to the other Because all things impartially weighed the greatness of the good you hope is a greater advantage than the certainty of the small good you possess You hope indeed with uncertainty but that uncertainty is the foundation of your hope and sufficiently rewarded by the greatness of what you expect 'T is upon that account that Merchants venture a little for a considerable gain though very doubtful A Souldier and a Seaman expose their lives to the end that they may pass the rest of their daies more comfortably though they cannot be secure of the length of their life nor of a gain which a thousand perils upon Sea and Land seem to obstruct They sacrifice the present time to that which is to come things that are certain to those that are doubtful and look upon that comfortable living they promise themselves one day as a greater happiness than the quiet possession of their life with all the troubles and pains that attend it Should the happiness of the next life exceed this only of some Ages or Degrees there were ground enough to a wiseman to prefer the first to the second Nor is there any man of sense but would resign up an age of ordinary happiness and such as the world conceives it upon hopes of a reign of a thousand years and a life infinitely happy But is there no proportion between these two sorts of Goods if that maxim be false that the certain is to be preferred to the uncertain when the advantages are not equal how much more when the one is finite and the other infinite the uncertain you expect infinitely more durable and perfect than the certain you venture And this is the just idea we must form our selves of this and of the next life What proportion is there between the pleasures of this world and the happiness of Heaven What comparison between joyes so limited in their Nature in their Duration in their Extent and those unspeakable ones the eye has never seen because they are not Colours nor the Ear heard because they are not Sounds August Ep. 118. nor have entred into the heart of man because it is too narrow for them What equality can there be found between the possession of the whole earth it self and that of all the riches of God Between the dark heavy passible state of our bodys and the blessed state of immortality and spirituality wherein the resurrection of Christ shall instate them Certainly the Distance is greater than that of Atom to the Universe And must the Irreligious be afraid of venturing that finite good that Atom that Nothing against an infinite Being Must he not be ashamed of claiming here the right of preferring things that are certain to them that are not he who in the way a hunting on his travels at play and in his commerce disclaims it so openly He ventures in all these things with this difference that there is still some proportion in his risque and gain both of them being finite whereas there is none between this life and eternity CHAP. VIII Conclusion of this Discourse LEt the Impious then extend so far as he pleases the greatness of his sinful joyes Let him live to the age of Mathuselem without the least cloud or mixture of infelicity yet he cannot deny that this long contexture of years and happiness is still finite He must needs consess that an uncertain good is to be preferred to any other when it is infinite The uncertainty of it not debarring us from our hopes and the last degree of hope of an infinite happiness far surpassing the enjoyment of a transitory one All the venture is to lose those transitory Goods which loss being already inevitable cannot be parallel'd with an happiness incapable of diminution I see no answer to this except that eternal happiness and misery are Ideas subsisting no where but in the fancies of Christians which is the more irrational because as long as they cannot convince their Religion of falshood and impossbility but still doubts and still reasons all the foregoing ratiocination remains in its entire force against him This only may be added that this is the conformity between a Christian and an Irreligious man that the first believes and acts contrary to his belief and the second doubts and acts contrary to his doubts Of the one it is too too manifest The other talks as if he were certain and thinks and droops without ever being able to fix himself When he speaks of Religion he is confident that it is altogether false and impossible and when he reasons he finds himself exposed to a bottomless Sea of doubts and uncertainties THE Second Discourse The removal of some Objections against Christian Religion IT is not intended here to prove the truth of Christian Religion this having been already done by great men with a success answerable to their expectation but only to remove some of the most substantial Objections of the Irreligious whereby Christian Religion is evinced to be at least most probable They may be reduc'd to these three heads The seeming lowness of the mysteries Christian Religion obliges us to believe The incomprehensibility of our Doctrine The impossibility of those Miracles we look upon as the foundation of our Faith CHAP. I. The Lowness and Despicableness of our Mysteries answered THis reproach is not peculiar to the Irreligious The Jews before them had lookt upon the death of Christ as a stumbling block and the Heathens as a foolishness Marcio and Valentinus as Tertullian relates it did teach that Christ had assumed an imaginary body and his Birth and Death were only illusions put upon the eyes of the Spectators Apelles would have him covered with a real flesh but borrowed from the Stars and not from the Blessed Virgin Thus man would have ordered the grand mysterie of Incarnation had he been Master of it He would have left the bare disposition to God as if he could or should do nothing else but what man is able to think The occasion of those Dreams of the Hereticks was that they believed Christ's humiliations unworthy of him and the ground of the Irreligious men is that they believe they are unworthy of themselves Both are as different in their consequences as in their principles The first concluded that he had no real body nor had really suffered The second from the birth and death of Christ inferred that he was no God The aim of both is to separate sufferings from God as things altogether irreconcilable The Irreligious destroy the Divinity of Christ and receive his humiliations The Hereticks deny his humiliations to preserve his Divinity Christians unite them both in the person of Christ acknowledging that though God as his Father yet he is become lower than the Angels taking upon him our nature and lower than men suffering for them a most cruel and shameful death Supposing then as a Principle that Christ is God it is no hard task to prove that his
