there be true liberty in the world we know well whereunto to impute all these disorders but if there be no true liberty in the world free from antecedent necessitation then they all fall directly upon God Almighty and his Providence The last question is concerning his definition of contingent That they are such Agents as work we know not how Against which I gave him two exceptions in my defence One was this Many Agents work we know not how as the Loadstone draweth iron the Jet chaff and yet they are known and acknowledged to be necessary and not contingent Agents Secondly many Agents do work we know how as a stone falling down from an house upon a mans head and yet we do not account it a necessary but a contingent event by reason of the accidental concurrence of the causes I have given him other instances in other parts of this Treatise And if need be he may have twenty more And yet though his definition was shewed formerly to halt down-right on both sides yet he good man is patient and never taketh the least notice of it But onely denyeth the consequence and over-looketh the proofes His objection about the indetermination of the causes That indetermination doth nothing because it maketh the event equal to happen and not to happen is but a flash without any one grain of solidity For by indetermination in that place is clearly understood not to be predetermined to one by extrinsecal causes but to be left free to its own intrinsecal determination this way or that way indifferently So the first words By reason of the indetermination have referrence to free Agents and free Events And the other words Or accidentall concurrence of the causes have referrence to casuall Events And both together referendo sigul◅ singulis do include all contingents as the word is commonly and largely taken by old Philosophers Castigations of the Animadversions Num. 17. REader I do not wonder now and then to see T. H. sink under the weight of an absurdity in this cause A back of steel were not able to bear all those unsupportable consequences which flow from this opinion of fatall destiny But why he should delight to multiplle needlesse absurdities I do not know Allmost every Section produceth some new monster In this seventeenth Section I demonstrated clearly that this opinion of universal necessity doth take away the nature of sinne That which he saith in answer thereunto is that which followeth First it is true he who taketh away the liberty of doing according to the will taketh away the nature of sinne but he that denieth the liberty to will doth not so This answer hath been sufficiently taken away already both in the defence and in these Castigations Inevitable and unresistible necessity doth as much acquit the will from sin as the action Again whereas I urged That whatsoever proceedeth essentially by way of physicall determination from the first cause is good and just and lawfull he opposeth That I might as well have concluded that what soever man hath been made by God is a good and just man So I might What should hinder me to conclude that every man and every creature created by God is good qua talis as it is created by God but being but a creature it is not immutably good as God himself is If he be not of the same opinion he must seek for companions among those old Hereticks the Manichees or Marcionites So he cometh to his main answer Sin is not a thing really made Those things which at first were actions were not then sins though actions of the same nature with those which were afterwards sins Nor was then the will to any thing a sin though it were a will to the same thing which in willing now we should sin Actions became then sins first when the Commandemens came c. There can no action be made sin but by the law Therefore this opinion though it derive actions essentially from God it derives not sins essentially from him but relatively and by the Cōmandement The first thing I observe in him is a contradiction to himself Now he maketh the anomy or the irregularity and repugnance to the law to be the sinne before he conceiveth the action it self to be the sin Doth not the Bishop think God to be the cause of all actions And are not sins of commission actions Is murther no action And doth not God himself say there is no evil in the City which I have not done And was not murther one of those evills c. I am of opinion that the distinction of causes into efficient and deficient is Bohu and signifieth nothing This might have been pardoned to him But his second slip is worse That the World was I know not how long without sin I did demonstrate That upon his grounds all sins are essentially from God and consequently are lawfull and just He answereth That the actions were from God but the actions were not sins at the first untill there was a law What is this to the purpose It is not materiall when sin did enter into the World early or late so as when it did enter it were essentially from God which it must needs be upon his grounds that both the murther and the law against murther are from God And as it doth not help his cause at all so it is most false What actions were there in the World before the sinne of the Angell He charged the Angels with folly And if God spared not the Angels that sinned but cast them down to hell and the Angels which kept not their first estate What were those first actions that were before the sinne of Adam By one man sinne entred into the World and death by sinne Thirdly he erreth most grossely in supposing that the World at first was lawlesse The World was never without the eternall law that is the rule of justice in God himself and that which giveth force to all other laws as the Divine Wisdom saith By me Kings raign and Princes decree justice And sinne is defined to be that which is acted said or thought against the eternall law But to let this passe for the present because it is transcendentally a law How was the World ever without the law of nature which is most properly a law the law that cannot lie not mortal from mortal man not dead or written in the paper without life but incorruptible written in the heart of man by the finger of God himself Let him learn sounder doctrine from St. Paul For when the Gentiles which have not the law do by nature the things contained in the law these having not the law are a law unto themselves which shew the work of the law written in their hearts their consciences also bearing witnesse and their thoughts the mean while accusing or excusing one another I passe by those Commandements of God which were delivered by tradition from hand to
shunned 1 Pet. 2. 14. No proper punishment but for sin Lam. 3. 39. 2 Sam. 12. 13. 14. 2 Cor. 4. 17. Matth. 25. 46. Ioh 37. 23. Lam. 3. 33. Psal. 107. 17. Gen. 9. 3. Prov. 12. 10. Why God did not make man impeccable Jude v. 6. Matth. 25. 41 46. Mar. 9. 44 45. Jud. v. 6 7. Punishments of the damned are eternall Gods prescience proveth infalliblity not necessity Resolution proveth election and liberty In the answer to the stating of the question What is necessary Chance is from accidentall concurrence not from ignorance Eccles. 4. 10. Prov. 22. 28. Jer. 18. 15. Ex Plutarchi Polit. ad Trajan Encheiridion c. 16. Math. 7. 6. Exact definitions not frequent What liberty is What is spontaneity What is necessity De interpret l. 1. c. ultimo Necessity of being and acting distinguished Tull. Necessity upon supposition what it is Mark 10. 27. Man is not a passive instrument as the sword in his hand Act. 17. 28. The instance in ambs ace hath lost T. H. his game T. H. his will is no more than the bias of a bowle See stateing of the question answer to Num. 1. St. Austiâ—… more to be credited than T. H De lib. Arbit l. 3. c. 3. To give liberty to two and limite to one is a contradiction According to T. H. his principles all perswasions are vvin We can blame no man justly A lame comparison T. H. maketh himself no better than a wooden toppe T. H his deep skill in Logick His silly definitions Medition liâ—…tle worth without making use of other mens experience Terms of art are unungrateful to rude persons 1 Top. c. 2. ss 2. Ans. to the stat quest fount of Argum. cast Num. 1 3. def Num. 3. Freedom to do if one will without freedom to will a vain distinction Num. 30. 14. Josh. 24. 15. 2 Sam. 24. 12. Deut. 30. 19. Bulla Caroli 4. Exercit. 307. And maketh T. H. a degree worse than the Stâ—…cks Aust. de civit deâ—… l. 5. c. 10. Apud Gellium Iudicium practicé practicum explained Plut. How the object is and how it is not the cause of seeing Num. 3. Spontaneity Ethic. l. 3. c. 2. Num. 3. Conformity signifieth agreeableness as well as likeness 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 what they are Eth. l. 3. c. 1 2. l. 3. c. 3 4. Phys. l. 2. c. 6. A true will may be changed Num. 8. Num. 25. Voluntarinesse doth not desend on the judgment of other Num. 33. Num. 8. Num. 8. Num. 26. 1 King 3. 11. Election of more than one Verse 5. Ver. 6 7 8 9. Ver. 10. Ver. 11. Ver. 13. Acts 5. 4. Was it not in thy power Explained Out of hatred to true liberty T. H. makes God hypocritical Gods secret and revealed will not contrary And why Fount of Arg. in fine Occulte virtue or influence Job 38 31. It is blasphemy to say that God is the cause of sinne Or to say that sin is efficaciously decreed by God 〈◊〉 no â—…d perâ—…ssion The difference between general and special influence 1 King 21. 9. Fountains of Argâ—…ments Iam. 4. 13 14. Num. 12. Rom. 11. 23. God may oblige himself Jam. 1. 17. God cannot do any unrighteous thing Tit. 1. 2. Num. 〈◊〉 19. 2 Tim. 2. 13. Hebr. 6. 10. Mich. 6. 2. Ezek. 18. 25. Gen. 18. 23 25. Iud. 7. Plut. Num. 10. It is just to afflict innocent persons for their own good Lib. de cive tit Imp. c. 6. n. 18. â—…n is properly irregularity God no cause of irregularity Laws may be unjust Impossibilities made bâ—… our selves may be justly imposed not impossibilities in them selves Acts 5. 29. 1 Pet. 2. 13 Proper punishment is ever vindictive in part Lam. 3. 39. Job 31. 11. Ezra 9. 13. Heb. 10. 28. Deut. 25. 2. 1 Pet. 2 4. Yet further of unjust laws L. 1. 14. Exod. 1. 17. Dan. 3. 18. Heb. 11. 23. 1 King 21. 2 King 6. 32. Dan. 6. 8. Mich. 6. 16. 2 K. 17 19. Isay 10. 1. The authority of the Scripture not dependent on the printer Ammon in lib. de Interpret Mr. R. H. T. H. a fit Catechist for disloial and unnatural persons Num 12. Mankind never without laws De cive c. i. Num 12. Never lawful for private men ordinarily to kill one another Numbers 35. Fount of Arg. Gen. 9. 6. Gen. 4. 10. 1 Sam. 19. 5. 2 King 24. 4. Prov. 28. Deut. 10. 11. Exod. 21. 14. Gen. 9. 6. Joh. 8. 44. T. H. Attorny General for the brute beasts Gen. 1. 28. Gen. 2. 19. Psal. 8. 6. Gen. 9. 3. Prov. 26. 5. Seen and unseen necessity Act. 27. 22. V. 30. If all things be absolutely necessary admonitions are all vaine A litter of absurdities What is morally good Isa. 5. 20. Exod. 1. 21 Rewards of bruits and men differ Rom. 1. 21. What it is to honour God Jam 2. 19. What are devils in his judgement God doth not hinder privately what he commands openly His opinion destroyeth the truth of God And his goodnesse Isa. 28. 21. Wisd. 1. 13. Ezek. 33. 11. Fount of Arg. And his justice And omnipotence making the cause of sinne Amos 3. 6. A right Hobbist cannot praise God Deut. 29. 29. Nor hear the Word or receive the Sacrament worthily Matth. 11. 12. Mat. 7. 11. Rom. 10. 14. Nor vowas he ought Nor repent of his misdeeds What repentance is 2 Cor. 7. 11. Joel 2. 12. Mans concurrence with Gods grace Act. 7. 51. Prov. 1. 24. Mark 1. 15. Rom. 11. 20. Rom. 2. 5. Rev. 3. 20. 1 Cor. 3. 9. 1 Cor. 15. 10. Confidence in praier and the efficacy of it Jam. 1. 6. 1 Tim. 2. 8. Mark 11. 24. Jam. 5. 15. Phil. 1. 19. Isay 38. 5. 1 King 8. 37. 2 Chron. 7. 12. Luk. 17. 13. 18. 2 Cor. 1. 11. T. H. Still mistaketh necessity upon supposition There is more in contingency than ignorance Def. Num. 3. stat of quest cast Num. 1. 3. c. Sin in the world before the civil law Job 4. 18. 2 Pet. 2. 4. Jude 6. Rom. 5. 12. Prov. 8. 15. Rom. 2. 14. 1â—… 15. To command impossibilities is unjust Yet further against his silly distinction free to do if he will not free to will Of monsters What is said to be in deo and what extra deum Exod. 3. 14. To will do in God the same thing He willeth not all he could will Luâ—… 3. 8. T. H. make the will to be compelled Arist. Eth. lib. 3. c. 1. 1 Sam. 28. 23. Est. 1. 8. 2 Cor. 12. 11. Motus primó primi and antipathies To search too boldly into the nature of God is a fault But the greater fault is negligence Rom. 1. 20. Exer c. 12. d. 2. T. H. his liberty omnipotence in shew in deed nothing He dare not refer himself to his own witnesses Terms of Art 1 Cor. 14. 19. A contradiction c. 17. d. 28. Matth. 15. 14. Election and compulsion inconsistent There are mixt actions Eth. l. 3.
