London Printed for Nathaniell Ponder at ye. Peacock in Chancery lane DEnsis continuis iisque validissimis argumentis Atheismum exagitat iste Tractatus cui Titulus The Unreasonableness of Atheism made manifest Imprimatur 10. Maii. 1669. Humfr. London THE UNREASONABLENESSE OF ATHEISM made manifest In a Discourse written by the command of a Person of Honour By Sir Charles Wolseley Baronet Omnis homo eo ipso quod rationalis conditus est ex ipsa ratione illum qui se condidit Deum esse colligere debet S. Greg. in Mor. c. The second Edition revised and enlarged by the Author LONDON Printed for Nathaniel Ponder and are to be sold at his Shop at the Sign of the Peacock in Chancery-Lane 1669. My Lord THese Papers like Orphans meanly descended are glad to forget their original and innoble themselves with the Adoption of your Commands The title you have to them transfers a relative honour which is the whole of what they claim to inherit You have trusted the richest Jewel in the hands of a mean Artist by whom 't will be set with great disadvantage You have committed the noblest of subjects to a prison of low thoughts where 't is debased beneath it self like a rich soil under a barren Genius The reproach of the highest thoughts in their best exercise suffers here a confinement to the straits of a very narrow capacity However he that lists himself in the defence of truth though he fight ill is sure to be of the Conquerours side And he that duels an Atheist can never want a good second The weakest defence often makes a stand and gives occasion to greater forces to ralley Sometimes the happy sling of a stone may stab A Goliah in the forehead and rout his whole rere-guard Every man cannot lead an Army for Truth but all men should follow the Camp no man should ever meet an Atheist unarm'd but wear a constant weapon in his understanding to fight him Each man combates not the same way I have provided a Sling for such as cannot bear heavier Armour notions that lie even to mean capacities that he may be able to bolt his door against an Atheist that cannot build a Cittadell for his defence When Atheism so loudly batters us on all sides 't is time to cast our eyes every way The weakest places should be first secured and such who can least make a resistance should be most taken care for This is the Post I have undertaken designed me by my own disability to do better I have chose to help those that are least knowing to interpose my feeble aid where I see the weakest front and the worst preparation to endure a shock nor will you blame me if I am pleased with a Subject where I am sure to live by the warmth of reflection if I contend for the lowest employment am proud of any admission into such a service where the meanest Livery carries Grandeur and the lowest Officer must needs be a dignified person This choice as it best secures me against the justest of fears that so noble a cause should suffer by a weak defence in the hand of an impotent Champion so the suitableness of it to the most of my self gives me hopes of the same acceptance he found under the Law with the Sacrifice of a Turtle that wanted a better Offering My Lord This prepares you to know I disclaim the vanity of instructing you by this discourse 'T is composed for you to correct for ignorance to learn by You espoused the concerns of others when you commanded this from me Should I attempt to make your Lordship a better Divine I should shake hands with that foolish Oratour who being to make an Oration before Hannibal went about to instruct him in the art of War 'T is the many unlearned and unstable who steer not by the Compass of right reason but by the winds of every false notion and every deluding Sophism that challenge discourses of this kind and make them a debt due from us Those that have been the guard of every age have still encountred the predominant humour The world in every stage of it has besmeared it self with some peculiar deformity has corrupted into some new distemper or improved some old disease We seem at once greedily to have swallowed the dregs of the whole and to have epitomized the worlds Apostacy in the fatal Plague of Atheism We skirmish not like other ages to retail single truths but the whole of Religion lies at stake with us He that yields the field to an Atheist has at once betrayed all divine truth to the block and left the noblest property of his soul in the hand of his worst enemy All other distempers naturally fall in here they all issue themselves into this infection men think it the cheapest way of becoming vile The troubles men are at from the efforts of conscience and the convincing aspect of some open-faced truths have by this a ready conveyance and seem shortly dismissed out of the world They that are uneasie under all Religion if they can once perswade themselves there is no God think they have found a happy expedient to ease them of those cares This makes the knowledge of God in these daies to be grown so cheap a commodity and lie like a drug upon so many mens hands they will gladly barter it away for an empty notion of Atoms or any plausible trifle the worst ware serves them so it come in the room of Religion they 'l never dispute the terms if they can but come to a bargain they think they have got all and parted with nothing I am contending by this small endeavour some little to antidote the poison of this disease to forbid the fury of such a Phrenzie to speak to men in the native language of their own reason to meet with them in the cool of the day and treat with them when the heat of this distemper may be some what abated The man that turns from God and disowns him unhinges himself from the best of his own being is highly unjust to his Maker and forfeits his own interest towards himself It were not more unnatural should the leaves of a tree drop poison upon their own root nor less destructive should the earth refuse the warmth of the Sun The glory of man lies in his Supreme Head 't is his descent that innobles him 't is the Divine Image that greatens him and crowns him King of the Vâ—iverse Whoever disclaims such an original and makes it his choice to derive himself from the nothing of chance has forfeited the best of himself has done his utmost to depose himself from his own native dignity and becomes the natural prey of every mans contempt Nor can we deny the existence of God without some way assaulting our selves He must first design a rape upon his own reason that resolves to have nothing above him Our reasonable part disowns all friendship to an Atheist and
