of Retribution hereafter where the holy and obedient shall be blessed and the unholy and disobedient punished 4. The proofs of the verity of the Christian faith For the first of these that there is a God though I have proved it beyond all rational contradiction yet I have dispatched it with haste and brevity because it is to the mind as the Sun is to the eye and so evident in all that is evident in the world that there needeth nothing to the proving of it but to help the Reader to a rational capacity and aptitude to see that which all the world declareth The common argument from the effects
to the cause in all the entities and motions in the world is undeniable Whatsoever any Being hath and hath not originally from it self or independently in it self it must needs have from another and that other cannot act beyond its power nor give that which it hath not either formally or eminently Therefore he that findeth in the world about him so much entity and motion so much Intellection Volition and Operation and so much Wisdom Goodness and Power must needs know that all these have some cause which formally or eminently or in a way of transcendency hath more it self than it giveth to others I measured my endeavours about this subject according as the occasions of my own soul had led me among all the temptations which have at any time assaulted me I have found those so contemptible and inconsiderable as to their strength which would have made me doubt of the being of a God that I am apt to think that it is so with others And therefore in the review of this discourse I find no reason to stand to answer any mans objections against the Being or essential Attributes or Properties of God And for the second point that we all owe to this God our absolute Resignation Obedience and Love and so that Holiness is naturally our duty it doth so naturally result from the Nature of God and Man compared that I can scarce think of any thing worthy of a confutation which can be said against it but that which denieth the Nature of God or Man and therefore is either confuted under the first head or is to be confuted under the third As for the fourth particular contained in the second Tome the truth of the Gospel I find not any reason to defend it more particularly nor to answer any more objections than I have done for in proving the truth I have proved all the contradictory assertions to be false and I have answered already the greatest objections and after this to answer every ignorant exception of unsatisfied persons against the several passages of the Scripture would be tedious and not necessary to the end of my design And indeed I perceive not that any considerable number are troubled with doubtings of the truth of the Christian faith in a prevalent degree who are well convinced of those antecedent verities of the Deity and of the natural obligation and necessity of Holiness and of the Immortality of the soul or of a future life of reward and punishment and that live in any reasonable conformity to these natural principles which they profess For when natural evidence hath sufficiently convinced a man that he is obliged to be holy in absolute obedience and love to his Creator through the hopes and fears of another life he is very much prepared to close with the design and doctrine of the Gospel which is so far from contradicting this that it doth but confirm it and shew us the way by which it may most certainly be brought to pass And therefore my observation and experiences constrain me to think that there is no point which I have insisted on which so much calleth for my vindication as the third about the Life to come I know there is a sort of over-wise and over-doing Divines who will tell their followers in private where there is none to contradict them that the method of this Treatise is perverse as appealing too much to natural light and over-valuing humane reason and that I should have done no more but shortly tell men that All that which God speaketh in his word is true and that propria luce it is evident that the Scripture is the Word of God and that to all God's Elect he will give his Spirit to cause them to discern it and that this much alone had been better than all these disputes and reasons but these over-wise men who need themselves no reason for their Religion and judge accordingly of others and think that those men who rest not in the authority of Jesus Christ should rest in theirs are many of them so well acquainted with me as not to expect that I should trouble them in their way or reason against them who speak against reason even in the greatest matters which our reason is given us for As much as I am addicted to scribling I can quietly dismiss this sort of men and love their zeal without the labour of opening their ignorance My task therefore in this conclusion shall be only to defend the doctrine delivered in this fore-going Treatise of the Life to come or the Soul's Immortality against some who call themselves Philosophers For of men so called it is but a small part who at all gainsay this weighty truth The followers of Plato the Divine Philosopher with the Pythagoreans the Stoicks the Cynicks and divers other Sects are so much for it that indeed the most of them go too far and make the soul to be eternal both à parte arte and à parte post and Cicero doth conclude from its self-moving power that it is certainly eternal and divine Insomuch that not only Arnobius but many other ancient Christians write so much against Plato for holding the soul to be naturally immortal and assert themselves that it is of a middle nature between that which is naturally immortal and that which is meerly mortal that he that doth not well understand them may be scandalized at their expressions and think that he readeth the Philosopher defending the souls immortality and the Christian opposing it And though Aristotle's opinion be questioned by many yet Cicero who lived in time and places wherein he had better advantage than we to know his meaning doth frequently affirm that he was in the main of Plato's mind and that the Academicks Peripateticks and Stoicks differed more in words than sense chiding the Stoicks for their schism or separation in setting up a School or Sect as new which had almost nothing new but words Not only Fernelius de abditis rerum causis but many others have vindicated Aristotle however his obscurity hath given men occasion to keep up that controversie And if the book de Mundo be undoubtedly his I see no reason to make any more question of his meaning much less if that book be his which is entitled Mystica Aegypt Chald. Philos which Aben Ama Arabs translated out of Greek into Arabick which Franc. Roseus brought from Damascus and Moses Rovas Medicus Haebr translated into Italian and Pet. Nicol. Castelinus into Latine and Patricius thinketh Aristotle took from Plato's mouth It is only then the Epicureans and some novel Somatists that I have now to answer who think they have much to say against the separated subsistence and immortality of mans soul which I may reduce to these objections following I. Matter and Motion without any more may do all that which you ascribe to incorporeal substances or souls therefore you assert them without ground II. To confirm this