name of Gods grace which will afford no shelter for his errour Our question was not about the concurrence of grace and free-will in the conversion of a sinner but meerly about the liberty or necessity of all naturall and civil events when he hath acquitted himself like a man in the former cause then he is free to undertake the second The next collection is of such places of Scripture as say there is election of which T. H. is pleased to affirm That they make equally for him and me I do not blame him if he desire that all places which maintain Election and that all natural and civil events should quite be sequester'd from this controversie For it is not possible to reconcile these places with fatal necessity All choice or election is of more than one but there can be no choice of more than one where there is an extrinsecal determination of all particular events with all their circumstances inevitably irresistibly to one by a fluxe of natural causes So they leave no manner of Election at all no more freedom to chuse a mans actions than to chuse his will But all these places and many more prove expressely that a man is free not onely to do it if he will but to will The reason is evident because to chuse is to will the proper elicite immediate act of the will and to chuse one thing before another is nothing else but to will one thing before another But all these places say that a man is free to chuse that is to will one thing before another Chuse life saith one place Chuse whom ye will serve saith a second place Chuse one of three saith a third place and so of the rest But I have pressed these places formerly and shall do further if there be occasion His third sort of Texts are those which seem to make for me against him But I am at age to chuse and urge mine own arguments for my self and cannot want weapons in this cause Therefore he may forbear such a thanklesse office He telleth us of a great apparent contradiction between the first sort of Texts and the last but being both Scripture they may and must be reconciled This is first to wound the credit of the Scriptures and then to give them a plaister The supposed contradiction is in his own phansie Let him take them according to the analogy of faith in that sense wherein the Church hath ever taken them and there is no shew of contradiction The Scripture consists not in the words but in the sense not in the outside but in the marrow He demands Whether the selling of Ioseph did follow infallibly and inevitably upon the permission of God I answer If we consider Gods permission alone neither inevitably nor infallibly If we consider his permission joyntly with his prescience then infallibly but not inevitably Foreknowledge doth no more necessitate events to come to passe than after-knowledge Gods prescience did no more make Judas his treason inevitable to him than my remembrance now of what was done yesterday did make it inevitable then to him that did it He urgeth further So the prescience of God might have been frustrated by the liberty of humane will I answer nothing lesse The natures and essences of all things come to passe because they were foreknown by God whose knowledge was the directive cause of them But the acts and operations of free Agents are therefore foreknown because they will come to pass If any thing should come to pass otherwise God had foreknown from eternity that it should have come to passe otherwise because his infinite understanding doth encompasse all times and all events in the instant of eternity And consequently he beholds all things past present and to come as present And therefore leaving those forms of speech which are accommodated to us and our capacities To speak properly there is neither fore-knowledge nor after-knowledge in God who neither knows one thing after another nor one thing by deduction from another He askes Whether the treachery and fratricide of Iosephs brethren were no sin I answer yes and therefore it was not from God positively but permissively and dispositively Ye thought evil against me but God meant it unto good to save much people alive But he urgeth Joseph said Be not grieved nor angry with your selves that ye sold me hither Ought not a man to be grieved and angry with himself for sinning Yes but penitent sinners such as Josephs brethren were have great cause of joy and comfort when they understand that God hath disposed their sin to his glory their own good and the benefit of others He demands further Doth God barely permit corporal motions and neither will them nor nill them Or how is God the cause of the motion and the cause of the law yet not of the irregularity It were a much readier way to tell us at once directly That either there is no sin in the World or that God is the authour of sin than to be continually beating the bush after this manner But I answer All corporal motion in general is from God not onely permissively but also causally that is by a general influence but not by a special influence The specifical determination of this good general power to evil is from the free Agent who thereby doth become the cause of the irregularity There is no contrariety between motion in general and the law but between the actual and determinate abuse of this good locomitive power and the law He demands Whether the necessity of hardnesse of heart be not as easily derived from Gods permission that is from his withholding his grace as from his positive decree This question is proposed in a confused blundering manner without declaring distinctly what grace he meaneth I answer two wayes First we are to distinguish between a necessity of consequence or an infallibility and a necessity of consequent or a causal necessity Supposing but not granting that hardnesse of heart is as inâ—…allibly derived from the one as from the other yet not so causally nor so culpably in â—…espect of God who is not obliged in justice â—…o give his free grace to his creature but he is â—…bliged by the rule of his own justice not to determine his own creature to evil and then punish him for the same evil Secondly I answer that even this supposed necessity of infabillity can no way be imputed to God who never forsakes his creature by with holding his grace from him until his creature have first forsaken him who never forsakes his creature so far but that he may by prayers and using good indeavours obtaine the aide of Gods grace either to prevent or remove hardnesse of heart When God created man he made him in such a condition that he did not need special exciting grace to the determination of his will to supernatural good And to all that are within the pale of his
beliâ—…e that what is is and what hath been hath been So I hold this for a certain truth that what shall be shall be And therefore the argument holds as strongly against me as against him If I shall recover I need not his unsavoury potion If I shall not recover it will do me no good In all my life I never heard a weaker or sillier Sophisme urged in earnest by a rational man That which is is necessary to be upon supposition that it is That which hath been is necessary to have been upon supposition that it hath been So that which shall be shall be necessarily that is infallibly upon supposition that it shall be And the event cannot be supposed except it be supposed that the free Agent shall determine it self in such manner and except all necessary means be likewise supposed Such a necessity upon supposition is very consistent with true libery but T. H. his necessity is of another nature an antecedent extrinsecal necessitation and determination to one which is altogether inconsistent with election and true liberty According to my opinion we say That which may be may be but that which may be may not be According to his opinion we say That which must be must be but that which must be cannot be otherwise According to my opinion I am free either to walk abroad or to stay within doors whethersoever I do this is true that which shall be shall be But if I walk abroad as I may do then my stay within doors shall not be And on the other side If I stay within doors as I may do likewise then my walking abroad shall not be The event hath yet no determinate certainty in the causes for they are not yet determined The Agent may determine it self otherwise the event may come otherwise to passe even until the last moment before the production And when the event is actually produced and is without its causes it hath a determinate certainty not antecedent not from extrinsecal determination not absolute but meerly hypothetical or upon supposition the not distinguishing aright of which two different kinds of necessity makes the reader and us all this trouble It follows Laws are not superfluous because by the punishment of one or a few unjust men they are the cause of justice in a great many This answer hath been taken away already and shall be surther refelled if it be surther pressed But he willingly declineth the main scope of my argument which reflected more upon the unjustice than upon the superfluity of human laws if his opinion were true Those laws are unjust which punish men for not doing that which was antecedently impossible for them to do and for doing that which was impossible for them to leave undone But upon supposition of T. H. his opinion of the absolute necessity of all events all humane laws do punish men for not doing that which was antecedently impossible for them to do and for doing that which was antecedently impossible for them to leave undone Here we have confitentem reum our adversaries confession within a very few lines It is true that seeing the name of punishment hath relation to the name of crime there can be no punishment but for crimes that might have been left undone This is the first ingenuous confession we have had from T. H. I hope we shall have more From whence it followeth First that there neither is nor can be any crime deserving punishment in the World that is to say no such criminal thing as sin for nothing by his doctrine was ever done that could have been left undone Secondly it followeth hence that no punishment is just because nothing can be left undone that is done And that all men are innocent and there is no such thing as a delinquent in the World How saith he then That the laws are the cause of justice in many by punishing one or a few unjust men Upon his principles the Laws and Judges themselves are unjust to punish any men If this be not a contradiction I have lost my aime And if punishments are not just then neither are â—…ewards just Thus by his doctrine we have lost the two great pillars or preservatives of all well-ordered Societies as Lycurgus called them the two hinges whereupon the Common-wealth is turned Reward and Punishment Yet St. Peter doth teach us That Kings and Governours are sent from God for the punishment of evil-doers and for the praise of them that do well The last inconvenience which he mentions of those that were urged by me is this God in justice cannot punish a man with eternal torments for doing that which never was in his power to leave undone To which admitting as you have heard that there can be no punishment but for crimes that might have been left undone he gives two answers The first is this Instead of punishment if he had said affliction may not I say that God may afflict and not for sin Doth he not afflict those creatures that cannot sin And sometimes those that can â—…n yet not for sin as Job and the blind man in the Gospel This is still worser and worser He told us even now that nothing which is dishonourable ought to be attributed to God And can there be any thing in the World more dishonourable than to say That God doth torment poor innocent creatures in hell fire without any fault of theirs without any relation to sin meerly to shew his dominion over them The Scripture teacheth us clear otherwise That a man complains for the punishment of his sins Sin and punishment are knit together with adamantine bonds He phrases it for the manifestation of his power If it were true it was the greatest manifestation of cruelty and tyranny that is imaginable I confesse that chastisements ioflicted after the sin is forgiven are not properly punishments because they proceed a patre castigantâ—… non a Iudice vindicante from a father correcting not from a Judge revenging Yet even these chastisements are grounded upon sin The Lord hath put away thy sin thou shalt not die Howbeit because by this deed thou hast given great occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme the child that is born unto thee shall surely die But what place have such chastisements as Davids were in hell Is any man bettered by his sufferings there What place have probations and trialls of mens graces such as Jobs were in hell where there are no graces to be tried Jobs triall and Davids chastisements and the poor mans blindnesse were the greatest blessings that ever befell them For their light afflictions which were but for a moment did work out unto them a far more excellent and eternall weight of glory But the paines of hell are heavy and endlesse and work out nothing but torment In a word these afflictions we now treat of are downright punishments So the Holy Ghost stiles them everlasting punishment he
by special influence did necessitate the second causes to operate as they did and if they being thus determined did necessitate man inevitably unresistably by an essential subordination of causes to do whatsoever he did then one of these two absurdities must follow either That there is no such thing as sin in the World or That God is more guilty of it than man as the motion of the watch is more from the Artificer who makes it and winds it up than from the watch it self To this he answereth onely this That my consequence is no stronger then if out of this That a man is lame necessarily one should inferre That either he is not lame or that his lamenesse proceeded necessarily from the will of God And is it possible that he doth not see that this inference followeth clearly and necessarily from his principles If he doth not I will help his eye-sight All actions and accidents and events whatsoever do proceed from the will of God as the principal cause determining them to do what they are by a naturall necessary subordination of causes This is the principle I assume that which no man can deny But the lamenesse of this man whom he mentioneth is an accident or event Therefore this lamenesse upon his principles is from the will of God c. Castigations upon the Animadversions Num. 12. IN this Section he behaveth himself as the Hound by Nilus drinketh and runneth as if he were afraid to make any stay quite omitting the whole contexture and frame of my discourse onely catching here and there at some phrase or odd ends of broken sentences The authority of St. Paul was formerly his Palladium the fate of his opinion of Fate or his seven-fold shield which he bore up against all assailants And now to desert it as the Oestredge doth her egges in the sand and leave it to the judgement of the Reader to think of the same as he pleaseth seemeth strange That man usually is in some great distresse who quitteth his buckler I desire but the judicious Reader upon the By to compare my former defence with his trifling exceptions and I do not fear his veredict He saith it is blasphemy to say that God can sin so it is blasphemy also to say that God is the authour or cause of any sinne This he himself saith at least implicitly and this he cannot but say so long as he maintaineth an universal antecedent necessity of all things flowing from God by a necessary flux of second causes He who teacheth that all men are determined to sin antecedently without their own concurrence irresistibly beyond their own power to prevent it and efficaciously to the production of sinne He who teacheth that it is the antecedent will of God that men should sinne and must sinne He who maketh God to be not onely the cause of the act and of the law but likewise of the irregularity or deviation and of that very anomy wherein the being of sin so far as sin hath a being doth consist maketh God to be the principall cause and authour of sin But T. H. doth all this He saith it is no blasphemy to say that God hath so ordered the World that sin may necessarily be committed That is true in a right sense if he understand onely a necessity of infallability upon Gods presence or a necessity of supposition upon Gods permission But what trifling minsing of the matter is this Let him cough out and shew us the bottom of his opinion which he cannot deny that God hath so ordered the World that sin must of necessity be committed and inevitably be committed that it is beyond the power of man to help it or hinder it and that by vertue of Gods omnipotent will and eternall decree This is that which we abominate Yet he telleth us That it cannot be said that God is the authour of sin because not he that necessitateth an action but he who doth command or warrant it is the authour First I take that for granted which he admitteth that by his opinion God necessitateth men to sinfull actions which is a blasphemy as well as the other Secondly his later part of his assertion is most false That he onely who commandeth or warranteth sin is the authour of it He who acteth sin he who necessitateth to sin he who first bringes sin into the World is much more the authour of it than the bare commander of it They make God to be the proper and predominate cause of sin by an essential subordination of the sin of man to the will of God and in essential subordinates allwayes the cause of the cause is the cause of the effect If there had never been any positive commandment or law given yet sin had still been sin as being contrary to the eternall law of justice in God himself If an Heathen Prince should command a Christian to sacrifice to Idols or Devils and he should do it not the commander onely but he who commits the idolatry is the cause of the sin His instance in the Act of the Israelites robbing the Egyptians of their Jewels is impertinent For it was no robbery nor sin God who is the Lord Paramount of Heaven and Earth having first justly transfered the right from the Egyptians to the Israelites and in probability to make them some competent satisfaction for all that work and drudgery which they had done for the Egyptians without payment This is certain if God necessitate the Agent to sin either the act necessitated is no sin or God is the principall cause of it Let him chuse whether of these two absurdities this Scylla or that Charybdis he will fall into The reason which he gives of Gods objurgations to convince men that their wills were not in their own power but in Gods power is senselesse and much rather proveth the contrary that because they were chidden therefore their wills were in their own power And if their wills had not been in their own power most certainly God would not have reprehended them for that which was not their own fault He saith That by interpreting hardening to be a permission of God I attribute no more to God in such actions then I might attribute to any of Pharaohs servants the not perswading their master c. As if Pharaohs servants had the same power over their master that God Allmighty had to hinder him and stop him in his evill courses As if Pharaohs servants were able to give or withhold grace as if Pharoahs servants had divine power to draw good out of evill and dispose of sin to the advancement of Gods glory and the good of his Church As if an humble petition or perswasion of a servant and a physicall determination of the will by a necessary flux of naturall causes were the same thing He who seeth a water break over its banks and suffers it to run out of its due channel that he may draw it by furrows into