reasons must needs know by that act that he is he needs no other demonstration of his own Being to himself and with great ease may he inform himself of the actual existence of all other things But the souls enquiry will still reach further the proper food of craving reason is a reasonable knowledge of things such as the subject is capable of Reason travels to reduce things First To the truth of their existence Secondly To the reason of their existence And Thirdly To the right manner and method of their existence in their relation to and dependance upon each other The whole truth of no existence can be known so as reason may justly challenge a knowledge of it without knowing the cause of it or else knowing there was no cause of it because the great and supreme distinction of Beings lies in the absoluteness and dependency of them To know any visible existence to be without cause is to know it to be that which no man can rationally know any visible Being to be which is to know it to be eternal And if it have some first cause without some reasonable account of that to our selves we can never tell from what nor from whence to date it nor how to answer many other questions reason will ask about it Things are never in their proper station till they are made a right object for knowledge and reduced to a due correspondence to reason Then they bear their proportion to the great and universal harmony 'T is reason puts the world into regular motion sorts each thing places causes before effects finds out causes by effects and necessary conclusions from their own natural premises and still pursues things to the highest and supremest cause of all Search the world without this Candle and it will appear nothing but a heap of confusion God seems to have placed this sublime faculty in man for two ends First That a man might rule himself and the rest of the world in such a manner and method as might carry some proportion to the eternal reason above of which mans rational soul is an image And Secondly That by the use of it he might ascend to the knowledge of his Maker and have every thing he saw as well as himself made a step to help him upward The ground of all our homage to God lies in the knowledge we have of a Supreme Being before us and above us Without that 't is impossible ever to introduce Religion into the world Two things seem to be but a reasonable collection from the natural composition of mankind and the pure issues of a reasoning soul abstractly taken from all helps of revelation First That 't is not possible for that noble and impartial faculty of mans reason to be true to it self in its own actings and to arrive at its own necessary satisfaction about it self and all other Beings without a strict inquiry into the primary reason and first cause of the Being of it self and all other things And Secondly That the single exercise of natural reason in such an inquiry will safely conduct a man to the conclusion of some first cause and some one Supreme Being the cause of all Beings which we call God To prove there Positions undoubted truths shall be the first endeavour of the following discourse If we can happily bring mankind to God by this high-way of their reason and light a man to his Creator by this Lamp that continually burns in his own soul we shall then prove Atheism a very lye and the Atheist a most unnatural lyer towards his God and towards himself I shall proceed First affirmatively and positively and then negatively in giving a full answer to all the Atheist has to object Consider in the first place 't is not a thing within any compass of supposition that mankind in the use of their reason should fail to fix upon that as their first and great enquiry how things came to be in the posture they are now found and what original they owe themselves to That faculty that reasons about causes and effects must needs ascend by that method to the highest cause of all things No satisfying knowledge which the soul still labours after can be had of any thing unless we can trace it to its original without that it proves but a vexation to reason and reproaches it with ignorance in that grand fundamental in the knowledge of things which must give the truest inlet to all the subsequent comprehension we can have of them That reason in its operation must needs move this way will appear by these several considerations First There is no more obvious enquiry for whatever we see than to know whether it have a beginning or were without a begining If it had beginning when it did begin and how it came first to exist in the world and from whence it had the donation of it self No mans reason can acquiesce without some answer to this Secondly Finding out the original of things determines the property of them and so fills the mind with a satisfaction in that great concern reason has about every thing to know whose it is Whatever was the first cause of a thing and the original maker of it must needs have the property of it 'T is impossible there should be a claim made with so much justice to any thing as by the first maker of it 'T is not possible to disseize him of his right to a thing that gave it its existence and caused it first to be He that first produced a Being had that Being first entirely existing in himself and in his own power Whatever is made can have no property in it self The right must needs be in the maker Here reason sits down satisfied and fully acquiesces in that particular Thirdly The knowing the original of any thing gives us the true boundaries and limits of it Nothing can rise higher than its original No effect can out-reach the cause Nay there must be ever a necessary inferiority in whatever is caused to the first causer of it This is a necessary direction to all the searches of reason about the nature of any thing to know the first cause of such a Being and the true original it derives it self from Fourthly The knowledge of things in their prima causa quiets our reason because it gives us the utmost and ultimate knowledge that is to be had about them To know a thing in it self and to know it in its first cause and original is to know all that reason can expect to know about any visible Being This brings things to hold their due proportion to the rational soul and rectifies us in our knowledge in placing causeâ— and effects in their due Stations Secondly If the being of reason be such as that it must necessarily make out it selâ— into such enquiries and that the first cause of things is the most proper object for a rational soul that trades in causes and effects we will