neerest to GOD that we have any knowledge of And therefore Reason will not teach us to look to any intermediate universal or superiour Cause because there is no created superiour Nature to the Intellectual And it 's absurd to goe to the Inferior to be the Cause of the superior If any will needs think that under God there is some Vniversal Intellect not of the whole Universe for that 's plainly improbable but of our Systeme or Vortex they must take it to be some Angelical Intelligence as Aristotle or the Sun No man can prove either of these to have any such office And for the Sun it is certain that it is not possible unless it self be an Intelligence And though to humane Reason it seem very likely that so glorious a corporeal Nature as the Sun should not be destitute of as noble a form as a lump of Clay a humane body doth possess that so there may be a proportion in Gods works between the nobility of matter and form yet all this to man is utterly uncertain nor doth any man know whether the Luminaries are animated with either sentient or intelligent Souls or not He that most confidently asserteth either and scorneth the Contradicter doth but tell you that he is ignorant of his ignorance But if it should prove true as many of the Fathers thought and Mammertus ubi supra asserteth that Angels have fiery Bodies which they animate and so that the Sun is animated with an Intelligence it would not follow that as fiery or as sensitive but only as intellective it were a subordinate universal Cause of compleat humane Generations and that Sol Homo generant hominem save only quoad Corpus which is but secundum quid But that God is the Vniversal Cause is unquestionable whether there be any subordinate or not 16. And here it is no wonder if the doubts arise which were in the cases of the forementioned Generations Whether God as the universal cause produce new-metaphysical matter for new forms Whether millions of Souls since generated have not more such metaphysical matter than the soul of Adam and Eve alone How Souls may be said to have more or less such matter or substance Whether he educe all Souls è virtute foecunditate primarum by giving them a power without any division or diminution of themselves to bring forth others by multiplication and so cause his Creature to participate of his own foecundity or power of causing Entities c. But such difficulties as these which arise not from uncertainties in Theology but are the meer consequents of the imperfection of humane Intellects and the remoteness depth and unrevealedness of these mysterious works of God should turn no man from the holding of other plain revealed truths As that man generateth man that God is the chief specifying Cause by his first making of man and giving him the power and blessing of propagation which he still maintaineth and with which he doth concurre That Man is the second specifying Cause in the exercise of that power of Generation which God gave him That God is the chief universal Cause and to the production of an Intellectual nature as such doth unspeakably more than man That the mother as cherishing the semen utriusque Parentis is the maternal universal Cause c. We know not fully how it is that one Light causeth a thousand without division or diminution of it self and what it is that is caused de novo It is easie to say that it is but the motion of one part of the atomes or materia subtilis moving another which was all pre-existent But few men that can see through a smoke or dust of atomes will believe that the Sun and other fiery bodies which shew themselves so wonderfully to us by Motion Light and Heat have no peculiar Nature Power or Virtues to cause all this but meer magnitude and figure And that those Corpuscles which have so many hundred degrees of magnitude and figures should not fall into as many hundred such Bodies as we call Elements rather than into two or four Suppose which we may ad verum exquirendum that there were no more Fire in the Universe than one Candle It having the same nature as now it hath that Candle would turn Cities and all combustible matter into Fire But of the Generation of man quoad animam I referre the Reader to Sennertus his Hypomnemata to omit all others And now I would know what there is in Generation that should be against the Immortality of the Soul will you say it is because the Soul hath a Beginning I have answered before that so have all Creatures Is it because it proveth the Soul material 1. If it did I have shewed that you your selves hold a perpetuity of matter 2. But it doth not so If you say that Incorporeal Spirits generate not I answer That is but a naked unproved assertion If you say that Angels do not I answer that 1. that is not because they are unable or unapt if God thought it fittest for them nor 2. can any man prove de facto whether they do or not Christ saith They marry not but he saith not whether they at all propagate their species or not I know the negative is taken for certain and I say not that it is not true but that it is not certain not at all known and therefore an unfit supposition to argue from against the Immortality of the Soul And I must confess that for my part as I have oft read Formae se multiplicant and that the Fire can more multiply or encrease it self than Earth and as I know that the more noble any Nature is the more like it is to God and therefore more potent more active more fecund and productive so I should farr rather think that the Angelical Nature can propagate it self than the Humane if God had not told me the later and said nothing pro or contra of the former And therefore make no doubt but if it do not which no man knoweth it is not because things material are more able but for other reasons unknown to us Whether because God will have this lower World to be the Nidus vel Matrix Coelorum and the Seminary of Heaven and all multiplication to be here or what it is we know not But if it be on the other side concluded that the whole substance of a Soul doth proceed directly and immediately from God it doth make no great alteration in this case or any of the coincident cases about humane propagation if you consider 1. That it is impossible that there should be any substance which is not totally from God either immediately or mediately And that what is said to be mediately from Him hath in it as much of his Causation as if there were no medium For God is not a partial Cause but a total in suo genere and he is as neer to the effect as if there were no