righteous with the wicked Necessity may justifie the sufferings of innocent persons in some cases But no necessity can warrant the punishment of innocent persons Innocentium lachrimae diluvio periculosiores Whether they did well or ill for the manner of the act who put out their bodily eyes because they supposed them to be an impediment to the eye of the soul is not pertinent to our purpose yet was apt enough to prove my intention that bodily blindnesse may sometimes be a benefit His instance in brute beasts which are afflicted yet cannot sin is extravagant I did not go about to prove that universal necessity doth take away afflictions it rather rendereth them unavoidable But I did demonstrate and he hath not been able to make any shew of an answer to it that it taketh away all just rewards and punishments which is against the universal notion and common belief of the whole World Brute beasts are not capable of punishment They are not knocked down out of vindictive justice for faults committed but for future use and benefit I said there was a vast difference between the light and momentany pangs of brute beasts and the intollerable and endlesse pains of Hell Sure enough Dionysius the Tyrant seeing an oxe knocked down at one blow said to his friends What a folly it is to quit so fair a command for fear of dying which lasts no longer a space He himself when his wits are calmer doth acknowledge as much as I and somewhat more Perhaps saith he if the death of a sinner were an eternall life in extream misery a man might as far as Job hath done expostulate with God Allmighty not accusing him of injustice c. but of litle tenderness love to mankind But now he is pleased to give another judgement of it As if the length or greatnesse of the pain made any difference of the justice or unjustice of inflicting it yes very much According to the measure of the fault ought to be the number of the stripes If the punishment exceed the offence it is unjust On the other side it is not onely an act of justice but of favour and grace to inflict temporary paines for a greater good Otherwise a Master could not justly correct his Scholler Otherwise a Chirurgion might not lance an impostume or put a man to pain to cure him of the stone If God afflict a man with a momentary sicknesse and make this sicknesse a means to fit him for an eternall weight of glory he hath no cause to complain of injustice He is angry that I would make men believe that he holds all things to be just that are done by them who have power enough to avoid punishment He doth me wrong I said no such thing If he be guilty of this imputation either directly or by consequence let him look to it he hath errours enough which are evident I did indeed con44te this tenet of his That irresistible power is the rule of justice of which he is pleased to take no notice in his Animadversions But whereas he doth now restrain this priviledge to that power alone which is absolutely irresistible he forgetteth himself over much having formerly extended it to all Soveraignes and Supreme Councels within their own dominions It is manifest therefore that in every Common-wealth there is some one man or Councel which hath c. a Soveraign and absolute power to be limited by the strength of the Common wealth and by no other thing What neither by the Law of God nor nature nor nations nor the municipall laws of the land nor by any other thing but his power and strength Good doctrine Hunc tu Romane caveto Lastly to make his presumtion compleat he indeavoureth to prove that God is not only the author of the Law which is most true and the cause of the act which is partly true because he is the onely fountain of power but that he is the cause of the irregularity that is in plain English which he delighteth in the sin it self I think saith he there is no man but understands c. That where two things are compared the similitude or dissimilitude regularity or irregularity that is between them is made in and by the things themselves that are compared The Bishop therefore that denies God to be the cause of the irregularity denies him to be the cause both of the law and of the action This is that which he himself calleth blasphemy elsewhere that God is the authour or cause of sin Sin is nothing but the irregularity of the Act. So St. John defineth it in expresse terms 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Sin is an anomy or an irregularity or a transgression of the law For sin is nothing else but a declination from the rule that is an irregularity Another definition of sin is this Sin is that which is thought or said or done against the eternall law Still you see the formall reason of sin doth consist in the contrariety to the law that is the irregularity Othets define sinne to be a want of rectitude or a privation of conformity to the rule that is irregularity An irregular action is sin materially Irregularity is sin formally Others define sinne to be a free transgression of the commandement Every one of these definitions demonstrate that Mr. Hobbes maketh God to be properly the cause of sinne But let us weigh his argument He who is the cause of the law and the cause of the action is the cause of the irregularity but God is the cause of the law and the cause of the action I deny his assumption God indeed is the cause of the law but God is not the total or adaequate cause of the action Nay God is not at all the cause of the action qua talis as it is irregular but the free Agent To use our former instance of an unjust judge The Prince is the authour or cause of the law and the Prince is the cause of the judiciary action of the Judge in generall because the Judge deriveth all his power of judicature from the Prince But the Prince is not the cause of the irregularity or repugnance or non-conformity or contrariety which is between the Judges actions and the law but the Judge himself who by his own fault did abuse and misapply that good generall power which was committed and entrusted to him by the Prince he is the only cause of the anomy or irregularity Or as a Scrivener that teacheth one to write and sets him a copy is both the cause of the rule and of the action or writing and yet not the cause of the irregularity or deviation from the rule Sin is a defect or deviation or irregularity No defect no deviation no irregularity can proceed from God But herein doth consist T. H. his errour that he distinguisheth not between an essential and an accidentall subordination Or between a good generall power and the derermination or
misapplication of this generall power to evill What times are we fallen into to see it publickly maintained That God is the cause of all irregularity or deviation from his own rules Num. 13. HEre is no need of Castigations there being no Animadversions Castigations of the Animadversions Num. 14. IN the beginning he repeateth his empty objections from what shall be shall be and from foreknowledge and that a man cannot chuse to day for tomorrow and thence concludeth nemine consentiente That my deductions are irrationall and fallacious and that he need mak no further answer As if he should say I sent forth two or three light horsemen to vapour who were soundly beaten back and made their defence with their heels therefore I need not answer the charge of the main battle He told me that I did not understand him if I thought he held no other necessity than that which is contained in that old foolish rule Whatsoever is when it is it is necessarily so as it is But I see when all is done he must sit down and be contented to make his best of that old foolish rule For praescience and what shall be shall be doe imply no more In the next place he chargeth me with three great abfurdities The first that I say A law may be unjust The second That a law may be tyrannicall The third that I say It is an unjust law which prescribes things impossible in themselves to be done A grievous accusation These absurdities are at age let them even answer for themselves He saith Civil laws are made by every man that is subject to them because every one of them consented to the placing of the Legislative power I deny his consequence Indeed in causes that are naturally necessarily and essentially subordinate the cause of the cause is allwayes the cause of the effect as he that planteth a vineyard is the cause of the vine But in causes that are accidentally or contingently subordinate as the people electing the law-giver elected and the law made are the cause of the cause is not allwayes the cause of the effect As he that planteth a vineyard is not the cause of the drunkennesse The Kings commission maketh a Judge but it is not the cause of his unrighteous judgement Two Cities in Italy contending about their bounds chose the people of Rome to be their Arbitrators they gave either City a small pittance and reserved all the rest to themselves Quod in medio est populo Romano adjucetur The two Cities did not so much like their Arbitators at the first as they detested the Arbitrament at the last And though they had contracted a necessity of compliance by their credulous submission yet this did not free that unconscionable Arbitrament from palpable injustice no nor yet so much as from palpable injury for though a man is not injuried who is willing to be injuried volenti non fit injuria Yet he who doth chuse an Arbitrator doth not chuse his unjust Arbitrament nor he that chuseth a Law-giver chuse his tyrannical Law Though he have obliged himself to passive obedience yet his obligation doth not render either the injurâ—…ous Arbitrament of the one or the tyrannicall law of the other to be just So the main ground of his errour is a grosse fallacy which every Sophister in the University is able to discover I answer secondly That though every subject had actually consented as well to the laws as to the Law-giver yea though the law were made by the whole collective body of the people in their own persons yet if it be contrary to the law of God or nature it is still an unjust law The people cannot give that power to their Prince which they have not themselves Thirdly many laws are made by those who are not duely invested with Legislative power which are therefore unjust laws Fourthly many laws are made to bind forraigners who exercise commerce with subjects which if they be contrary to the pacts and capitulations of the confederate nations are unjust laws Forraigners never consented to the placing of the Legislative power Fifthly no humane power whatsoever judiciary or Legislative civill or sacred is exempted from excesses and possibility of doing or making unjuct acts Lastly the people cannot confer more power upon their Law-giver than God himself doth confer neither is their election a greater priviledge from injustice than Gods own disposition but they who have been placed in soveraign power by God himself have both made unjust laws and prescribed unjust acts to their subjects I said those laws were unjust which prescribed things impossible in themselves Against this he excepteth Onely contradictions are impossible in themselves all other things are possible in themselves as to raise the dead to change the course of nature But never any Tyrant did bind a man to contradictions or make a law commanding him to do and not to do the same action or to be and not to be in the same place at the same moment of time I answer first That Tyrants may command and by their Deputies have commanded contradictory Acts as for the same Subjects to appear before several Judges in several places at the same time And to do several duties inconsistent one with another which imply a contradiction and have punished Subjects for disobedience in such cases Secondly I answer That when we say Law-makers ought to command things possible it ought to be understood of things possible to their Subjects upon whom they impose their commands not of such things as are possible to God Allmighty To make a law that subjects should raise the dead or change the course of nature which he reckons as things possible in themselves is as unjust a law as a law that should injoine them contradictions the acts as impossible to the Subject Thirdly these words impossible in themselves which he layeth hold on have a quite contrary sense to that which he imagineth and are warranted by great Authours Some things are impossible to us by our own defaults as for a man to hold the liquour firmly without shedding who hath contracted the Palsy by his own intemperance These impossibilities may justly be forbidden and punished when we have had power and lost it byour own fault Secondly there are other impossibilities in themselves such as proceed not from our own faults which never were in our power as those which proceed from the antecedent determinatioo of extrinsecall causes To injoine these by law and to punish a man for not obeying is unjust and tyrannicall Whereas I called just laws the ordinances of right reason he saith It is an errour that hath cost many thousands of men their lives His reason is If laws be erroneous shall they not be obeyed Shall we rather rebell I answer neitheir the one one nor the other We are not to obey them actively because we ought to obey God rather than man Yet may we not rebell Submit your selves to
their own Countries and if the Governour will allow no religion then Atheisme is the true religion Then the blessed Apostles were very unwise to suffer for their conscience because they would obey God rather than man Then the blessed Martyrs were ill advised to suffer such torments for a false religion which was not warranted or indeed which was for bidden by the Soveraign Magistrates And so I have heard from a Gentleman of quality well deserving credit that Mr. Hobbes and he talking of self-preservation he pressed Mr. Hobbes with this argument drawn from holy Martyrs To which Mr. Hobbes gave answer They were all fools This bolt was soon shot but the primitive Church had a more venerable esteem of the holy Martyrs whose sufferings they called palms their Prison a Paradise and their death-day their birth-day of their glory to whose memory they builded Churches and instituted festivalls whose monuments God himself did honour with frequent miracles He asketh why the Bible should not be canonicall in Constantinople as well as in other places if it were not as he saith His question is Apocryphall and deserveth no other answer but another question Why a ship being placed in a stream is more apt to fall down the stream than to ascend up against the stream It is no marvel if the World be apt to follow a sensuall religion which is agreeable to their own appetites But that any should embrace a religion which surpasseth their own understandings and teacheth them to deny themselves and to saile against the stream of their own natural corruptions this is the meer goodnesse of God He saith That a Conquerour makes no laws over the conquered by virtue of his power and conquest but by virtue of their assent Most vainly urged like all the rest Unjust Conquerours gain no right but just Conquerours gain all right Omnia dat qui justa negat Just conquerors do not use to ask the assent of those whom they have conquered in lawfull war but to command obedience See but what a pretâ—…y liberty he hath found out for conquered persons They may chuse whether they will obey or dye Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem What is this to the purpose to prove that Conquerours make laws by the assent of those whom they have conquered nothing at all And yet even thus much is not true upon his principle Conquered Persons are not free to live or die indifferently according to his principles but they are necessitated either to the one or the other to live slaves or dye captives He hath found out a much like assent of children to the laws of their Ancestors without which he would make us believe that the laws do not bind When a child cometh to strength enough to do mischief and to judgement that they are preserved from mischief by fear of the sword that doth protect them in the very act of receiving protection and not renouncing it they obliege themselves to the laws of their protectours And here he inserteth further some of his peculiar errours as this That Parents who are not subject to others may lawfully take away the lives of their children and Magistrates take away the lives of their Subjects without any fault or crime if they do but doubt of their obedience Here is comfortable doctrine for children that their parents may knock out their brains lawfully And for Subjects that their Soveraigns may lawfully hang them up or behead them without any offence committed if they do but doubt of their obedience And for Soveraigns that their Subjects are quitted of their allegiance to them so soon as they do but receive actual protection from another And for all men if they do receive protection from a Turk or an heathen or whomsoever they are obliged to his Turkish Heathenish Idolatrous Sacrilegious or impious laws Can such opinions as these live in the World surely no longer â—…han men recover their right wits Demadesâ—…hreatned â—…hreatned Phocion That the Athenians would destroy him when they fall into their mad fits And thee Demades said Phocion when they returne to their right minds He saith That I would have the Iudge to condemn no man for a chrime that is necessitated As if saith he the Iudge could know what acts are neressary unlesse he knew all that had anteceded both visible and invisible If all acts be necessary it is an easie thing for the Judge to know what acts are necessey I say more that no crime can be necessitated for if it be necessitated it is no crime And so much all Judges know firmly or else they are not fit to be Judges Surely he supposeth there are or have been or may be some Stoicall Judges in the World He is mistaken no Stoick wss ever fit to be a Judge either Capitall or Civill And in truth Stoicall principles do overthrow both all Judges and Judgments He denieth that he ever said that all Magistrates at first were elective Perhaps not in so many words but he hath told us again that no law can be unjust because every Subject chuseth his law in chusing his Law-giver If every Law-giver be elective then every Soveraign Magistrate is elective for every Soveraign Magistrate is a Law-giver And he hath justified the laws of the Kings of Egypt of Assyria of Persia upon this ground because they were made by him to whom the people had given the Legislative power He addeth That it appears that I am of opinion that a law may be made to command the will Nothing lesse if he speaks of the law of man My argument was drawn from the lesser to the greater thus If that law be unjust which commands a man to do that which is impossible for him to do then that law is likewise unjust which commands him to will that which is impossible for him to will He seeth I condemne them both but much more the later Yet upon his principles he who commandeth a man to do impossibilities commandeth him to will impossibilities because without willing them he cannot do them My argument is ad hominem and goes upon his own grounds That though the action be necessitated neverthelesse the will to break the law maketh the action unjust And yet he maintaineth that the will is as much or more necessitated than the action because he maketh a man free to do if he will but not free to will If a man ought not to be punished for a necessitated act then neither ought he to be punished for a necessitated will I said truely That a just law justly executed is a cause of justice He inferreth that he hath shewed that all laws are just and all just laws are justly executed And hereupon he concludeth That I confesse that all I reply unto here is true Do I confesse that all laws are just No I have demonstrated the contrary or do I believe that all just laws are justly executed It may be so in Platos Common-wealth or in Sr.
that the subsequent commands of a Sovereign contrary to his former lawes is an abrogation of them And that it is an opinion repugnant to the nature of a commonwealth that he that hath the soveraign power is subject to the civill lawes The determinations of Scripture upon his grounds do bind the hands of Kings when they themselves please to be bound no longer To conclude sometimes he doth admit the soule to be a distinct substance from the body sometimes he denieth it Sometimes he maketh reason to be a naturall faculty sometimes he maketh it to be an acquired habit In some places he alloweth the will to be a rationall appetite in other places he disallowes it Sometimes he will have it to be a law of nature that men must stand to their pacts Sometimes he maketh covenants of mutuall trust in the state of nature to be void Sometimes he will have no punishment but for crimes that might have been left undone At other times he maketh all crimes to be inevitable Sometimes he will have the dependence of actions upon the will to be truly liberty At other times he ascribeth liberty to rivers which have no will Sometimes he teacheth that though an action be necessitated yet the will to break the law maketh the action to be unjust at other times he maketh the will to be much more necessitated than the action He telleth us that civill law-makers may erre and sin in making of a law And yet the law so made is an infallible rule Yes to lead a man infallibly into a ditch What should a man say to this man How shall one know when he is in earnest and when he is in jest He setteth down his opinion just as Gipsies tell fortunes both waies that if the one misse the other may be sure to hit that when they are accused of falsehood by one they may appeale to another But what did I write in such a place It was the praise of John Baptist that he was not like a reed shaken with the wind bending or inclining hither and thither this way and that way now to old truths then to new errours And it is the honour of every good Christian. St. Paul doth excellently describe such fluctuating Christians by two comparisons the one of little children the other of a ship lying at Hull Eph. 4. 14. That we henceforth be no more children tossed too and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine as a child wavers between his love and duty to his parent or nurse on the one hand and some apple or other toy which is held forth to him on the other hand or as a ship lying at anchor changeth its positure with every wave and every puffe of wind As the last company leaves them or the present occasion makes them so they vary their discourses When the time was T. H. was very kind to me to let me see the causes and grounds of my errours Arguments seldome work on men of wit and learning when they have once ingaged themselves in a contrary opinion If any thing will do it it is the shewing of them the causes of their errours One good turn requireth another Now I will do as much for him If it do not work upon himself Yet there is hope it may undeceive some of his disciples A principall cause of his errours is a fancying to himself a generall state of nature which is so far from being generall that there is not an instance to be found of it in the nature of things where mankind was altogether without laws without governours guided only by self interest without any sense of conscience justice honesty or honour He may search all the corners of America with a candle and lanthorn at noon day and after his fruitlesse paines return a non est invent us Yet all plants and living creatures are subject to degenerate and grow wild by degrees Suppose it should so happen that some remnant of men either chased by war or persecution or forced out of the habitable world for some crimes by themselves committed or being cast by shipwrack upon some deserts by long conversing with savage beasts lions beares wolves and tygers should in time become more bruitish it is his own epithite than the bruites themselves would any man in his right wits make that to be the universall condition of mankind which was onely the condition of an odd handfull of men or that to be the state of nature which was not the state of nature but an accidentall degeneration He that will behold the state of nature rightly must look upon the family of Adam and his posterity in their successive generations from the creation to the deluge and from the deluge untill Abrahams time when the first Kingdome of God by pact is supposed by T. H. to begin All this while which was a great part of that time the world hath stood from the creation lasted the Kingdom of God by nature as he phraseth it And yet in those daies there were lawes and government and more Kings in the world then there are at this present we find nine Kings engaged in one war and yet all their dominions but a narrow circuit of land And so it continued for divers hundreds of years after as we see by all those Kings which Joshua discomfited in the land of Canaan Every City had its own King The reason is evident The originall right of fathers of families was not then extinguished Indeed T. H. supposeth that men did spring out of the earth like Mushromes or Mandrakes That we may return again to the state of nature and consider men as if they were even now suddenly sprouted and grown out of the earth after the manner of Mushroms without any obligation of one to another But this supposion is both false and Atheistical howsoever it dropt from his pen. Mankind did not spring out of the earth but was created by God not many suddenly but one to whom all his posterity were obliged as to their father and ruler A second ground of his his errours is his grosse mistake of the laws of nature which he relateth most impersectly and most untruly A moral Heathen would blush for shame to see such a catalogue of the laws of nature First he maketh the laws of nature to be laws and no laws Just as a man and no man hit a bird and no bird with a stone and no stone on a tree and no tree not laws but theorems laws which required not performance but endeavours laws which were silent and could not be put in execution in the state of nature Where nothing was another mans and therefore a man could not steal where all things were common and therefore no adultery where there was a state of war and therefore it was lawfull to kill where all things were defined by a mans own judgement and therefore what honours he pleased to give unto his father and lastly