as younger Brothers The Egyptians and the Ethiopians claimed that honour and declared that they came immediately from the womb of the earth And the Athenians took the proud title of 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 But the Chaldaeans and Egyptians carried their Dispute to the very height The first as refer Diodorus and Tully who laugh at both said that when Alexander the Great over-run Asia they had already applied themselves to the study of the Stars just four hundred seventy thousand years And not reckoning their years by the reign of their Kings but divers periods some of six thousand others of six hundred the least of sixty years they made up their account The Egyptians wanted no number to outvie them They found in their Archives that since they had the name of Egyptians the Stars had already compleated four times their great revolution that is returned to the same state where they were when they began to move which includes an incredible number of years Being as proud of Astrology as the Caldaeans they boasted to have kept the Ephemerides of an infinite number of years and the lives of their Kings all that time An Author of theirs relates three branches of them One of Gods the other of Heroes the third of men who reigned an infinite number of ages Nay they were so thirsty of antiquity as to say that Vulcan their first King reigned innumerable ages But the Annals of his reign were lost The Sun succeeded to him as being his Son and reigned six hundred thousand six hundred seventy four years May it not be askt whether the brain of them that made such reckoning or of them that believed them was well settled and yet this is the ground of the belief of the Irreligious Those Dreams are all the shelter they can find if they go to prove the authority of the world by way of authority They agree therefore with Christians in that they believe incomprehensible things But with this difference that we believe only upon the authority of God who has revealed them We are perswaded that his power goes farther than our apprehension And that he includes within and works without himself greater wonders than we are able to conceive And as it is alwaies rational to trust him who is infinitely wise so reason it self forces us to believe things beyond reason This impotency of conceiving the works of God is the only thing can make us happy What sort of God is this that can be included in the narrow minds of men Certainly an object of this nature is a slender ground of felicity And our hopes being inseparable from our faith his incomprehensibility is the greatest comfort of our souls This Irreligious will admit of nothing but what his senses or his experience make plain to him When therefore they believe any thing they neither see nor apprehend their belief is not grounded upon the certainty or evidence but the interest they have in things It is not the object that determines and fixes their belief but their heart and inclinarions They believe that such a thing is after such a manner because they know it and are satisfied but because they would have it so Nay they carry so far that abuse of their reason that when they cannot avoid to believe things morally incredible they had rather believe them incredible by their gross absurdity than any divine grandure that lies in them These are the miserable shifts of the Irreligious But if they could stay there and feed themselves with the imaginations of their hearts without any danger we had nothing to say to them All wise men would only think them out of their wits and so far 't is well 't is no worse But to believe impertinencies and Chimera's with that danger that if they mistake they shall fall into an eternal state of misery 't is a fury a passion an extravagancy that wants a name and can scarce be imagined CHAP. V. Abuse the Irreligious makes against the Immortality of the soul of the conformity between man and beast IT is not intended here to prove the immortality of the soul but only to shew how false and inconsistent are the principles of Irreligion There is a vast conformity between man and beast in their senses in the multiplication of their kinds their self-preservation their passions their distempers their death c. From the mortality of the souls of beasts the Irreligious concludes that of the soul of man and thinks in that to judge according to the natural impression that form in his mind so many qualities which being common to both make a sort of prejuge against man To evince how false is that ratiocination it may suffice to prove that it is no less against than for him He concludes from that conformity that as these of beasts so our souls die Why not that theirs are immortal as well as ours The conformity being equal to both sides it must not be more partial to one than to the other According to all appearances saies the Irreligious Man Beast are altogether alike in the necessity of dying and in all the consequences of death But the whole beast dies body and soul therefore the whole man dies so also But the very self same argument may be thus as probably inverted Beasts and man are are alike in their death But man dies in his body and not in his soul therefore Beasts do so too and their souls are immortal Either of these conclusions must be equal to the Irreligious since professing to believe but what he knowes he knowes and can know the mortality of the souls of Beasts no better than their immortality But Christians saies he acknowledge the whole Beast dies Which answer is the more absurd because he must not argue from what we believe but only from what falls under his senses and experience and what he must thence rationally conclude But he sees only in a Beast the death of the body His eyes can go no further and concludes from that internal equality any thing for their soul Or leaving the answer in its full latitude 't is in vain he makes use of our authority concerning the destruction of the souls of beasts since we do it by reasons which establish the immortality of ours But supposing with them and all the world besides the mortality of the souls of Beasts all that can be concluded from their conformity with man can only fall upon that wherein they are alike There is in man that which is rational and that which is animal Man is born preserves himself by nourishment and his kind by generation He is subject to the distempers of his body the passions of his heart the disorders of the Elements and the necessity of dying All this is common to him and the smallest Beasts Nay many of them out-do him in the perfection of his senses Their light is more piercing their hearing quicker their smelling more refined But all this is still animal All