Emperours who triumphed most in pretending Atheism threatned the wind if it blew upon them and the clouds if they rained upon them betrayed upon every small occasion the dreadfullest fears imaginable Julian the Apostate at last cryed out The Galilaean had overcome him The great Hector of the Gods Epicurus himself was the most eminent coward that ever lived in those things he most defied nothing ever frighted any man more than those two things did him Death and the Gods so you shall find it reported in Cicero His Atoms had not solved his conscience nor cured him it seems of his fears he was certain of them though he bottom'd all the world upon chance How many are to be seen daily that when they think they have safely interred their conscience when they come to any extremity soon find a revival of it again There is nothing so universally certain amongst mankind but what is subject to variation in individuals which strongly proves that the world has not immutability nor eternity affixed to it Sometimes we see such members of the body and such faculties of the soul cease to exert themselves in particulars but yet such monsters for they are no better ought not to destroy the general character and definition we give of natural Beings In this matter of conscience which does plainly admit the Being of a God to which it hath immediate relation two things strongly plead for the generality of it in all men above the generality of any one thing that belongs to them First That 't is the great Trustee for God in the world And unless it be in some very extraordinary case where God concurrs with a man to extinguish it as a special and signal judgement upon him it seems plain that no man can totally obliterate it in himself Secondly 'T is the great medium he will judge the world by He will deal with men according to their light and the consciences of men shall perform that great office of accusing or excusing in the great day He that either actually has a principle of conscience or ever had such a thing or comes hereafter to find that such a principle is within him gives a witness sufficient to the Being of such a principle and I believe the Atheist will undertake a hard task to find one individual man well in his wits that is not included in that compass He that tells me he hath no conscience and expects I should believe him may as well expect that I should take his word if he should tell me he is not of the same composition with other men and does not see nor hear though he has eyes and ears visibly as other men have A fourth Argument to prove the truth of a supreme Being above the world is the miracles that have been wrought in the world This stabs the Atheist and mortally wounds him If ever in fact there were such a thing as a miracle the Atheist is irrecoverably gone All his Hypotheses fall to the ground all the fig-leaves he can get will never hide him from apparent nakedness and folly To give this argument its due force I shall endeavour two things First To prove that a miracle leads us directly to God and is in its being destructive to all an Atheist sayes And secondly That the fact of such miracles is true and that we have good reason to believe it is so and that there have been often such in the world A miracle is properly that which could not come to pass by any natural cause If a man actually dead should be raised again it were a thing could not be brought to pass in any natural way nor could any natural account be given of it If a man born blind and that had no eyes should by a word speaking be made to see 't were a thing out of all humane reach to do You must step out of the world and take a view of something above it to know how such a thing could come to pass The working of a miracle is the doing of that which apparently to our senses and our reason nothing visible in the world could do And if so it must needs be done by somewhat that is superiour to the world Nay 't is sometimes the doing of that which is quite contrary to the natural motion and constant tendency of the whole universe If a man be once dead and that principle of life and motion that was in him be gone 't is natural for his body to corrupt and vary the form of its matter Now to make such a man live again who by the standing Law of Nature died and must by the same Law corrupt is not only a thing above all natural power but a thing directly contrary to nature and perfectly inverts the whole course of it For 't is as much the reason and course of nature for a man to die as 't is at the first for him to live If therefore any such thing were ever done in the world it must necessarily be brought to pass by a Power above all natural causes and the utmost ability of all natural Beings We must needs erect a Throne for a power superiour to nature and such a power as must directly lead us to God 'T is as much a miracle and as far above all natural power to revive a man actually dead as to make a man out of a stone or form him from a lump of earth Consider the world in which of the Atheists notions of it you will if there be nothing above it nor besides it then 't is plainly impossible that any thing should happen or come to pass but what has its rise and foundation from somewhat within it For if there be nothing existing but this world there can be nothing produced but what this world can produce But that we call a miracle is such a thing as is quite beyond the worlds production neither the reasonable part nor the sensible part nor the whole together can produce a miracle Not the reasonable part for the great and genuine business of reason is to place things in their due dependencies each upon other and to know causes producing effects and means suited to ends Reason can never elevate any thing in its operation beyond it self nor force an act from it beyond the compass of its own Being That reason has an innate antipathy to 't were to set reason against it self and say reason shall produce things without reason and against reason Reason cannot the imagined to deal in that for which no reason can be given And therefore when we see a miracle a thing that can have no natural cause or reason directs us to look to somewhat above the world that must needs be the cause of it Not the sensible part of the world for that can never alter its course Nature is a perfect Law to it self which it can never repeal This we are assured of not only by our experience of the constant course that