Church he gives sufficient grace to prevent hardnesse of heart if they will If man have lost his primogenious power if he will not make use of those supplies of grace which Gods mercy doth afford him that is his own fault But still here is no physical determination to evil here is no antecedent extrinsecal determination of any man to hardnesse of heart here is nothing but that which doth consist with true liberty Lastly he saith We make God onely to permit evil and to will good actions conditionally and consequently if man will them So we ascribe nothing at all to God in the causation of any action good or bad He erreth throughout God is the total cause of all natures and all essences In evil actions God is cause of the power to act of the order in acting of the occasion and of the disposition thereof to good In good actions freely done he is the author original of liberty he enableth by general influence he concurreth by speciall assistance and cooperation to the performance of them and he disposeth of them to good He doth not will that meerly upon condition which himself hath prescribed nor consequently which he himself hath antecedently ordained and instituted Now having cleared all his exceptions it remaineth next to examine how he reconcileth the first and the third sort of Texts The will of God saith he sometimes signifieth the word of God or the commandments of God that is his revealed will or the signs or significations of his will Sometimes it signifieth an internal act of God that is his counsel and decree By his revealed will God would have all men to be saved but by his internal will he would not By his revealed will he would have gathered Ierusalem not by his inward will So when God saith What could I have done more to my vineyard that is to be understood outwardly in respect of his revealed will What directions what laws what threatnings could have been used more And when he saith It came not into my mind the sense is to command it This I take to be the scope and summe of what he saith Thus far he is right that he distinguisheth between the signifying will of God and his good pleasure for which he is beholding to the Schooles And that he makes the revealed will of God to be the rule of all our actions And that many things happen against the revealed will of God but nothing against his good pleasure But herein he erreth grossely that he maketh the revealed will of God and his internal will to be contrary one to another as if God did say one thing and mean another or command one thing and necessitate men to do another which is the grossest dissimilation in the World Odi illos seu claustrâ—… erebi quicunque loquuâ—…nr Ore aliud tacitoque aliud sub pectore condunt He saith It is not Christian to think if God had a purpose to save all men that any could be damned because it were a sign of want of power to â—…ffect what he would It is true if God had an absolute purpose to work all mens salvation irresistibly against their wills or without themselves But God hath no such absolute will to save all men He loves his creatures wel but his own justice better And he that made men without themselves will not save them without themselves He co-operates with all his creatures according to their distinct natures which he hath given them with necessary Agents necessarily with free Agents freely God hath given men liberty to assent to saving truth They abuse it He hath proposed a condition under which they may be saved They reject it So he willeth their salvation by an antecedent will and their damnation by a consequent will which two wills in God or within the Divine Essence are no way distinct for they are the same with the Divine Essence But they are distinguished onely in order to the things willed of God Neither is there the least contradiction between them The one shews us what God would have us to do The other is what God himself will do The one looks upon man as he was created by God or as he should have been or might have been without his own fault The other looks upon man as he is with all circumstances The one regards onely the order of the causes and means designed by God for our salvation The other regards also the application or misapplication of these meanes by our selves In answering to these words Say not thou it is through the Lord I fell away Say not thou he hath caused me to erre He distinguisheth between say not and think not as if it were unlawful to say so but not unlawful to think so Curse not thy King saith Solomon no not in thy thought much lesse thy God Thought is free from man but not from God It is not honourable saith he to say so No more is it to think so It is not lawful saith he to say that any action can be done which God hath purposed shall not be done that is in his language which shall not actually come to passe in due time Our Saviour was of another mind Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my father and he shall presently give me more than twelve Legions of Angels He knew some things can be done which never will be done Next he proceedeth to touch those inconveniencies which flow from the opinion of universal necessity but very gently and sparingly Arts and armes and bookes and consultations and medicines c. are not superfluous though all events be necessary because the means are equally necessitated with the event Suppose it were so so much the worse This must needs utterly destroy all care and solicitude of free Agents He is a madman that will vexe and trouble himself and take care and consult about things that are either absolutely necessary or absolutely impossible as about the rising of the Sun or about the draining of the sea with a sieve Yet such are all events and all the means to effect them in his opinion either as absolutely necessary as the rising of the Sun or as absolutely impossible as the draining of the Ocean with a sieve What need he take care for a Medicine or a Physician who knows that if he must recover and if a Medicine or a Physician be a necessary means for his recovery the causes will infallibly provide him one and it may be a better Medicine or a better Physician than he should have used If a man may recover or not recover both means and care to use means do well But if a man must recover or not recover that is if the end and the means be both predetermined the meanes may be necessary but all care and sollicitude is altogether vain and superfluous But he telleth the Reader that this absurdity followeth as much from my opinion as from his For as I
not practically practical because it takes not effect by reason of the dissent of the will But whensoever the will shall give its free assent to the practical judgement of the understanding and the sentence of reason is approved by the acceptation of the will then the judgement of the understanding becomes practically practical Then the election is made which Philosophers do therefore call a consultative appetition Not that the will can elect contrary to the judgement of reason but that the will may suspend its consent and require a new deliberation and a new judgement and give consent to the later So we have this seeming piece of non-sense judicium intellectus practice practicum not onely translated but explained in English consonantly to the most received opinions of Classical Authours If he have any thing to say against it let him bring arguments not reproaches And remember how Memnon gave a railing souldier a good blow with his Lance saying I hired thee to fight and not to raile The absurdity which he imputeth to me in natural Philosophy That it is ridiculous to say that the object of the sight is the cause of seeing which maketh him sorry that he had the ill fortune to be ingaged with me in a dispute of this kind is altogether impertinent and groundlesse The cause of seeing is either the cause of the exercise of seeing or the cause of the specification of the act of seeing The object is the cause of the specification why we see this or that and not the cause of the exercise He that should affirm that the object doth not concurre in the causation of sight especially going upon those grounds that I do that the manner of vision is not by sending out beames from the eye to the object but by receiving the species from the object to the eye was in an errour indeed For in sending out the species there is action and in the reception of them passion But he that should affirm that the object is the cause of the exercise of sight or that it is that which maketh that which is facultate espectabile to be actu aspectabile or that it is that which judgeth of the colour or light or to come home to the scope of the place that the object doth necessitate or determine the faculty of sight or the sensitive soul to the exercise of seeing were in a greater errour Among many answers which I gave to that objection that the dictate of the understanding doth determine the will this was one That supposing it did determine it yet it was not naturally but morally not as an efficient by physical influence into the will but by proposing and representing the object which is not my single opinion but the received judgement of the best Schoole-men And in this sense and this sense onely I said truely that the understanding doth no more by proposing the object determine and necessitate the will to will than the object of sight doth determine and necessitate the sensitive soul to the actual exercise of seeing whereas all men know that the sensitive Agent notwithstanding any efficacy that is in the object may shut his eyes or turn his face another way So that which I said was both true and pertinent to the question But his exception is altogether impertinent and if it be understood according to the proper sense and scope of the place untrue And this is the onely Philosophical notion which hitherto I have found in his Animadversions Castigations of his Animadversions Num. 8. WHosoever desireth to be secure from T. H. his arguments may hold himself close to the question where he will find no great cause of fear All his contention is about terms Whatsoever there was in this Section which came home to the principal question is omitted and nothing minded but the meaning or signification of voluntary and spontaneous acts c. which were well enough understood before by all Scholars until he arose up like another Davus in the Comedy to trouble all things So he acts his part like those fond Musicians who spent so much time in tuning of their Instruments that there was none left to spare for their musick Which are free which are voluntary or spontaneous and which are necessary Agents I have set down at large whither to prevent further trouble I refer the Reader And am ready to make it good by the joynt testimonies of an hundred Classick Authours that this hath been the common and current language of Scholars for many Ages If he could produce but one Authour Stoick or Christian before himself who in the ventilation of this question did ever define liberty as he doth it were some satisfaction Zeno one of the fairest flowers in the Stoicks Garland used to boast that he sometimes wanted opinions but never wanted arguments He is not so lucky never wanting opinions ever wanting proofes Hitherto we have found no demonstrations either from the cause or from the effect few topical arguments or authorities that are pertinent to the question except it be of country men and common people with one comparison But to come to the Animadversions themselves He chargeth me or rather the Schoole-men for bringing in this strange word Spontaneous meerely to shift off the difficulty of maintaining our Tenet of free-will If spontaneous and voluntary be the same thing as we affirm and use them both indifferently I would gladly know how the one can be a subterfuge more than the other or why we may not use a word that is equipollent to his own word But to cure him of his suspition I answer That the same thing and the same terme of spontaneous both in Greek and Latine in the same sense that we take it as it is distinguished from free and just as we define it was used by Philosophers a thousand years before either I or any Schoole-men were borne as we find in Aristotle That is spontaneous or voluntary 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 whose beginning is in it self with knowledge of the end or knowing every thing wherein the action doth consist And the same Authour in the very next Chapter makes the very same difference between that which is voluntary and that which is free or eligible that we do His second exception is against these words Spontaneity consists in a conformity of the appetite either intellectual or sensitive to the object which words saith he do signifie that spontaneity is a conformity or likeness of the appetite to the object which to him soundeth as if I had said that the appetite is like the object which is as proper as if I had said that the hunger is like the meat And then he concludes triumphantly If this be his meaning as it is the meaning of the words he is a very fine Philosopher All his Philosophy consists in words If there had been an impropriety in the phrase as there is none this exception had been below an Athenian
every ordinance of man for the Lords sake Passive obedience is a mean between active obedience and rebellion To just laws which are the ordinances of right reason active obedience is due To unjust laws which are the ordinances of reason erring passive obedience is due Who shall hope to escape exception when this innocent difinition is quarrelled at I wish his own principles were half so loiall He saith I take punishment for a kind of revenge and therefore can never agree with him who takes it for nothing else but for a correction or for an example c. I take punishment in the same sense that all Authours both sacred and civil Divines and Philosophers Lawyers and generally all Classick Writers have ever taken it That is for an evill of passion which is inflicted for an evill of action So to passe by other Authours as sleighted by him the holy Scripture doth allwayes take it As wherefore doth a living man complain for the punishment of his sins And this is an heinous crime yea it is an iniquity to be punished by the Iudges And thou hast punished us lesse than our iniquities deserved Yea punishment doth not onely presuppose sin but the measure of punishment the degree of sin He that despised Moses law died without mercy of how much sorer punishment shall he be thought worthy who hath trampled under foot the son of God The Judge was commanded to cause the offender to be beaten according to the fault This truth we learned from the ferula's and rods which we smarted under when we were boyes And from the gibbets and axes and wheeles which are prepared for offenders Omnis paena si justa est peccati paena est That the punishment of Delinquents hath other ends also there is no doubt Nemo prudens punit quia peccatum est sed ne peccetur Punishment respects the Delinquent in the first place either to amend him or to prevent his doing of more mischief Secondly it regardeth the party suffering to repair his honour or preserve him from contempt or secure him for the time to come Lastly it respects other persons that the suffering of a few may be exâ—…mplary and an admonition to many But herein lies his errour That punishment is for nothing else but for correction or example God spared not the Angels that sinned but cast them down into Hell That was no correction And at the last Judgement Go ye cursed into everlasting fire there is neither correction nor example but in both instances there is punishment Whence it is apparent that some punishment especially divine doth look onely at the satisfaction of justice I gave five instances of unjust laws Pharaohs law to drown the Israelitish children Nebuchadnezars law to cast them who would not commit idolatry into the firey Furnace Darius his law that whosoever prayed to God for thirty dayes should be cast into the Den of Lions Ahashuerosh his law to destroy the Jewish Nation root and branch The Pharisees law to excommunicate all those who confessed Christ. To all these he answereth nothing in particular but in general he giveth this answer That they were just laws in relation to their subjects because all laws made by him to whom the people have given the Legislative power are the acts of every one of that people and no man can do injustice to himself But they were unjust actions in relation to God He feareth the Bishop will think this dâ—…scourse too subtile Nay rather the Bishop thinketh it too flat and dull Dii te Damasippe deaeque Tale judâ—…cium donent tenere I have answered his reason before that it is a Sophistical fallacy flowing from the accidental subordination of the causes A man may will the Law-giver and yet not will the Law That is one reply to his distinction Secondly I reply That when the people did give them the Legislative power they gave a Kingly power to preserve and protect their Subjects they meant not a power to drown them to burn them to cast them to the Lions to root them out from the earth by the means of unjust bloody tyrannical laws made on purpose to be pitfalls to catch Subjects Hear himself No man can transferre or lay down his right to save himself from death wounds and imprisonment If the right be not transferred in such cases then the law is groundlesse and unjust and made without the consent of the Subject They did not give they did not intend to give they could not give them a divine power or rather a power paramount above God To command idolatry to forbid all prayer and invocation of Gods holy Name And therefore though such laws do not warrant rebellion because it is better to die innocent than to live nocent yet that hindereth not but such laws are un-just both towards God and towards man Thirdly if these laws had been just in relation to the Subjects then the Subjects had been bound to obey them actively but they were not bound to obey them actively yea they were bound not to obey them The Midwives feared God and did not as the King of Egypt commanded them The three children answered Be it known unto thee O King that we will not serve thy gods nor worship thy golden image which thou hast set up The Parents of Moses are commended for their faith in saving Moses contrary to the Kings commandment Fourthly Subjects have given to their Soveraigns as well Judiciary as Legislative power over themselves but their Judiciary power doth not justifie their unjust acts or sentences even towards their Subjects Elias accused Ahab of murther And Elisha called his son Joram The son of a murderer Sauls injustice towards the Gibeonites did draw the guilt of blood upon his House And the Lord was not satisfied until the Gibeonites had received satisfaction He himself stileth Davids act towards Uriah murther Certainly murther is not just either towards God or towards man Therefore neither doth the Legislative power justifie their unjust lawes Fiftly of all Law-givers those who are placed freely by the people have the least pretence to such an absolute and universal resignation of all the property and interest of the Subject For it is to be presumed that the people who did chuse them had more regard to their own good than to the good of their Law-giver and did look principally at the protection of their own persons and the preservation of their own rights and did contract accordingly As we see in the most flourishing Monarchies of the World as that of the Medes and Persians They had their fundamental laws which were not in the single power of the present Law-giver to alter or violate by a new law or command without injustice If a pupill shall chuse a Tutour or Guardian for himself he investeth him with all his power he obligeth himself to make good all his acts Neverthelesse he may wrong