souls immortality It is true But are they of her destruction Is not either of them equally unattainable to our senses What can then determine him rather to the belief of one than of the other since both are equally unknown to him CHAP. VIII Some places of Ecclesiastes Irreligious men make use of to prove the mortality of the soul explained NOthing surprises more than to see the Irreligious make use of a Book written against Irreligion The Ecclesiastes supposes every where existence of God and the creation of man He condemns the vanity of his desires reproaches him with ignorance in the works of God draws a picture of the chief abuses of all conditions threatens all sinners with the last judgement and exhorts them to repent before death may overtake them It is easie to see that all this is grounded upon immortality If the soul does not out-live the body it is needless to perswade to actions of piety which should go unrewarded and to deter us from crimes by the image of a judgement to come which had nothing real in it Certainly the design of Solomon being to lead us to God through the duties of a sincere piety this Book is directly opposite to the error of the destruction of the soul the belief of her mortality being the foundation of all Religion But had he established it in any place with what probability could we make use of another to destroy it Unless we should impute to the Wise man a shameful contradiction and accuse him to pull down before-hand what he intended to build after The scope of the last Chapter is to advise men to serve God from their Youth and not put off their conversion to the last years of their life wherein repentance is so suspicious And having metaphorically described the dissolution of the body in these words Ere the wheel be broken at the Cistern he breaks off his metaphors and saies plainly Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it 12.6 These words make out clearly the immortality of the soul If our spirit subsists not after the dissolution of the body how can it return to God Can a spirit which is annihilated return to his maker And this seems to be inforced by the comparison he makes of it to the dust For the dust our body is made of subsists really after the dissolution of the whole Nay this dust is immortal no creature being able to annihilate it and matter remaining incorruptible to any natural power Therefore the dust of our body subsisting even after our death returning to the earth as it was who doubts but our spirit returning to God who gave it subsists after the separation There is not the least colour to attribute any other sense to the Wise man And we are naturally led to it by the justness of the comparison between these two parts of our selves The spirit shall return unto God who gave it as the dust shall return to the earth as it was 'T is the Wise-mans proposition But the dust subsists even after the separation and returns really to the earth Therefore the spirit returning to God who gave it subsists really also Nor is it an amazing thing that our soul should be immortal since the dust and earth she animates is so too And as death is not the annihilation of bodies but their separation from souls and their dissolution into elements so it is not the annihilation of the soul but its separation from the body and reunion to God as her source Indeed after so precise an assertion of the immortality of the soul any ingenious adversary will confess that if some obscure place occurs it is a rule of common sense to reduce it to the perspicuity of these words But what must one say if that very place the Irreligious usurps against immortality should suppose it so plainly that it is meer nonsense out of that supposition The Wise-man saies that having considered those places where Judges sit he had seen wickedness in them and impiety in their judgements vers 16 17. But that their verdicts shall be reviewed and reformed When God shall judge the righteous and the wicked for there is a time for every purpose and for every work that it cannot be understood but of the last judgement and consequently supposes before-hand the immortality of the soul He adds vers 18 19. that he has said in his heart concerning the sons of men that God might manifest them and that they might see that they themselves are beasts 'T is upon that account in the Wise-mans opinion that as one dies so dies the other Yea they have all one breath so that a man has no preeminence upon a beast for all is but vanity And that they may be convinced of it all go to one place all are of the dust and turn to dust again This is so strong a prejudice for stupid and carnal men as it inclines them to believe that their condition is perfectly the same with that of beasts Who knoweth the spirit of man that goes upward and the spirit of the beast that goes downward to the earth 'T is almost the same manner of speaking as that which expresses so perspicuously the immortality of the soul and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it Which is the Tame as if he had said in that deep ignorance of all things men are involved there is not so much as one who knowes that which no body should be a stranger to being the foundation of all Religion that rational souls are immortal and that of the beasts is not It appears therefore clearer than light it self that the Wiseman proposes not this truth as doubtful but as undoubtedly granted Which is an extraordinary manner of speaking When to exaggerate some points men are engaged to know one doubts whether they do know others which are more common Is there an ignorance may one say equal to that of the Popish people in many places They think it lawful to keep another mans goods as long as the Law does not call them to an account they blame no Oaths but perjury Nay who of them knowes whether there is three persons in God and two Natures in Christ 'T is just the same trope the Wise-man spoke in He is not uncertain whether the soul returns to God whence she came since he professes it expresly at the end of his Book but he doubts whether amongst the men of his time any had light enough to discover this truth in the midst of so much darkness If speaking thus he seems to doubt of the souls immortality he must have doubted also of the corruptibility of the souls of beasts his expression reaching equally to both Who knoweth the spirit of man that goes upward and the spirit of beasts that go downward He must then mean this Who knowes whether the spirit of man subsists after death as it is usually believed