the Stars That say to the second they cannot find that excellency in the Doctrine of the Scriptures we speak of but rather find it interrupts and crosses them in all those things they take most delight and pleasure in That reject wholly the third and throw away all be1ief of things past and resolve to credit nothing but what they see That mock at the fourth the divine Power attending the Scripture and deny the Being of any such thing think it a vain imagination and tell you that many fabulous stories and false Religions have equally gained upon the world and found many that have religiously bowed down themselves to them and submitted to deluding impositions from them Those I say that will thus object and feed upon this kind of trash that find a way to convert into humour and disease all such notions of things as are the satisfying food of sober and reasonable men and resolve to believe nothing they do not like that will deny the truth of all divine and rational impressions upon mankind because some of them are deluded and mistaken and will admit no men to have attained a right knowledge in divine things suitable to the truest exercise of their rational faculties because part of the world either by weakness or corruption are under the dominion of vanity and lies Such men are most punished when they are left to themselves nor is it less vain to endeavour their satisfaction than to make a demonstration about colours to one that we know cannot or else is resolved that he will not look upon them or to convine him of the harmony of any sound that resolves before-hand to make no use of his ears or at least to call every thing discord that does not suit with some ill sound his ears are already possessed with Supernatural Religion is a thing proposed to men with reason abundantly sufficient to satisfie a man reasonably willing to be satisfied and to leave him without excuse if he be not satisfied And besides all other proofs of it the same humane evidence by which we rest satisfied in all other things that we do not see descends to all ages but not with answers to every froward dissenters objections that will dispute without end against the truth of it because he dislikes the matter of it and be so absurdly disingenuous to deny that to be a good proof to him of the truth of the Scriptures by which he himself rests satisfied in the truth of a thousand other things He that will give no credit to any divine revelation unless God will satisfie his curiosity in the manner of its conveyance to the world sayes in effect though God have given me other good reason and such as he thought sufficient for me to believe him and upon which he has made it my duty to believe him and such reason as I my self think sufficient for the belief of all other things of the like nature and such as I think abundant proof to make good any thing I have a mind to yet I will not believe him unless I please And though my reason tell me that some Being superiour to all Beings made the world Yet unless I had seen him do it I will not believe it Such men are monstrous Fanaticks men that live upon fancy that fancy to themselves how God should govern the world and how he should reveal himself to it and because he does not do it according to their fancy and descend to gratifie their fond imaginations they make it a Law to themselves that they will neither receive nor admit any of his Laws nor pay any acknowledgement to his Being What delight have men taken of late to upbraid the Scriptures with all kind of uncertainty in the delivery of them and all kind of contradictions and absurdities in the matter of them Mens wits and parts have encreased their value with very many as they could best enlarge upon on these heads and despise others as weak and to be pitied who make any stand for divine Truth By this men tempt themselves and others into a mean value of Religion and at last into the highest irreligion 'T is I confess a noble enquiry to search into the grounds of Religion that so we may be rationally ascertained of its truth and not take our greatest concern upon trust But to deal in those things with no other intention but to tie knots to invent vexing questions and peevish objections and because the Scriptures cross mens boundless appetites to load them with all imaginable disgrace and contempt that so God may be more easily dismissed out of the world if we deal with the Scriptures I say upon no better or other account 't is no wonder if the success be accordingly and that men steering such a course not only turn their backs upon all supernatural Religion but at last arrive at the utmost confines of all prophaneness and contempt of Religion it self in down-right Atheism Fifthly 'T is no unusual thing to see many that if they may not enjoy the worship they are affected to and think the best will go to none at all And from such a habit once gotten 't is easie to foresee what a precipice of Atheism men are at the brink of All men are not so well catechized in Religion nor so well affected to it as to try all experiments before they forsake it There is in the generality of men something in the parties and persons they adhere to and in the mode of Worship they joyn in which pleaseth them and has some part in their affections as well as Religion it self purely and abstractly considered And although such collateral things are in themselves not the best and highest motives to divine Worship yet they are such as considerably prevail with not the least part of mankind And they are such as God in his providence over-rules to preserve men in their open owning a Deity and a visible subjection to him in some outward worship and to prevent a total apostacy to Atheism We may not unreasonably suppose that the restraint which in some times past was upon the use of the Liturgy and the present worship of the Church of England to which the generality of the Nation were earnestly inclined did much occasion that Atheism which hath too visibly infected many amongst us For not being able to enjoy the way of worship they most liked and wholly disgusting the way that was then used in publick 't is to be feared that in a short time many came by that means to throw off all thoughts of God and by a disuse of paying any homage or service to him came at last totally to deny him and positively to dispute against him The great concern of a Christian State is to justifie the common cause of God in the world and to dam out the flood of general Atheism Such who can have no tye from above and disown all superiour obligations are never to be ruled but by