shew such another grant for the Lions to devour men When God said Whoso sheddeth mans blood by man shall his blood be shed for in the Image of God made he man Was it intended onely that his blood should be preserved for the Lions or do not their teeth deface Gods Image as much as mans weapons But the Lion had liberty to eat man long before He is mistaken the creatures did beare a more awful respect to the Image of God in man before his fall But mans rebellion to God was punished with their rebellion of the creatures to him He saith it was impossible for most men to have Gods license to use the creatures for their sustenance Why so as if all the world were not then comprised in the family of Noah Or as if the Commandments and dispensations of God were not then delivered from father to son by tradition as they were long after by writing He asketh how I would have been offended if he should have spoken of man as Pliny doth Then whom there is no living creature more wretched or more proud Not half so much as now Pliny taxeth onely the faults of men he vilifieth not their humane nature Most wretched What is that but an argument of the immortality of the soul God would never have created the most noble of his creatures for the most wretched being Or more proud that is then some men Corruptio optimi pessima The best things being corrupted turn the worst But he acknowledgeth two advantages which man hath above other creatures his tongue and his hand Is it possible that any man who believeth that he hath an immortal soul or that reason and understanding are any thing but empty names should so far forget himself and his thankfulnesse to God as to prefer his tongue and his hands before an immortal soul and reason Then we may well change the definition of a man which those old dunses the Philosophers left us Man is a reasonable creature into this new one Man is a prating thing with two hands How much more was the humane nature beholden to Tully an Heathen who said That man differed from other creatures in reason and speech Or to Ovid who stileth man Sanctius his animal mentâ—…sque capacius altae If he have no better luck in defending his Leviathan he will have no great cause to boast of his making men examples And now it seemeth he hath played his masterprise For in the rest of his Animadversions in this Section we find a low ebbe of matter Concerning consultations he saith nothing but this That my writing was caused physically antecedently extrinsecally by his answer In good time By which I see right well that he understandeth not what a physical cause is Did he think his answer was so Mathematical to compel or necessitate me to write No I confesse I determined my self And his answer was but a slender occasion which would have had little weight with me but for a wiser mans advice to prevent his over-weening opinion of his own abilities And then followeth his old dish of twice sodden colewortes about free and necessary and contingent and free to do if he will which we have had often enough already His distinction between seen and unseen necessity deserveth more consideration The meaning is that seen necessity doth take away consultation but unseen necessity doth not take away consultation or humane indeavours Unseen necessity is of two sorts either it is altogether unseen and unknown either what it is or that it is Such a necessity doth not take away consultation or humane endeavours Suppose an office were privately disposed yet he who knoweth nothing of the disposition of it may be as solicitous and industrious to obtain it as though it were not disposed at all But the necessity which he laboureth to introduce is no such unseen unknown necessity For though he know not what the causes have determined particularly or what the necessity is yet he believeth that he knoweth in general that the causes are determined from eternity and that there is an absolute necessity The second sort of unseen necessity is that which is unseen in particular what it is but it is not unknown in general that it is And this kind of unseen necessity doth take away all consultation and endeavours and the use of means as much as if it were seen in particular As supposing that the Cardinals have elected a Pope in private but the declaration of the person who is elected is kept secret Here is a necessity the Papacy is full and this necessity is unseen in particular whilest no man knoweth who it is Yet for as much as it is known that it is it taketh away all indeavours and consultations as much as if the Pope were publickly enthroned Or suppose a Jury have given in a privy veredict no man knoweth what it is until the next Court-day yet it is known generally that the Jurers are agreed and the veredict is given in Here is an unseen necessity Yet he who should use any further consultations or make further applications in the case were a fool So though the particular determination of the causes be not known to us what it is yet if we know that the causes are particularly determined from eternity we know that no consultation or endeavour of ours can alter them But it may be further objected that though they cannot alter them yet they may help to accomplish them It was necessary that all who sailed with St. Paul should be saved from shipwrack Yet St. Paul told them that except the shipmen did abide in the ship they could not be saved So though the event be necessarily determined yet consultation or the like means may be necessary to the determination of it I answer the question is not whether the means be necessary to the end for that is agreed upon by all parties But the question is to whom the ordering of the means which are necessary to the production of the event doth properly belong whether to the first cause or to the free Agent If it belong to the free Agent under God as we say it doth then it concerneth him to use consultations and all good endeavours as requisite means to obtain the desired end But if the disposition of the means belong soly and wholly to God as he saith it doth and if God have ordered all means as well as ends and events particularly and precisely then it were not onely a thanklesse and superfluous office to consult what were the fittest means to obtain an end when God hath determined what must be the onely means and no other but also a saucinesse and a kind of tempting of God for a man to intrude himself into the execution of God Almighties decrees whereas he ought rather to cast away all care and all thought on his part and resign himself up wholly to the disposition of the second causes which act nothing but by
conformity or an adaequation of the sign to the thing said which we call Veracity When one thing is commanded publickly and the same is hindered privately and the party so hindered is punished for not doing that which was impossible for him to do Where is the veracity where is the conformity and adaequation of the sign to the thing said I dare not tell Mr. Hobbes that he understandeth not these things but I fear it very much If he do his cause is bad or he is but an ill Advocate Next to reconcile the goodnesse of God with his principles he answereth first to the thing That living creatures of all sorts are often in torments as well as men which they could not be without the will of God I know no torments of the other creatures but death and death is a debt to nature not an act of punitive justice The pangs of a violent death are lesse than of a natural besides the benefit that proceedeth thence for the sustenance of men for which the creatures were created See what an Argument here is for all his answers are recriminations or exceptions from brute beasts to men from a debt of nature to an act of punitive justice from a sudden death to lingring torments ut sentiant se mori from a light affliction producing great good to endlesse intolerable pains producing no good but onely the satisfaction of justice Then to the phrase of Gods delighting in torments He answereth That God delighteth not in them It is true God is not capable of passions as delight or grief but when he doth those things that men grieving or delighting do the Scriptures by an anthropopathy do ascribe delight or grief unto him Such are his exceptions not to the thing but to the phrase because it is too Scholastical or too elegant I see he liketh no tropes or figures But in all this here is not one word of answer to the thing it self That that which is beyond the cruelty of the most bloody men is not agreeable to the Father of Mercies to create men on purpose to be tormented in endlesse flames without their own faults And so contrary to the Scriptures that nothing can be more wherein punishment is called Gods strange Work his strange Act For God made not death neither hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living but ungodly men with their works and words called it unto them It this place seem to him Apocryphall he may have twenty that are Canonicall As I live saith the Lord God I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked but that he turn from his way and live Turn ye turn ye from your evil wayes for why will ye die O house of Israel That his opinion destroyeth the justice of God by making him punish others for his own acts is so plain that it admitteth no defence And if any further corroboration were needful we have his own confession That there can be no punishment but for crimes that might have been lest undone Yet he keepeth a shuffling of terms afflictions and bruit creatures which by his own confession are not capable of moral goodnesse or wickednesse and consequently not subject to punishment and quite taking away the proportion between sin and punishment onely to make a shew of answering to them who do not or cannot weigh what is said Among guilty persons to single out one to be punished for examples sake is equall and just that the punishment may fall upon few fear to offend upon all But to punish innocent persons for examples sake is onely an example of great injustice That which he calleth my opinion of the endlesse tormenrs of hell I learned from Christ himself Go ye cursed into everlasting fire and from my creed When Origen and some others called the mercifull Doctours did indeavour to possesse the Church with their opinion of an universall restitution of all creatures to their pristine estate after sufficient purgation it was rejected by the Church Without doubt a sin against infinite majesty and an aversion from infinite goodnesse do justly subject the offenders to infinite punishment But he talketh as though God were obliged to do acts of grace and to violate his own ordinances that he might save men without their own wills God loves his own creatures well but his own justice better Whereas I shewed That this opinion destroyeth the omnipotence of God by making him the authour or cause of sinne and of all defects which are the fruits of impotence not of power He distinguisheth between the cause of sinne and the authour of sinne granting that God is the cause of sinne He will say That this opâ—…nion makes him God the cause of sinne But does not the Bishop think him the cause of all actions And are not sins of commission actions Is murther no action Doth not God himself say there is no evill in the City which I have not done And was not murther one of those evils But he denieth that God is the authour of sinne that is God doth not own it God doth not give a warrant for it God doth not command it This is down-right blasphemy indeed When he took away the devill yet I did not suspect that he would so openly substitute God Almighty in his place Simon Magus held that God was the cause of sinne but his meaning was not so bad He only blameth God for not making man impeccable The Manichees and Marcionites did hold that God was the cause of sinne but their meaning was not so bad they meant it not of their good God whom they called light but of their bad God whom they termed darknesse But T. H is not afraid to charge the true God to be the very acter of all sinne When the Prophet asketh Shall there be evill in a City and the Lord hath not done it He speaketh expressely of evill of punishment not at all of the evill of sinne Neither will it avail him in the least that he maketh not God to be the authour of sinne For first it is worse to be the physicall or naturall cause of sinne by acting it than to be the morall cause of sinne by commanding it If a man be the Authour of that which he commandeth much more is he the authour of that which he acteth To be an authour is lesse than to be an actour A man may be an authour by perswasion or by example as it is said of Vespasian that he being antiquo cultu victuque was unto the Romans praecipuus astricti moris author by his observing of the ancient dyet of the country and the old fashion of apparrel He was unto the Romans the principall authour of their frugality Hath not he done God Almighty good service to acquit him from being the authour of sinne which is lesse and to make him to be the proper cause of all sin which is more Thus to maintain fate he hath deserted the
things which have a reall being do depend upon God for their being for their making for their conservation And therefore when we speak of any thing that is without the Deity we do not intend that any thing is without the Essence or the Presence or the Power or the circumference of it God is a Circle whose Center is every where the Circumference no where But by the works of God without himself we understand the Creation and the Government of the World which are not terminated in the Deity it self but in the creatures which are from God as their efficient and for God as their end and in God or thorough God in respect of their necessary and perpetual dependence upon him who is the Original Essence of all things I am hath sent me unto you yet they are not of God as particles of the Divine Essence nor in God in that sense wherein we use to say Whatsoever is in God is God And so they are his works ad extra without the Deity To make good the second part of his censure that it was untruly said he produceth nothing but his old threedbare argument taken from the prescience of God which hath been answered over and over Neither the prescience of God nor the will of God upon prescience do imply any more than a meer hypothetical necessity which will do his cause no good In the conclusion of this Section he confesseth That God doth not all things that he can do if he will but he saith God cannot will that which he hath not willed from eternity understanding by eternity an everlasting succession whereas in eternity nothing is past or to come I have shewed often in these Castigations the falsity uselessenesse and contradiction of this absurd silly senselesse distinction in respect of men But being here applied by him to God nothing can be imagined more absurd for to will efficaciously and to do in God are the same thing What he doth he doth by his will To imagine that many things are free to God to do which are not free to him to will sheweth that his meditations upon this Subject were either none at all or worth nothing But it shall susfice for the present to shew how absurd and how unappliable this exposition is to the two places by me produced John Baptist told the Jews that they might not flatter themselves with this that they were the posterity of Abraham that though all they should prove impenitent and unbelievers yet God was able to raise up children to Abraham of stones If it were impossible for God to will the doing of any such thing How was this truly said And how could this afford any supply to the seed of Abraham in case his carnal posterity should continue obstinate In the other place S. Peter drawing his sword in defence of his Master Christ reprehended him and told him that he could have a better guard to secure him from all the attempts of the Jews if it pleased him not to lay down his liâ—…e freely Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father and he shall give me presently more than twelve legions of Angels He saith not I can if I would but positively I can Neither speaketh he of remote possibilities but he shall give me presently Christ would shew by these words that if it had not been his own will freely to suffer for the Redemption of mankind he could have prayed to his Father and he would have sent him a Guard of more than twelve Legions of Angels and that presently without delay If it was impossible for God to will any such thing then our Saviours plea to S. Peter was but a vain pretence and had nothing of reality in it If T. H. regarded the honour and veracity of Christ he would not impose such a jugling delusory sense upon his clear assertion As if our Saviour should have said Peter I have no need of thy endeavours to defend me for I could pray to my Father he would immediately send me a Guard of twelve Legions of Angels But to say the truth he is not willing to do it and to say the whole truth it is not possible for him to be willing Castigations of the Animadversions Num. 19. HE professeth that he never said the will is compelled but doth agree with the rest of the World that it is not compelled But to let us see that he understandeth not what the World meaneth in saying the will is not compelled twice or thrice in the same page he maketh it to be compelled Many things saith he may compel a man to do an action in producing the will If a man can be compelled to will then the will can be compelled This appeareth yet more plainly a little after where he maketh the casting of ones goods into the sea in a storm to be a voluntary free elective act And yet he confesseth that terrour was a necessary cause of the election To which if we adde what he saith in his answer A man is then onely said to be compelled when fear maketh him willing to it it appeareth that according to his grounds it is a compulsory action also If voluntary actions may be compulsory actions then the will may be compelled To help to beare off this blow he distinguisheth between the compulsion of the will and the compulsion of the voluntary Agent denying the former but acknowledging the later That is not a compulsion of the will but of the man The very same he hath again in these words The necessitation of the will is the same thing with the compulsion of the man If this be not plain Jargon and Bohu as he phraseth it let him tell me what is the compulsion of a man to will but the compulsion of his will Whether by the will he understand the soul as it willeth or the faculty of the will or the act of willing every way he that compelleth a man to will compelleth his will Let him call it what he please either to compell a man to will or to compell the will by his leave it is a grosse contradiction for to compell implyeth reluctance and opposition and to will implyeth inclination and appetition To necessitate the will as he doth is to compell the will so far as the will in the elicite acts of it is capable of compulsion That is properly said to be compelled which hath its beginning from an extrinsecal cause that which suffereth contributing nothing to it but resisting as much as he can But he hath devised a new improper kind of compulsion which is caused onely by fear which is not properly a compulsion and such as it is common to many other causes with fear As to persuasion So Sauls servants compelled him to eat To command So the drinking was according to law none did compell To occasion So S. Paul saith I am become a foole in glorying ye have compelled me I passe by his
teeth though he cannot bite and leaving counterfeiting in hope of quarter to himself as a person much more capable of that design the next new Subject that presenteth it self is Whether there be any mixt actions partly voluntary partly unvoluntary He denieth it positively upon this ground That one and the same action can never be both voluntary and unvoluntary I answer first to his argument That voluntary and unvoluntary are not opposed contradictorily so as to admit no mean but privatively which do admit a mean as the dawning of the day or the twilight is a mean between light and darknesse when it may be truly said it is partly light and partly dark Melancthon hath an excellent rule to this purpose Privative opposita nequeunt esse in eodem subjecto gradibus excellentibus Privative opposites cannot be in the same subject in eminent degrees but in remisse degrees they may As to avoid importunity a man may do a free act with reluctance All reluctance is a degree of unwillingnesse When Nero in the beginning of his Quinquennium was to sign the condemnation of a malefactor he used to wish that he had never learned to write to shew that though he did it willingly to satisfie Justice for otherwise he might have pardoned him yet he did it unwillingly in his own nature And with this Aristotle agreeth fully There are some actions which are neither properly voluntary nor unvoluntary but of a middle kind or mixed actions as things done for fear of a greater evil or for some honest cause And he giveth two instances This is one of a man who throws his goods into the sea willingly in respect of the end to save his life but the action being simply considered in it self unwillingly The other instance of one commanded to do some dishonest act by a Tyrant who hath his parents and children in his power And so he concludeth truly That they are mixt actions but participate more of the voluntary than of the unvoluntary Whereas I urged that election of one out of more could not consist with determination to one he answereth That a man forced to prison may chuse whether he will walk upon his feet or be haled upon the ground Which as it is false as I have shewed in my former defence so it is wholly wide from his purpose There is no doubt but he who is necessitated in one particular may be left free in another as he who is appointed the time and place for a Duel may chuse his weapon But in that particular wherein he is necessitated he cannot chuse If they will tie him to an horsetaile he must be tied If they will fasten him to a sled and draw him to prison he must be drawn There cannot possibly be any election where there is and so far as there is an antecedent determination to one He disliketh the terme of rational will saying There is nothing rational but God Angels and men I hope he is not in earnest Surely he believeth there is a reasonable soul or otherwise he deserts his Athanasian creed that is The soul of a rational man as a will is the will of a rational man Whether he make the will to be a faculty of the reasonable soul or to be the reasonable soul as it willeth I am indifferent As the appetite of a sensitive creature is called the sensitve appetite So the appetite of a rational or intellectual creature is called the rational or intellectual will He saith he would not have excepted against this expression but that every where I speak of the will and other faculties as of men or spirits in mens bellies I do not confine the reasonable soul to the belly but it is a spirit in a mans body If it be not let him say what it is The will is either a faculty of the reasonable soul or which is all one the reasonable soul it self as it dischargeth the duties of such a faculty Sometimes he confesseth as much himself Indeed as the will is a faculty or power of a mans soul so to will is an act of it according to that power He jesteth at my five terrible things saying I had no more reason for five than fifteen It seemeth that when he should have been reading Authors he was meditating upon a dry Summer Let him consult with Aristotle and his Expositors That which determined the three children was no antecedent extrinsecal cause but conscience and their own judgement which dictated to them their duty to their God He seemeth to be troubled at sundry passages in my former defence as exâ—…mpting Subjects from active obedience to unjust laws which he saith makes it impossible for any nation in the world to preserve it self from Civil wars Whether was it want of memory or rather subtilty in him among these passages to omit that Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God judge ye It is hard that we who have formerly been accused to maintain blind obedience should now be charged with seditious principles which our souls abhor But we sail securely between this Scylla and that Charybdis by steering the ancient and direct course of passive obedience We justifie no defensive armes against a Soveraign Prince We allow no Civil wars for conscience sake When we are persecuted for not complying with the unlawful commands of a lawful Soveraign we know no other remedy but to suffer or to flee according to that memorable example of the Thebaean Legion consisting wholy of Christians of unmatchable valour and such as might in probability have defended themselves from the Emperours fury Yet when Maximian commanded them to sacrifice to Idols they refused suffering every tenth man of them to be slain without a blow smitten And when the bloody Emperour came among them again to renew his command and to see them decimated the second time they cryed out with one voice Cognosce O Imperator c. Know O Emperour that we are all Christians we submit our bodies to thy power but our free souls flee unto our Saviour Neither our known courage nor desperation it self hath armed us against thee because we chuse rather to die innocents than to live nocents Thou shalt find our hands empty of weapons but our breast armed with the Catholick Faith And so having power to resist yet they suffered themselves without resistance to be cut in pieces They are T. H. his own principles which make no difference between just and unjust power between a sword given by God and a sword taken by man which do serve to involve Nations in Civil Wars He saith it seemeth that I call compulsion force and he calleth it a fear of force I called it as all the World called it and as it hath been defined in the Schooles for two thousand years Yet I do not believe that it is alwayes necessary to all sorts of compulsion that the force be actually