foppery and believe it I would never doubt to make him confess against Euclide That a part is greater than the whole and bring him to justifie the highest Non-sense that absurdity it self can attain to A second Argument to conduct us toward God and to prove that he made the world shall be this The natural rectitude and innate harmony of the world and the due subornation of things one to another and to the whole of the world all things concentring in one common end This must needs come from an eternal rectitude and a supreme Director the wisest of all workmen and contrivers if you admit causes superiour to effect Can you perswade your reason that the Sun and the Moon and the Stars were by chance fixed in the Firmament and that they do by chance keep a constant uninterrupted course and make constant day and night and a certain fixed determination of all times and seasons Can the Atheist without impudent madness perswade himself that Seed-time and Harvest and all the regular subordination of things one to another in their proper uses and dependencies are owing to nothing but chance Either they were so eternally or so in time If eternally they could not be by chance for chance cannot be eternal for whatsoever was eternally so could have no possibility of chance whether it should be so or not so Chance is a fiction a phantasm a thing without a real Being there is no such thing as chance ever was or can be either in things temporal or eternal A thing that is by chance must be such a thing as comes to pass without the necessary enforcement of any certain cause A thing that might have been or might not have been or might any way have been otherwise than it is But there is no such thing now in the world and whatever was eternally so was ever so and without a possibility of ever being otherwise so or of ever being not so If they come to be so in time they must either make themselves so or be made so make themselves so I have proved already they could not nothing can be the original cause of it self and therefore they must needs be made so and if made so then they could not come by chance to be so Because the world consisting of causes and effects one thing still causing another and nothing without cause there must necessarily and naturally be a cause of these causes and whatsoever caused these causes must needs be a cause and the highest cause If the world were ever caused by any thing but it self it could never be by chance because whatsover causeth any thing destroyes the being of it by chance For if it had a cause there was a reason why it came to pass and if there were a reason why it came to pass then it did not come to pass by chance And if the world in the first matter of it brought forth it self by chance there could then never have been any thing but chance in it for chance can produce nothing but chance there could have been no such thing as a certain cause in it Now we evidently see the contrary that there is no such thing as chance is the world The whole world is a great bundle of causes and effects When we say a thing happens by chance we say and mean no more but that it happened unexpectedly and that we do not at present see the cause of it That we call Lottery is nothing else but taking the visible effects of causes we purposely conceal from our selves He that shuffles Cards does not know what game he shall have because he purposely hides the cause from himself and takes only the effect But no man can therefore think there is such a thing as chance in that for if he looked upon the Cards as he shuffled them he would find his own disposal of them in such places was the cause of his game There is a certain fixed regularity in the course of every thing and a genuine dependance of one thing upon another Nothing moves nothing operates any way but as 't is moved and caused which unanswerably shews that nothing in the world hath any motion or operation innately and primarily in it self but comes all from a first mover and infinite cause of every thing Whatsoever we see come to pass though at the present we cannot point out the cause yet we see enough visible in it to assure us it has some cause He that cannot give a punctual demonstrative reason for the ebbing and flowing of the Sea yet sees enough in it by the constancy of it the certain time it keeps and the due correspondency it holds to some of the heavenly bodies to satisfie him that there is a natural cause of it and a reason to be given for it and that 't is not possible to be a thing by chance but is a thing linked into the round of the world and bears its proportion to the general subordination and harmony of things If the Atheist be so ridiculously foolish as to say that all that we see and call order and method is nothing but chance and that every thing happens still by chance so to be as we see it to be he must either palpably confute himself or else deny all the necessary causes and effects we see in the world and tell us that what we see constantly to be and never was known nor seen otherwise to be and in the reason of the things themselves must needs be soe and cannot be otherwise is a thing of meer chance and so may happen to be otherwise That is he must say that Rain must not necessarily moisten the earth but may perhaps scorch it and burn it up and that the Sun must not necessarily heat me but may perhaps cool me and chill me and that Summer is not necessary to come as it does but may chance to come in the place of winter and winter in the place of summer For if these things have no foundation but chance they may by chance be otherwise thaâ— now they are The rational soul abhorâ—â— chance it makes a reason of no use ' Tâ—â— strange chance should frame the world and frame the highest principle in it with a perfect antipathy to it self and to bâ— of no use at all to it For 't is to no purâ—pose to think reason or debate about whâ—â— comes by chance It forbids all foresight and all rational deductions and that suâ—premest acting of a wise man to fit and suâ—â— means to ends Besides there is this further evidencâ— of God to us in this rectitude we finâ— in the frame of the world That direct coâ—traries and such as are in their naturâ— destructive one to another are over-ruled a perfect harmony and coalition in the propâ—gation of the world How could eveâ— contrary elements of fire and water hoâ—â— could all other natural opposites be â—â—conciled and made to consist together 〈◊〉 the composion of things
Atoms had been rational Atoms and truly he might as well have begged and supposed them into reason as motion for bare matter can no more be proved to have an intrinsique motion in it which would make it absolutely necessary for all matter to move at all times than it can be proved to think will and reason and he that beggs and takes things for granted without the trouble of proof should take all that would serve his turn I say had Epicurus his Atoms been reasonable Atoms they would never have done any thing by chance because they had a superiour principle to do it by they would never have put that to the venture which might have been made certain Their own principle would have instructed them not to have put that to the venture of chance whether it should be or should not be which by reason might have been made certain to be A man that hath eyes would never shut them and go to discover colours by feeling Every superiour principle must needs act above an inferiour Whatever did happen by meer chance to be had a power to be and by reason might have been made certain to be How monstrously unreasonable is it to believe that these Atoms that had nothing in themselves but bare matter and motion upon the best supposition should produce in man and in nothing else a rational soul and that that in man which we call the rational soul should be nothing else but the more active and generous part of these Atoms which became so by being more smooth and round than the rest which you must believe fell by chance all to the share of men and no other Being had the hap to have any of them in their compositions We must also believe these eternal Atoms to be some of one size and some of another some of one quality and some of another and yet all eternal which is a flat contradiction to all notion of eternity Fourthly Suppose in these Atoms matter and motion the world could never come to be made fortuitously thereby For First all motion in every thing must either be from a superiour mover or from an innate and self-originated principle of motion in it self If from a superiour mover then we come to God If from an innate motion that any thing hath in and from it self that motion must needs be eternal For nothing can move that is not set on work or that doth not infinitely set it self on work If motion have beginning it must own it self to some beginner if it have no beginning it must be infinite and eternal and there needs no better or other argument to prove that any motion had a beginning than when we see it has an ending for as all mechanick motion by its coming to an end shews plainly it had a primum movens and was set on work so does all other motion by its perioding and ending declare plainly it had its beginning ab extra and is not self-originated and eternal So that if the motion of these Atoms came from a first mover then they came from a cause and their motion must needs be regular and corresponding to that first cause If they had no first mover then their motion must be eternal as Epicurus sayes it is and nothing that moves eternally can move by chance because it must needs have the highest perfection of motion And where that is 't is impossible to suppose any such thing as chance For whatever did eternally move can never cease so to move and so can have no such thing as chance conversant about it Secondly Matter it self cannot be moved fortuitously by motion supposed inherent in it that is utterly impossible because all matter determines its own motion Heavy things move downward and cannot fortuitously move upward Had there been nothing but chance to sement the world the heavy part would have been sure to have gone downward and the light part upward and they would never have met nor pieced together The motion of things is determined in the nature of their being And therefore we cannot reasonably say that bare matter and motion ever caused any thing by chance unless you will say it caused every thing to be by chance just as it must needs be and necessarily be which is a contradiction Who can believe chance the cause and certainty the effect We see all things moving in perfect order and not only our experience assures us of this but our reason shews us it must necessarily so come to pass For such causes do produce such effects suitable to the nature and being of things and an intrinsique causality and innate dependence upon each other which must needs be the effect of the supreme and great cause of all Let any man consider that noble principle in man the rational soul with the suitableness of it to govern himself and the rest of the world and how all things in their being and dependency lie proportioned to such a superiority Let him view the make of a man and a woman and see how suitable and how necessary they are one to another in their very composition and how the male and the female in all other creatures are adapted to propagate their own kind and to be useful each to other and the instinct they carry about them so to be Let him look upon the faces of men and women and consider them there never having been yet seen any two without some variety Let him look above him and below him and round about him and see what harmony there is between the Heavens and the Earth how the well-being of the one depends upon the influence of the other and how certain and regular those are by which all times and seasons are exactly determined Let him look upon the Sea and consider how useful that is to the world to introduce a trade and commerce among all Nations and to make each one capable of enjoying the good of all the rest Let him view the constant course of its ebbings and flowings and the standing Law of its Boundaries whereby such a mass of waters are still kept in one channel and continued in their proper station And when he has viewed these and a thousand things more that lye obvious to his reasonable contemplation if he then think the composition of the whole universe and all the parts of it and the grand oeconomy that is in it came from nothing but meer chance he renders himself a person fitter for Bedlam than disputation Yet such wretched shifts are men forced to fly to when they are labouring to exclude the notion of God and banish a Deity out of the world The Epicurean Atomist falls plainly under the heavy stroaks of several gross absurdities First He makes his Atoms which are the matter of which he will have the world to consist to move about in his ultra-mundan-space without a tendency to a center Which is perfectly impossible that any matter should move by a motion