aut faciendum quod cognoscit the understanding extended to injoy or do that which it knoweth it must needs be that the more reason the lesse passion the lesse reluctance and consequently the more liberty He saith When we mark not the force that moves us we think that it is not causes but liberty that produceth the action I rendred him thus The ignornnce of the true causes and their power is the reason that we ascribe the effect to liberty Where lieth the fault that which he calleth force and strength I call power and for that which moves us I say causes as he himself doth exexpresse himself in the same place Where I say the will causeth he saith the man chuseth As if there were any difference between these two the eye seeth and the man seeth This and a confounding of voluntas with volitio the faculty of willing with the act of willing and a young suckling contradiction which he hath found out That the will hath power to refuse what he willeth that is before it have willed it not after is the substance of this Animadversion which deserve no other answer but that a man should change his risibility into actual laughter I produced two reasons to prove that true liberty is a freedom not only from compulsion but from necessity The former drawn from the nature of election or the act of the will which is allwayes inter plura the later which I called a new Argument because it had not formerly been touched in this Treatise taken from the nature of the faculty of the will or of the soul as it willeth which is not capable of any other compulsion but necessitation And if it be physically necessitated it is thereby acquitted from all guilt and the fault transferred upon those causes that did necessitate it This argument indeed began with a distinction but proceeded to a demonstration which was reduced by me into form in my defence to which he hath given no shew of satisfaction either in his first answer or in these Animadversions except it be a concedo omnia or a granting of the conclusion The same ground which doth warrant the names of Tyrant Praemunire Sunday Monday Tuesday that is Use Quem penes arbitrium est vis norma loquendi doth likewise justifie these generally received terms of the Elicite and Imperate Acts of the will there being scarcely one Authour who hath written upon this subject in Latine that doth not use them and approve them In the councel of Dort which he himself mentioneth he may find this truth positively maintained that voluntas elicit actum suum Where he may likewise find what morall perswasives or motives are if he have a desire to learn Allthough he be convicted that it followeth from his principles That God is the cause of all sin in the world yet he is loath to say so much for that is an unseemly phrase to say that God is the cause of sin because it soundeth so like a saying that God sinneth yea it is even as like it as one egge is like another or rather it is not like it for it is the very same Nullum simile est idem He that is the determining cause of sin in others sinneth himself It is as well against the eternall law that is the rule of justice which is in God himself to make another to sin as to sin Yet though he will not avow such an unseemly phrase That God is the cause of sin Yet he doth indeavour to prove it by four texts of holy Scripture which are alltogether impertiuent to his purpose The first is that of the Prophet Amos Shall there be evill in a City and the Lord hath not done it But that is clearly understood of the evill of punishment not of the evill of sin To the three other places That the Lord said unto Shimei curse David and that the Lord put a lying spirit into the mouth of Ahabs Prophets And that of Rehoboams not hearkning to the people the Reader may find a satisfactory answer formerly But because he seemeth to ground much upon those words which are added to the last place for the cause was from the Lord conceiving some singular virtue to lie in them and an ovation at least to be due unto himself I will not say least the Bishop exclaim against me applauding himself like the flie upon the Cart-wheel See what a dust I do raise I will take the liberty to tell him further That there is nothing of any cause of sin in the text but of a cause of Jeroboams advancement as he might have perceived plainly by the words immediately following The cause was from the Lord that he might perform his saying which the Lord spake by Ahijah the Shilonite unto Ieroboam the son of Nebat Which saying was this I will rent the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon and will give ten tribes to thee So he hath produced an evil effect of punishment for an evil effect of sin and a cause of advancement for a cause of sin and a permitting or ordering or disposing of sin for a necessitating or determining to sin Yet he produceth six witnesses to prove that liberty is not opposed to necessity but to compulsion Luther Zanchy Bucer Calvin Moulin and the Synod of Dort First Reader I desire thee to judge of the partiality of this man who rejecteth all humane authority in this cause as he hath reason for it were an easie thing to overwhelme and smother him and his cause with testimonies of Councels Fathers Doctours of all Ages and Communions and all sorts of Classick Authours and yet to seek for protection under the authority of a few Neoterick Writers A double weight and a double measure are an abomination Aut haec illis sunt habenda aut illa cum his amittenda sunt Harum duarum conditionum nunc utram malis vide If he will reap the benefit of humane authority he must undergoe the inconvenience also Why may he use the testimony of Calvine against me in this cause and I may not make use of the testimonies of all the Ancients Greek and Latine against him whom Calvine himself confesseth to have been for liberty against necessiry Semper apud Latinos liberi arbitrii nomen extitit Graecos vero non puduit multo arrogantius usurpare vocabulum siquidem 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 dixerunt acsi potest as suiipsius penes hominem fuisset But I am able to give him that advantage in this cause Secondly a man may see by his citing of these testimonies that he hath taken them up upon trust without ever perusing them in the Authours themselves I demand therefore whether he will be tried by his own witnesses in this case in difference between him and me that is concerning universal necessity in natural civil and external actions by reason of a necessary connextion of second causes and a natural determination of
successively until the motive power cease altogether before the hundredth or it may be the thousandth part of the water in the tun be moved As we see in a stone thrown upwards the motion is swifter or slower of longer or of lesser continuance according to the degree of the first impression of force and the figure of the thing cast upwards which ceasing by continued diminution the motion ceaseth Violent motioris are vehement in the beginning remisse in the middle and cease in the end Lastly I answer That the case of a great tun and the whole World is not the same The World is too large a Sphere and exceedeth the activity of poor little weak creatures which are not able to leave such an impression of might as should move upwards to the convex superficies of Heaven and downwards to the center of the Earth and round about to the extremities of the VVorld If this were true the flie might say in earnest See what a dust I do raise It hath been given out that the burning of our heathes in England did hurt their vines in France This had been strange yet not so strange as his paradox That the least motions that are are communicated to the whole World But wise men looked upon this pretence as a meer scare-crow or made dragon The hurt it did was nearer home to destroy the young moorepowtes and spoile some young Burgesses game Castigations of the Animadversions Num. 22. HE cannot imagine how the question Whether outward objects do necessitate or not necessitate the will can any way be referred to moral Philosophy That is his fault If the objects do necessitate the will they take away both virtue and vice that is moral good and moral evil which consist in pre-election and cannot stand with antecedent necessitation to one To reform his errour let him consult with Aristotle Those things that are fair and pleasant do seem to be violent after a sort because being without us they move and necessitate Agents to act with their beauty and delight but it is not so What he addeth that the Principles of moral philosophy are the laws is an absurd supposititious obtrusion of the municipal law in place of the law of right reason which errour hath formerly been sufficiently refelled And to his horse that is lame from some cause that was not in his power I answer That the lamenesse is a natural or accidental defect in the horse but to instance in an horse as a fit subject of virtue or vice is a moral defect in him If he desire to speak to the purpose he must leave such impertinencies In the next Animadversion I meet with nothing but a meer sawing of the wind or an altercation about nothing All the difference between him and me is concerning an antecedent necessity but of a necessity of consequence that when a thing is produced it must necessarily be so as it is there can be no-question between us He himself confesseth as much If the Bishop think that I hold no other ne cessity than that which is expressed in that old foolish rule VVhatsoever is when it is is necessarily so as it is he understandeth me not And he confesseth that the necessity which he maintaineth is an antecedent necessity derived from the beginning of time And yet neverthelesse a great part of that altercation which he makes in these Animadversions is about such a necessity Socrates confesseth that naturally he had vitious inclinations This is no more than a proclinity to evil If by his own condescension he fall into sin this is but an hypothetical necessity yet he maketh it an antecedent necessity Socrates by his good indeavours reformeth his vitious propensions and acquireth the contrary habits or virtues This is but an hyothetical necessity yet he pretendeth it to be antecedent Lastly Socrates by the help of these habits which he himself had acquired doth freely do virtuous actions Still here is no necessity but consequents and still he pretendeth to Antecedent Either saith he these habits do necessitate the will or the will followeth not If these habits or somewhat else do not necessitate the will it may follow freely But saith he If they do onely facilitate men to do such acts then what they do they do not I deny his consequence acquired habits are not solitary but social and adjuvant causes of virtuous actions His next errour is yet more grosse making the person of the Preacher and not the sound of his voice to be the object of hearing Adding that the Preachers voice is the same thing with the hearing and a phansie of the hearer Thus as commonly their errours spring from confusion he confoundeth the images of sounds with sounds themselves What then is the report of a Canon or the sound of a Trumpet turned to a meer phansie By the same reason he may say that the Preacher himself is nothing but a meer phansie There is as much ground for the one as for the other If he go on in this manner he will move me beyond smiling to laugh outright In what sense the object of sight is the cause of sight and in what sense it is not the cause of sight I have shewed distinctly Here he setteth down another great paradox as he himself stileth it out of gallantry That in all the sensâ—… the object is the Agent If he had not said the Agent which signifieth either the sole Agent or the Principal Agent but onely an Agent we had accorded so far But the Principal Agent in all the senses is the creature indowed with sense or the sensitive soul perceiving and judging of the object by the proper Organ The Preachers voice and the Auditos hearing have two distinct subjects otherwise speaking should be hearing and hearing speaking I conclude this Castigation with the authority of as good a Philosopher as himself That it is ridiculous to think external things either fair or delightful to be the causes of humane actions and not rather him who is easily taken with such objects In the later part of this Animadversion his errours are greater and more dangerous than in the former He affirmeth that the will is produced generated and formed in such sort as accidents are effected in a corporeal subject and yet it the will cannot be moved As if generation and augmentation and alteration were not kinds of motion or mutation But the last words because it goeth not from place to place do shew plainly that he acknowledgeth no motion but local motion What no other natural motion but onely local motion no metaphorical motion that were strange We read in holy Scripture of those who have been moved with fear moved with envy moved with compassion moved with choler moved by the Holy Ghost In all these there is no local motion Outward persuasives inward suggestions are all motions God moveth a man to good by his preventing grace The devil moveth a man
if that which hath causes I leave it to necessity So where I say That reason cannot give a positive sentence he maketh me say That reason can give no sentence There is a great difference between these two The Judges name three men to the Sherifwick of of a County Here is a nomination or judgement but not yet positive The King picks one of these three then the nomination or judgement is positive So reason representeth to the free Agent or the free Agent judgeth in his understanding three means to obtain one end either not examining or not determining any advantage which one mean hath above another Here is an indefinite judgement for three good meanes though it be not positive for any one more than the rest In this case the will or the free Agent chuseth one of these three meanes as good without any further examination which is best Reason is the root of liberty in representing what is good even when it doth give no positive or determinate sentence what is best I am neither so vain to think there is any thing that hath a being which hath not causes nor so stupid on the other side as to think that all causes are necessary causes Chance proceedeth neither from the want nor from the ignorance but from the accidental concurrence of causes His next charge is That it is false that actions may be so equally circumstantiated that reason cannot give a positive that is a determinate sentence Yet he confesseth that in these things elected there may be an exact equality If he did not confesse it it is most evident in it self as appeareth in my former instance of two plaisters of equal virtue Or if he please in two peices of gold of the same stampe weight and alloy sent to one man upon condition to chuse the one and leave the other He judgeth them both to be good and is not such a foole as they are who say that he would hang in a perpetual equilibrium and could chuse neither for want of determination which was best Therefore he chuseth one of them without more to do But he saith There may be circumstances in him that is to elect that he do not spend time in vain or lose both It is true there are reasons to move him to elect because they are both good but there are no reasons to move him to elect the one rather than the other this rather than that or that rather than this but only the wil of him that electeth all things being so equally circumstantiated that reason can give sentence for them both as good but not for the one positively and determinately as better than the other Whatsoever is good is the object of the will though it be not alwayes the best I said that reason doth not weigh every individual object or action to the uttermost grain He pleadeth in answer True but does it therefore follow a man gives no sentence The will may follow the dictate of the judgement whether the man weigh or not weigh all that might be weighed I acknowledge it but he mistaketh the scope of my argument The lesse exactly that reason doth weigh actions or objects the lesse exactly it doth determine the free Agent but leaveth him as in a case of indifferency or having no considerable difference to chuse what he will as being not much material or not at all material whether he chuse the one part or the other Passions and affections saith he prevaile often against wisdom but not against the judgement or dictate of the understanding The will of a peevish passionate foole doth no lesse follow the dictate of his nuderstanding than the will of a wiser man He must pardon me passions prevaile not onely against wisdom but against the dictates of reason It was Medeas passion which dictated to her that to revenge her self upon her husband was more eligible than the lives of her children Her reason dictated the contrary Aliudque cupido Mens aliud suadet vidio meliora proboque Deteriora sequor It was St. Peters feare not his judgement which dictated to him to deny his Master Every man is tempted when he is drawn aside of his own lust not of his intellectual judgement Jacob did not curse his misunderstanding of Simeon and Levi but their passion Cursed be their anger for it was fierce and their wrath for it was cruel As the law is silent among armes so is reason silent among passions Passion is like an unruly passenger which thrusts reason away from the rudder for the time Therefore they use to say that the dominion of reason or of a reasonable man over his sensitive appetite is not despotical like the government of a Master over his slave but political like that of a Magistrate over the people which is often disturbed by seditious tumults and rebellions Passion is an eclipse of reason a short madnesse the metamorphosis of a man into a wild beast that is goared which runneth upon every thing that comes in her way without consideration or like a violent torrent descending down impetuously from a steep hill which beareth down all respects before it Divine and humane Whilest passion is at the height there is no room for reason nor any use of the dictates of the understanding the minde for the time being like the Cyclopian cave where no man heard what another said The last part of this Section is not concerning the fortunes of Asia but the weighing of an horse-load of feathers a light and trivial subject wherein there is nothing but a contempt of Schoole-termes without any ground bold affirmations without any proof and a continued detraction from the dignity of the humane nature as if a reasonable man were not so considerable as a Jack-daw When God created man he made him a mean Lord under himself to have dominion over all his creatures and put all things in subjection under his feet And to fit him for this command he gave him an intellectual soul. But T. H. maketh him to be in the disposition of the second causes sometimes as a sword in a mans hand a meer passive instrument sometimes like a toppe that is lashed hither and thither by boyes sometimes like a foot-ball which is kicked hither and thither by every one that comes nigh it and here to a pair of scales which are pressed down now one way then another way by the weight of the objects Surely this is not that man that was created by God after his own Image to be the Governour of the World and Lord and Master of the creatures This is some man that he hath borrowed out of the beginning of an Almanack who is placed immoveable in the middest of the twelve Signes as so many second causes If he offer to stir Aries is over his head ready to push him and Taurus to goare him in the neck and Leo to teare out his heart and Sagittarius to shoote an arrow