is kept by all natural Beings but because they keep such a course as carries an intrinsick reason for it in their very nature and being and such a course as they must keep and can keep no other If you dig up a Tree and cut off the root 't will certainly die This we are assured of not only from the fact of it that we continually find it so but our reason necessarily tells us it must be so and can be no otherwise And therefore whatever is done above all natural power and contrary to all natural operation must needs silence our sense and our reason and all parts of the world and forceth us to recurre to somewhat above the world that must be Lord over it and the great disposer of it Two things seem to make it plain that the whole world and all the ability that nature has can never produce a miracle First Nature can never go beyond it self nor do any thing by a power above it self The bounds of every thing is its own being 'T is an absurdity to say a thing should out-do it self or that the effect should be greater than the cause If any thing be done that is beyond all the power of nature that could never be caused by nature To cure a man that is sick of a disease or to raise a man that is a natural creeple to a perfect soundness by speaking a word to him is beyond all the confines of natural power and therefore cannot be an effect arising from any natural cause there being no such thing potentially in nature it self nor any relative operation natural in such a way Secondly Nature cannot contradict it self because its productions are suitable to and inherent in its own being Nature is as a free agent so a necessary agent The fire cannot be cold nor the water hot Throw men into the fire and if they be not burnt they must be beholding to somewhat above nature for nature will destroy them If a man should walk in the air and not fall and walk upon the waters and not sink it must be by a help supernatural For nature should otherwise oppose it self which it cannot do And to say its effects should cease is all one as to say nature it self in its own being should cease and so the world should cease Whatsoever can go beyond the power of nature and contradict the power of nature must needs be above the power of nature and what is so must needs be above the power of the world And this doth two waies evidently overthrow the vain supposition of the worlds eternity For First If there be any power above it it cannot be eternal unless you will make two eternals one above another which is absurd and perfectly impossible And Secondly If ever the course of nature and this world were stopped and crossed then I am sure the world in the course of it cannot have been eternal neither Two things are usually objected against miracles First The matter of fact is denied And Secondly The Atheist will tell you that those things we call miracles were not really and truly so but were extraordinary and unusual things brought about by some secret natural cause though not known nor perceived For the first of these Objections I will handle it distinctly by it self To the second I answer Every thing in the world was at the first a miracle nor could any reason be given of it Which is a plain proof that God made the world and that it did not make it self There was no other cause of all originals in nature and of the first things that were in the world but that God pleased to make them No doubt at the first a man might have called the Sun or a Rainbow a great miracle Nor could they ever find out any natural cause of them nor of the first being of any thing The whole world was a stupendious miracle and without any reason to be given for it but what lay in the makers breast To me therefore that saying of Aristotle seems wise and excellent That it is absurd for any man to go about to define first principles because they cannot be defined But since the world is extant and our constant beholding of it and converse with it makes it no more a miracle to us than we are to our selves and since we find that certainty and fixation in the worlds first make that there is no more since made but a continuance of the world in a natural orderly course and succession and that these first originals do by a certain necessary law of their own being and existence propagate the world in a way not only obvious to our senses but demonstratively to our reason and that such beings cannot cease to operate as they do nor cannot operate otherwise than they do we come rightly to call that a miracle which is neither one of the worlds original pieces or first principles nor any thing that can naturally be deduced from any or all of them in the regular way of the worlds existing In answering therefore this objection I will first admit all that can be admitted to the Atheist's advantage which is that whensoever we see any thing come to pass that we are not able to give an account how in a natural and in the ordinary course of the world it should come to pass and though we have not seen it come to pass before yet in that case if there be a possibility of a remote and occult cause that we do not at the present see nor comprehend there is no absolute necessity to impose that as a miracle upon any man because he will say 't is more reasonable to believe it to come from somewhat he doth see if there be a possibility of it than to come from what he doth not see But when the case falls out to be that a thing is brought to pass to which we are not only unable to assign a natural cause but such a thing as is not possible to have a natural cause which is necessarily to be concluded when it either overthrows the course of nature and goes directly counter to it or is evidently above it and superiour to it in such a case mankind must submit to it as a miracle and go to somewhat superiour to nature to find the cause of it There can never be a natural cause assigned for raising a dead man to life 't is both above nature and against nature For any man to be able in one moment to speak all languages is a thing above nature and naturally impossible for we see and know that men must arrive at the knowledge of any language by industry and use and cannot attain it otherwise In such cases as we see no visible natural cause for such things so 't is utterly impossible there should be any If a man should vanish out of our sight and in two or three minutes convey himself a hundred miles off as we could give
things where there is possibility on both sides there were good proof on both sides which to say were to make our faculties false and a most notorious absurdity that a thing might be proved to be and proved not to be For 't is nor whether there be possibility on both sides for that there is and that is no more than to say if a thing be or if it be not there is no contradiction either way and so no impossibility either way But if possibility be made of any force to affirm or deny a thing then possibility is supposed to make a proof and then it must needs make it both waies and prove a thing may be and prove a thing may not be because 't is both waies possible 'T is plain therefore that bare possibility is no proof at all any way and whenever the Atheist recurres to bare possibility to help him he recurres to a meer nullity He says a thing is because it may be and 't is not because it may not be which as to the proof of it either way either to its being or not being amounts to just nothing In some cases impossibility proved of the one side carries necessity on the other side But whatsoever leaves things in such and equilibrium as possibility does which sayes they may be or they may not be can never certainly prove the being of them either way The disingenuity of the Atheist will also further appear to us if we consider that he himself admits invisibility and infinity in his own supposed notions about the world and yet object against them when they are ascribed to God He admits them in subjects we know are no way capable of them and yet denies them when they are most properly attributed to our supreme Being infinitely perfect He that will suppose matter with an inherent motion in it infinite must needs suppose it to have all possible perfection For whatsoever has infiniteness and self-origination must needs swallow up all perfection into it self or else no Being were capable of perfection Now let us once exclude the notion of God out of the world and where will you with any tolerable sense and without apparent absurdities place infinity with absolute perfection The notion we have in our minds of such a thing plainly tells us there is such a thing And our reason assures us it can be fixed no where but in a supreme Being which we call God The world is in its constitution such a thing and so related to God that the greatest shifters off of Divinity cannot give any tolerable account of the being of it to any reasonable creature without appropriating those things they most find fault with and cavil at in the notion of God to some part of the world Either they make the world infinite just as it is or else some small particles of matter with an inherent motion in them they must be eternal This shews a necessity of Eternity somewhere and that all things that are must needs come from somewhat that ever was by the judgement of every rational creature and that all mankind have naturally a notion and Idea of eternity within them So that whoever denies the being of God when he goes to give a reason of his denial is forced to confess and admit those things which he sayes are the grounds of his denyal and so makes it a thing not only of the very same but of ten times greater difficulty to believe there is no God than to confess there is one For when he goes about to give a reasonable account how the world could come to be without some first cause he is forced to admit all those things he himself objects against a first cause and besides lyes under all those absurdities the being of the world will cast upon our reasons when we go about to give an account of it excluding the notion of a God and a first cause from it And as the Atheist is exceeding disingenious in his principles and objections so he is monstrously unreasonable First In this that he ascribes the world to causes that have the highest improbability and in some cases impossibility to our reason plainly attending them First 'T is plainly impossible that the world in the course we now see it should have been eternal according to that Idea our souls are able to make of eternity For though we are not able to give a full description of what is eternal yet we are able to say negatively what we are sure cannot be eternal Suppose eternity to be never so much beyond me and above me yet 't were absurd for me to admit any thing to be eternal that does not reach the notion I have of eternity But grant to the Atheist the most he pretends to which is that there is a bare possibility that the world may have been eternal and that there is no contradiction to say so I think I have fully proved that bare possibility is no proof at all nor ought to have the least sway with any reasonable man in the affirmation or negation of any thing And therefore when the Atheist recurs as generally he doth to bare possibility to support his notions he is driven beyond the confines of all rational proof and endeavours to make something of an absolute nothing He takes that for proof which only gives an admission that there may be proof Take him in the other way in the notion of his Atoms from whence he will needs derive the world what an aspect doth it carry to our reason to imagine that Atoms in a fancied vacuity had an eternal gravity in them which caused an eternal motion of them up and down without any tendency at all to a center and that they could never cease their motion till they hit by chance one against another and were diverted that way That this dull matter and this sensless motion in it caused by the internal gravity of it did by chance produce this glorious fabrick of a rational soul and so did transfer that to another which it had not first in it self And that by the chance and casuality of the motion of these Atoms the world and all the order and harmony of it was first produced The Atheist in this will never arrive at bare possibility For the whole of it so far as it is urged against Gods making the world and made use of to self-originate the world is a perfect Systeme of non-sense He that sayes the world was made by chance does in effect say He cannot tell how it was made and that when we deny God to be the Author of it we can give no reasonable account of it The Atheist is also further unreasonable because he denies the being of that which the world is a plain effect of and the contemplation of the whole world doth rationally lead us unto He denies also that to be which we have an innate notion of in our own souls which is a supreme Being absolutely