signifie the same thing in this place Onely to permit is opposed to acting to permit barely is opposed to disposing There are many things which God doth not act there is nothing which God doth not dispose He acteth good permitteth evil disposeth all things both good and evill He that cutteth the banks of a River is the active cause that the water floweth out of the Channel He that hindreth not the stream to break the banks when he could is the permissive cause And if he make no other use of the breaking out it is nuda permissio bare permission but if he disposeth and draweth the water that floweth out by furrowes to water the Medows then though he permit it yet he doth not barely permit it but disposeth of it to a further good So God onely permitteth evil that is he doth it not but he doth not barely permit it because he disposeth it to good Here he would gladly be nibling at the questions Whether universals be nothing but onely words Nothing in the World saith he is general but the significations of words and other signes Hereby affirming unawares that a man is but a word and by consequence that he himself is but a titular and not a real man But this question is alltogether impertinent in this place We do not by a general influence understand some universal substance or thing but an influence of indeterminate power which may be applyed either to good or evill The influence is a singular act but the power communicated is a general that is an indeterminate power which may be applied to acts of several kinds If he deny all general power in this sense he denieth both his own reason and his common sense Still he is for his old errour That eternity is a successive everlasting duration But he produceth nothing for it nor answereth to any thing which I urged against it That the eternity of God is God himself that if eternity were an everlasting duration then there should be succession in God then there should be former and later past and to come and a part without a part in God then all things should not be present to God then God should lose something namely that which is past and acquire something newly namely that which is to come and so God who is without all shadow of change should be mutable and change every day To this he is silent and silence argueth consent He saith Those many other wayes which are proposed by Divines for reconciling eternal prescience with liberty and contingency are proposed in vain if they mean the same liberty and contingency that I do for truth and errour can never be reconciled I do not wonder at his shew of confidence The declining sun maketh longer shadows and when a Merchant is nearest breaking he maketh the fairest shew to preserve his reputation as long as may be He saith he knoweth the loadstone hath no such attractive power I fear shortly he will not permit us to say that a plaister or a plantine leaf draweth What doth the loadstone then if it doth not draw He knoweth that the iron cometh to it or it to the iron Can he not tell whether This is worse than drawing to make iron come or go By potentiality he understandeth power or might Others understand possibility or indetermination Is not he likelely to confute the Schoolmen to good purpose Whereas I said that God is not just but justice it self not eternall but eternity it self He telleth me That they are unseemly words to be said of God he will not say blasphemous and Atheistical that God is not just that he is not eternal I do not fear that any one Scholler or any one understanding Christian in the World should be of his mind in this If I should spend much time in proving of such known truths approved and established by the Christian World I should shew my self almost as weak as he doth shew himself to talk of such things as he understandeth not in the least to the overthrowing of the nature of God and to make him no God If his God have accidents ours hath none If his God admit of composition and division ours is a simple essence When we say God is not just but justice not wise but wisdom doth he think that we speak of moral virtues or that we derogate or detract from God No we ascribe unto him a transcendental justice and wisdom that is not comprehended under our categories nor to be conceived perfectly by humane reason But why doth he not attempt to answer the reasons which I brought That that which is infinitely perfect cannot be further perfected by accidents That God is a simple essence and can admit no kind of composition That the infinite essence of God can act sufficiently without faculties That it consisteth not with divine perfection to have any passive or receptive powers I find nothing in answer to these but deep silence Attributes are names and justice and wisdom are moral virtues but the justice and wisdom and power and eternity and goodnesse and truth of God are neither names nor moral virtues but altogether do make one eternal essence wherein all perfections do meet in an infinite degree It is well if those words of our Saviour do escape him in his next Animadversions I am the truth Or St. Paul for making Deum and Deitatem God and the Godheads or Deity to be all one Or Solomon for personating God under the name of Wisdom in the abstract To prove eternity to be no successive duration but one indivisible moment I argued thus The divine substance is indivisible but eternity is the divine substance In answer to this in the first place he denyeth the Major That the divine substance is indivisible If he had not been a professed Christian but a plain Stoick I should not have wondred so much at this answer for they held that God was corporall If the divine substance be not indivisible then it is materiate then it is corporall then it is corruptible then the Anthropomorphites had reason to attribute humane members to God But the Scriptures teach us better and all the World consenteth to it That God is a Spirit that he is immortall and invisible that he dwelleth in light which no man can approach unto whom no man hath seen nor can see It is inconsistent with the nature of God to be finite It is inconsistent with the nature of a body to be infinite The speculations of Philosophors who had onely the light of reason were not so grosse who made God to be a most simple essence or simplicity it self All matter which is the originall of divisibility was created by God and therefore God himself cannot be material nor divisible Secondly he denyeth the minor That the eternity of God is the divine substance I proved it from that generally received rule Whatsoever is in God is God His answer is That
to this subject which we are about it is most impertinent and improper He himself as partial as he is cannot think that this liberty is any thing to that moral liberty which renders a man capable of reward or punishment any more that a Taylors measure is to the measure of motion I said and say again That nothing can begin to be without a cause and that nothing can cause it self Yet I say many things do begin to act of themselves This he saith is to contradict my self because I make the action to begin without a cause This is not the first time that he hath noted this for a contradiction I shall sooner salve the contradiction than he save his credit As if the Agent and the Action were the same thing Or as if the Agent was not the cause of the Action Or as if there were any consequence in this The Agent cannot begin to be of himself therefore he cannot begin to act of himself Or he cannot cause himself therefore he cannot cause his action Nothing can cause it self but that which is caused by one thing may cause another Whereas he addeth That it hath been proved formerly that every sufficient cause is a necessary cause and that is but Iargon to say free causes determine themselves it is but a puffe of his vain glorious humour He hath made nothing to appear but his own ignorance and mistakes In the later end of this Section I made bold to make some serious demands to Mr. Hobs which did not at all reflect upon him in particular but at those natural notions which are common to all mankind The first demand was Whether he doth not find by experience that he doth many things which he might have left undone if he would c. He answereth Yet if he would but he maketh it impossible for him to have had any other will So he doth as good as tell us that he might have done them upon an impossible condition or supposition as he himself might have flown over sea if he had had a paire of wings This is a contradiction indeed implied first to say he might have done otherwise and then to adde an impossible condition which makes his proposition negative I am sure it is not fairly done to avoide the scope and meaning of the demand The second question was Whether he do not some things out of meer animosity and will without regard to the direction of right reason c. He answereth This question was in vain unlesse I thought my self his confessor No it is enough I desire not to intrude into his secrets My third demand as he saith was Whether he writ not this defence of necessity against liberty onely to shew that he will have a dominion over his own actions He answereth No but to shew that he had no dominion over his will and this at my request My request was That what he did upon this subject should rather be in writing than by word of mouth It seemeth that I had the dominion over his will So might I come to be questioned for all his Paradoxes The truth is This was no distinct question but a Corollary of the second question My third demand was Whether he be not angry with those who draw him from his study or crosse him in his desires and why he is angry with them if they be necessitated to do what they do any more than he is angry with a sharp winter c. This is wholly omitted by him The last demand was Whether he do not sometimes blame himself and say O what a fool was I to do thus or thus Or with to himself O that I had been wise and why he doth this if he were irresistibly necessitated to do all things that he doth He might as well have wished O that I had not breathed or O what a fool was I to grow old To this he answereth nothing but subtle questions and full of Episcopal gravity And that he thinks in this question I will appear the greater fool supposing that I meant to put the fool upon him which I professe my self to be innocent of as he might have found by these words inserted among the questions Which wise men find in themseves sometimes Though I jest sometimes with his cause or his arguments I do not meddle with his person further than to condemne his vain-glorious presumption to arrogate so much to himself Though I have not half so great an opinion of him as he hath of himself yet I wish his humilility were answerable to his wit Thus of four questions he hath quite omitted one neglected another refused to answer a third and answered the fourth contrary to the scope of the question Castigations of the Animadversions Num. 34. HIs bragging humour will not leave him he still forgetteth Epictetus his sheep He saith When I shall have read over his Animadversions Num. 31. I will think otherwise whatsoever I will confesse Male ominatis parcito verbis I should sooner turn Manichee and make two Gods one of good the other of evil than to make the true God to be the cause of all evill But there is no danger either of the one or of the other I have read over his Animadversions Num. 31. I have weighed them and I professe I find nothing in them worthy of a Divine or a Philosopher or an ingenious person who made a sad inquisition after truth nor any thing that doth approach within a German mile of the cause in controversie And so I leave him to the Castigations That his two instances of casting ambs ace and raining to morrow are impertinent appeareth by these two reasons First the question is of free actions these two instannes are of contingent actions Secondly the question is of antecedent necessity these instances are of an hypothetical necessity And though I used the beauty of the World as a Medium to prove liberty wherein contingency is involved yet this doth not warrant him to give over the principal question and to start and pursue new questions at his pleasure But let him be of good comfort be they pertinent or impertinent they shall not be neglected Because I would not blonder as he doth I distinguished actions into four sorts First The actions of free Agents Secondly The actions of free and natural Agents mixed Thirdly The actions of bruit beasts Fourthly The actions of natural inanimate causes Of these four sorts the first onely concerneth the question and he according to his custom quite omitteth it yet it was of more moment and weight than all he saith in this Section put together A man proportioneth his time each day and allotteth so much to his devotions so much to his study so much to his dyet so much to his recreations so much to necessary or civil visit so much to his rest He that will seek for I know not what necessary causes of all this without himself except that good God who hath
given him a reasonable soul may as well seek for a necessary cause of the Egyptian Pyramides among the Crocodiles of Nilus This distinction of a mans time is an act of dominion done on purpose to maintain his domion over his actions against the encroachments of sensual delights He saith here upon the by That he knoweth no action that proceedeth from the liberty of mans will And again A mans will is something but the liberty of his will is nothing Yet he hath often told us That a man is free to do if he will and not to do if he will If no action proceed from the liberty of the will then how is a man free to do if he will Before he told us He is free to do a thing that may do it if he have the will to do it and may forbear it if be have the will to forbear it If the liberty of the will be nothing then this supposition If he have the will is nothing but an impossibility And here to all that I have said formerly against that frivolous distinction I shall adde an undoubted rule both in law and Logick A conditional proposition having an impossible condition annexed to it is equipollent to a simple negative He who is free to write if he will if it be impossible for him to will is not free to write at all no more than he is free to will But this Castle in the aire hath been beaten down often enough about his ears Where I say that contingent actions do proceed from the indetermination or contingent concurrence of natural causes my intention was not to exclude contingent determination but necessary determination according to an antecdent necessity which he hath been so far from proving unanswerably that he hath as good as yeilded the cause in his case of Ames ace by making the necessity to be onely upon supposition Concerning mixt actions partly free and partly necessary he saith That for proof of them I instance in a tile falling from an house which breaketh a mans head How often must I tell him that I am not now proving but answering that which he produceth He may find proofes enough to content him or rather to discontent him in twelve Sections together from the fifth to the eighteenth And upon the by thoroughout the whole book He who proveth that election is alwayes inter plura and cannot consist with antecedent determination to one proveth that that man who did elect or chuse to walk in that street at that very time when the stone fell though he knew not of it was not antecedently necessitated to walke there And if any one of all those causes which concur to the production of an effect be not antecedently necessary then the effect is not antecedently necessary for no effect can exceed the virtue of its cause He saith I should have proved that such contingent actions are not antecedently necessary by a concurrence of natural causes though a little before I granted they are First he doth me wrong I never granted it either before or after It is a foule fault in him to mistake himself or his adversary so often Secondly it is altogether improper and impertinent to our present controversie Let him remember what he himself said If they the instances of casting ambs ace and raining to morrow be impertinent to his opinion of the liberty of mans will he doth impertinently to meddle with them Not so neither by his leave Though I refuse to prove them formally or write Volumes about them yet I do not refuse to answer any thing which he doth or can produce Such is his argument which followeth immediately Whatsoever is produced by concurrence of natural causes was antecedently determined in the cause of such concurrence though contingent concurrence He addeth That though I perceive it not concurrence and contingent concurrence are all one It may be in his Dialect which differs from the received Dialect of all Schollars but not in the Dialect of wiser and learneder men To his argument pardoning his confounding of natural and voluntary causes I answer That if he speak of the immediate adaequate cause as it is a cause in act without doubt he saith truth Causa proxima in actu posita impossible est non sâ—…qui effectum But he told us of a necessary connexion of all causes from eternity and if he make not this good he saith nothing If he intend it in this sense I deny his assertion That whatsoever is produced by concurrence of natural causes was antecedently determined from eternity As for instance that the generation of a monster which nature or the Agent never intended was necessary from eternity or necessary before the contingence was determined Concerning the individual actions of brute beasts that they should be necessitated to every act they do from eternity As the bee for example how often she shall hum in a day and how often she shall flie abroad to gather thyme and whither and how many flowers precisely she must suck and no more and such like acts I had reason to say I see no ground for it Yet the least of all these acts is known to God and subject to his disposition He telleth us That he hath pointed out the ground in the former discourse If he have it is as the blind Senator of whom I told him formerly pointed the wrong way All his intimations have received their answers But whereas I made an objection to my self Are not two sparrows sould for a farthing and one of them shall not fall to the ground without your father He doth not deale clearly to urge mine own objection and conceale my answer He doth not say which your father casteth not down or which your father doth not necessitate to fall but without your father That is without your fathers knowledge without his protection without the influence of his power or which is exemted from your fathers disposition The last sort of actions are the natural actions of inanimate creatures which have not the least pretence to liberty or so much as spontaneity and therefore were declined by me as impertinent to this question Out of my words concerning these he argueth thus If there be a necessary connexion of all natural causes from the beginning then there is no doubt but that all things happen necessarily But there is a necessary connexion of all natural causes from the beginning First I deny his consequence and by it he who is so busie to take other mens heights in Logick wherein he never medled yet but he was baffelled may have his own height taken by them that are so disposed There is scarce a freshman in the University but could have taught him the difference between causa efficiens physica and voluntaria the one acting by necessity of nature the other freely according to deliberation The former cannot defer nor moderate its act nor act opposite actions indifferently but the later
gathereth it from that place in Scripture as if the Scripture alone were not proof good enough except it be confirmed by the experience of Travellers From this preparatory discourse he frameth two Arguments and puts them into my Character as if they were my Reasons In our Climate the natural causes do not produce rain so necessarily at set times as in some Eastern Countries therefore they do not produce rain necessarily in our Climates then when they do produce it Again We cannot say so certainly and infallibly it will rain to morrow or it will not rain to morrow therefere it is not necessary either that it should rain or that it should not rain to morrow Such reasons as these do become him better than me I disclaim them and to use his own phrase must take them for untruths untill he cite the place where I have made any such ridiculous inferences which conclude against hypothetical necessity which we our selves do establish But I come to his arguments which I shall set down in his own words for it cannot be worse disposed to let us see the great skill of this new controller in Logick It is necessary that to morrow it shall rain or not rain if therefore it be not necessary that it shall rain it is necessary it shall not rain otherwise it is not necessary that the proposition it shall rain or it shall not rain should be true To this I answered That it was most false that the proposition could not be necessarily true except one of the members were necessarily true which is a truth evident and undeniable This answer I illustrated thus A conjunct proposition may have both parts false and yet the proposition be true As if the Sun shine it is day is a true proposition at midnight Logicians use to give another example If an Asse flie then he hath wings The proposition is true but both the parts are false Neither doth the Asse flie neither hath he wings To my direct answer he replyeth not a word either by denial or distinction and so by his silence yieldeth the controversie But to my illustration he excepteth thus First What hath a conjunct proposition to do with this in question which is disjunctive By his good favour there are two propositions in his argument the former is disjunctive which is not questioned at all by either party either for the truth of it or the necessity of it namely Either it will rain to morrow or it will not rain to morrow His second proposition is conjunctive and not disjunctive namely If therefore it be not necessary it shall rain it is necessary that it shall not rain This conjunctive proposition I deny and I deny it upon this evident ground because as in a conjunctive proposition both parts of the proposition may be false and yet the proposition true or both parts true and yet the proposition false because the truth or falshood of the proposition dependeth not upon the truth or falshood of the parts but onely of the consequence So in a disjunctive proposition the disjunction may be necessarily true and yet neither member of the disjunction be necessarily because the truth or falshood of a disjunctive proposition dependeth not upon the necessary truth of either member distinctly considered but upon the necessary truth of the disjunction The reason is evident in a disjunctive proposition nothing is affirmed or denyed either of the one member or the other but onely the necessary truth of the disjunction According to that rule in Logick In propositione disjunctiva affirmatio negatio aestimatur ex sola conjuctione disjunctiva cui necesse est addi negationem si debet negativa esse propositio Now the disjunction of contradictories is most necessary Either it will rain to morrow or it will not rain to morrow though neither part of the contradiction be necessarily true As for example A man is to pay a sum of mony Either he will pay it in gold or he will not pay it in gold is necessarily true but it is not necessary that he shall pay it in gold neither is it necessary that he shall not pay it in gold Seeing he hath it in his choice to pay it in gold or in silver or any other coine which is current This is so clear that no man can seriously oppose it without his own discredit Secondly he saith that a conjuctive proposition is not made of two propositions as a disjunctive is What then First this is altogether impertinent and nothing to his purpose Secondly it is also false Every compounded proposition such as a conjunct proposition is doth either actually or virtually include two propositions Indeed an hypothetical proposition may sometimes be reduced to a cathegorical that is when there are but three terms for when there are four terms it is hardly reducible What is this to the question or to any difference between us Just which is the way to London A sack full of plums He might do well for his reputation sake to reduce his argument into any Scholler like form either Cathegorical or hypothetical or disjunctive or any thing But then the uglinesse of it would streight appear This is the nearest to his sense that I can contrive it Either it is necessary that it shall rain to morrow or it is necessary that is shall not rain to morrow Or this proposition Either it will rain to morrow or it will not rain to morrow is not necessarily true I deny the disjunction Pono quartum Or the one of these two raining or not raining will happen contingently The disjunction is alwayes necessarily true before either of the members be determinately or necessaly true Whether this proposition I know that either it will rain to morrew or it will not rain to morrow be a disjunctive proposition or not is not material It includeth a disjunctive proposition in it and sheweth plainly that the certainty of a disjunctive proposition doth not depend upon the certainty of either of the members determinately but upon the certainty of one of them indifferently He taketh great exception at my manner of expression that God made his own decrees freely because whatsoever was made had a beginning but Gods decrees are eternal Besides Gods decree is his will and the Bishop said formerly that the will of God is God Although God being a simple and infinite essence to speak properly is not capable of any manner of composition or of being perfected any further than he is Yet to help our conception we use to attribute to God such acts and qualities and perfections which being spoken after the manner of men are to be underood according to the Majesty of God Such is the notion of Gods decrees More particularly the decrees of God may be taken and is taken in the Schools two wayes actively or passively Actively as it is an act immanent in God and so the decree of God is nothing else but Deus decernens
virtue and vice holinesse and sin are any thing more than empty names That there is any election in the World That admonitions and reprehensions and praises and dispraises and laws and consultations do signifie any thing That care and good endeavours are to be cherished That all motives to godlinesse and religious piety are to be maintained and I cannot fall in this cause There is no doubt but the best doctrines may be abused as the doctrine of Gods providence to idlenesse and his patience to procrastination and his mercy to presumption But such abuses do not flow necessarily and essentially from good doctrines as they do from universal necessity He telleth us how God dealeth with those whom he will bring to a blessed end and how he hardeneth others but he telleth us of nothing that is in mans power under God to doe either to prevent this hardening or to attain this blessed end He talketh of a mans examining his wayes but he teacheth withall that a man is either necessitated unresistibly to examine his wayes or otherwise it is impossible for him to examine them He mentioneth some who reason erroneously If I shall be saved I shall be saved whether I walk uprightly or no. But he teacheth also that they are necessitated to reason erroneously and to walk uprightly and that they cannot avoide it by all the endeavours which are in their power For according to his principles nothing at all is in their power either to do or to leave undone but onely to cry patience and shrug up their shoulders and even this also is determined antecedently and inevitably to their hands So he maketh man to be a meer footbal or tennis ball smitten to and fro by the second causes or a top lashed hither and thither If the watch be wound up by the Artist what have the wheels to do to be sollicitous about any thing but onely to follow the motion which it is impossible for them to resist When he first broached this opinion he did not foresee all those absurd consequences which did attend it which might easily happen to a man who buildeth more upon his own imaginations than other mens experience and being once ingaged he is resolved to wade through thick and thin so long as he is able Castigations of the Animadversions upon the Postscript Num. 38. WE are now come to his last Section which is as full of empty and unsignificant vaunts as any of the former True reall worth useth not to send forth so many bubbles of vain-glory The question is not whether persons once publickly ingaged in the defence of an opinion be more tenacious of their errours than those who have no such prejudice which his own example doth confirm sufficiently and no rational man can doubt of but whether solid substantial proofs do work sooner upon persons of wit and learning then upon those who are ignorant whose judgements are confused and unable to distinguish between feigned shews and real truths How should he who understandeth not the right state of the question be so likely to judge what reasons are convincing and what are not as he who doth understand it Or he who knoweth not the distinction between that necessity which is absolute and that which is onely upon supposition be a competent Judge whether all events be absolutely necessary He might even as well tell us that a blind man is more likely to hit the mark or judge rightly of colours then he that hath his sight He himself doth half confesse as much I confesse the more solid a mans wit is the better will solid reasons work upon him What is it then that disgusteth him It is the addition of that which I call learning that is to say much reading of other mens doctrines without weighing them with his own thoughts When did either I or any man else ever call that learning to read Authours without weiging them Such extravagant expressions become none but blunderers who are able to say nothing to the question when it is truely stated But I wonder what it is which he calleth learning Nothing but a phantastick opiniastratie joyned with a supercilious contempt of all other men that are wiser or learneder than himself making the private thoughts of ignorant persons to be the standard and publick seal of truth As the Scholler thinketh so the bell clinketh If there were nothing else this alone to except against them who should be both his Jurers and his Judges were enough to render him and all his Paradoxes suspected Let him remember who said Learning hath no enemy but ignorance If he had ever read those Authours whom he condemneth namely The Fathers and Doctours of the Church his presumption had been somewhat more tolerable though too high But to condemne them all before he ever read any of them requireth a propheticall light to which he is no pretender In the mean time he would have his Readers believe that what is done by him upon designe meerly to hide his own ignorance is done out of depth of Judgement Like the Fox in the Fable which having lost his tail by mischance perswaded all his fellows to cut of theirs as unprofitable burthens The Philosopher divided them into three ranks Some who knew good and were willing to teach others these he said were like Gods amongst men Others who though they knew not much yet were willing to learn these he said were like men among beasts And lastly some who knew not good and yet despised such as should teach them These he esteemed as beasts among men Whereas he talketh of such as requite those who endeavour to instruct them at their own intreaty with reviling terms although he dictate more willingly than dispute where no man may contradict him yet neither do I take him to be of the ranck of Instructers before he himself hath first learned nor is he able to bring so much as one instance of any reviling or so much as discourreous language throughout my defence If his back was galled before and that make him over-sensible and suspicious of an affront where none was intended who can help it But now he himself having shewed so much scorn and peâ—…lance in his Animadversions though I have abstained from all reviling terms yet I have tempered my stile so as to let him plainly see That he is not so much regarded not half so formidable an adversary as he vainly imagineth In the next place he setteth down eight conclusions which he dreameth that he hath proved in this Treatise It is good beating of a proud man Though he be thrown flat upon his back at every turn yet he hath the confidence to proclaim his own atchievements with a silver trumpet when they do not deserve to be piped upon an oaten reed I will make him a fair offer If he have proved any one of them or be able to prove any one of them I will yield him all the rest Besides the
himself and all mankind If he did ground his opinions upon any other authority than his own dreams If he did interpret Scripture according to the perpetual tradition of the Catholick Church and not according to his private distemperd phantasies If his discourse were as full of deep reasons as it is of supercilious confidence so that a man might gain either knowledge or reputation by him a great volume would be well bestowed upon him Digna res esset ubi quis nervos intenderet suos But to what purpose is it to draw the coard of contention with such a man in such a cause where it is impiety to doubt much more to dispute Quid cum illis agas qui neque jus neque bonum aut â—…quum sciunt Melius pejus profit obsit nihil vident nisi quod lubet For mine own part as long as God shall furnish me with ability and opportunity I will endeavour to bestow my vacant hours upon a better subject conducing more to the advancement of primitive Piety and the re-union of Christendome by disabusing the hood-winked World then this doth tend to the increase of Atheisme and destruction of ancient truth unlesse the importunity of T. H. or some other divert me to look to my own defence I desire thy Christian prayers that God who hath put this good desire into my mind by his preventing grace will help me by his assisting grace to bring the same to good effect The Preface HItherto I have made use onely of a buckler to guard my self from Mr. Hobbes his assaults What passed between him and me in private had been buried in perpetual silence if his flattering Disciples not without his own fault whether it were connivance or neglect is not material to me had not published it to the World to my prejudice And now having carved out mine own satisfaction I thought to have desisted here as not esteeming him to be a fit adversary who denieth all common principles but rather to be like a pillar of smoake breaking out of the top of some narrow chimny and spreading it self abroad like a cloud as if it threatned to take possession of the whole Region of the air darkening the skie and seeming to pierce the heavens And after all this when it hath offended the eyes a little for the present the first puffe of wind or a few minutes do altogether disperse it I never nourished within my breast the least thought of answering his Leviathan as having seen a great part of it answered before ever I read it and having moreover received it from good hands that a Roman Catholick was about it but being braved by the authour in print as giving me a title for my answer Behemoth against Leviathan And at other times being so solicitous for me what I would say to such a passage in my answer to his Leviathan imagining his silly cavils to be irrefragable demonstrations I will take the liberty by his good leave to throw on two or three spadefulls of earth towards the final interrement of his pernicious principles and other mushrome errours And truly when I ponder seriously the horrid consequences of them I do not wonder so much at his mistaken exception to my civil form of valediction So God blesse us miscalling it A buffonly abusing of the Name of God to calumny He conceived me amisse that because in times less scrupulous and more conscientious men used to blesse themselves after this form at the naming of the devil therefore I did intend it as a prayer for the deliverance of all good Christians from him and his blasphemous opinions I do believe there never was any Authour Sacred or Profane Ancient or Moderne Christian Iew Mahumetan or Pagan that hath inveighed so frequently and so bitterly against all feined phantasmes with their first devisers maintainers and receivers as T. H. hath done excluding out of the nature of things the souls of Men Angels Devils and all incorporeal Substances as fictions phantasmes and groundlesse contradictions Many men fear the meaning of it is not good that God himself must be gone for company as being an incorporeal substance except men will vouchsafe by God to understand nature So much T H. himself seemeth to intimate This concourse of causes whereof every one is determined to be such as it is by a like concourse of former causes may well be called in respect they were all set and ordered by the eternal cause of all things God Almighty the Decree of God If Gods eternal Decree be nothing else but the concourse of natural causes then Almighty God is nothing else but nature And if there be no spirits or incorporeal substances he must be either nature or nothing T. H. defieth the Schooles and therefore he knoweth no difference between immanent and emanant or transient Actions but confoundeth the eternal Decrees of God before all time with the execution of them in time which had been a foule fault in a Schooleman And yet his Leviathan or mortal God is a meer phantasme of his own devising neither flesh nor fish but a confusion of a man and a whale engendered in his own brain not unlike Dagon the Idol of the Philistims a mixture of a god and a man and a fish The true literall Leviathan is the Whale-fish Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook whom God hath made to take his pastime in the great and wide sea And for a metaphorical Leviathan I know none so proper to personate that huge body as T. H. himself The Levia than doth not take his pastime in the deep with so much freedom nor behave himself with so much height and insolence as T. H. doth in the Schooles nor domineer over the lesser fishes with so much scorn and contempt as he doth over all other authours censuring branding contemning proscribing whatsoever is contrary to his humour bustling and bearing down before him whatsoever cometh in his way creating truth and falshood by the breath of his mouth by his sole authority without other reason A second Pythagoras at least There have been self conceited persons in all Ages but none that could ever King it like him over all the children of pride Ruit agit rapit tundit prosternit Yet is not his Leviathan such an absolute Soveraign of the Sea as he imagineth God hath chosen the weak things of this world to confound the mighty The little mouse stealeth up thorough the Elephants trunke to eat his brains making him die desperately mad The Indian rat creepeth into the belly of the gaping Crocodile and knaweth his bowels asunder The great Leviathan hath his adversaries the sword-fish which pierceth his belly beneath and the thrasher-fish which beateth his head above and whensoever these two unite their forces together against him they destroy him But this is the least part of his Leviathans sufferings Our Greenland fishers have found out a new art to draw
in a mean for he himself doth never observe a mean All his bolts fly over or under but at the right mark it is in vain to expect him Sometimes he fancieth an omnipotence in Kings sometimes he strippeth them of their just rights Perhaps he thinketh that it may fall out in politicks as it doth sometimes in physick Bina venena invant Two contrary poysons may become a Cordial to the Common-wealth I will begin with his defects where he attributeth too little to Regal power Fist he teacheth that no man is bound to go to warfare in person except he do voluntarily undertake it A man that is commanded as a Souldier to fight against the enemy may neverthelesse in many cases refuse without injustice Of these many cases he setteth down onely two First when he substituteth a sufficient souldier in his place for in this case he deserteth not the service of the Common-wealth Secondly there is allowance to be made for natural timorousnesse or men of feminine courage This might passe as a municipal law â—…tc exempt some persons at some time in some places But to extend it to all persons places and times is absurd and repugnant to his own grounds who teacheth that justice and injustice do depend upon the command of the Soveraign that whatsoever he commandeth he maketh lawful and just by commanding it His two cases are two great impertinencies and belong to the Soveraign to do or not to do as Graces whoso is timerous or fearful let him depart not to the Subjects as right He forgetteth how often he hath denied all knowledge of good and evill to Subjects and subjected their will absolutely to the will of the Soveraign The Soveraign may use every mans strength and wealth at his pleasure His acknowledgement that the Soveraign hath right enough to punish his refusal with death is to no purpose The question is not whether his refusal be punishable or not but whether it be just or not Upon his principles a Soveraign may justly enough put the most innocent Subject in the World to death as we shall see presently And his exception when the defence of the Common-wealth requireth at once the help of all that are able to bear armes is no answer to the other case and it self a case never like to happen He must be a mortall god indeed that can bring all the hands in a Kingdome to fight at one battle Another of his principles is this Security is the end for which men make themselves subjects to others which if it be not enjoyed no man is understood to have subjected himself to others or to have lost his right to defend himself at his own discretion Neither is any man understood to have bound himself to any thing or to have relinquished his right over all things before his own security be provided for What ugly consequences do flow from this paradox and what a large window it openeth to sedition and rebellion I leave to the readers judgement Either it must be left to the soveraign determination whether the subjects security be sufficiently provided for And then in vain is any mans sentence expected against himself or to the discretion of the subject as the words themselves do seem to import and then there need no other bellowes to kindle the fire of a civill war and put a whole commonwealth into a combustion but this seditious Article We see the present condition of Europe what it is that most soveraignes have subjects of a different communion from themselves and are necessitated to tolerate different rites for fear least whilst they are plucking up the tares they should eradicate the wheat And he that should advise them to do otherwise did advise them to put all into fire and flame Now hear this mercifull and peaceable Author It is manifest that they do against conscience and wish as much as is in them the eternall destruct on of their subjects who do not cause such doctrine and such worship to be taught and exhibited to their subjects as they themselves do believe to conduce to their eternall salvation or tolerate the contrary to be taught and exhibited Did this man write waking or dreaming And howsoever in words he denie all resistance to the soveraign yet indeed he admitteth it No man is bound by his pacts whatsoever they be not to resist him who bringeth upon him death or wounds or other bodily dammage by this learning the Scholler if he be able may take the rod out of his masters hand and whip him It followeth Seeing therefore no man is bound to that which is impossible they who are to suffer death or wounds or rather corporall dammage and are not constant enough to endure them are not obliged to suffer them And more fully In case a great many men together have already resisted the soveraign power unjustly or committed some capitall crime for which every one of them expecteth death whether have they not the liberty to join together and assist and defend one another certainly they have for they do but defend their lives which the guilty man may as well do as the innocent There was indeed unjustice in the first breach of their duty Their bearing of armes subsequent to it though it be to maintain what they have done is no new unjust act Why should we not change the name of Leviathan into the Rebells catechism Observe the difference between the primitive spirit and the Hobbian spirit The Thebaean Legion of known valour in a good cause when they were able to resist did chuse rather to be cut in pieces to a man than defend themselves against their Emperour by armes because they would rather die innocent than live nocent But T. H. alloweth Rebells and conspirators to make good their unlawfull attempts by armes was there ever such a trumpetter of rebellion heard of before perhaps he may say that he alloweth them not to justifie their unlawfull acts but to defend themselves First this is contrary to himself for he alloweth them to maintain what they had unjustly done This is too much and too intolerable but this is not all Secondly If they chance to win the field who must suffer for their faults or who dare thenceforward call their Acts unlawfull Will you hear what a casuist he is And for the other instance of attaining soveraignty by rebellion it is manifest that though the event follow yet because it cannot reasonably be expected but rather the contrary and because by gaining it so others are taught to gain the same in like manner the attempt thereof is against reason And had he no other reasons indeed against horrid Rebellion but these two It seemeth he accounteth conscience or the bird in the breast to be but an Idoll of the brain And the Kingdome of heaven as he hath made it not valuable enough to be ballanced against an earthly Kingdome And as for hell he hath expounded it