Selected quad for the lemma: nature_n
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A27438
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Of revelation and the Messias a sermon preached at the publick commencement at Cambridge, July 5th, 1696 / by Richard Bentley ...
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Bentley, Richard, 1662-1742.
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1696
(1696)
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Wing B1942; ESTC R5633
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15,739
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38
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fervour and temerity of Youth the force and the frequency of Temptations and the narrow dubious conconfines between Virtue and Vice and we may pronounce it impossible that any man should so govern his steps through all the lubricous paths of Life as never once to slip and fall from his duty Agreeably to the testimony of Scripture which hath concluded all under sin Gal. 3. 22. and again If we say we have no sin we deceive our selves and the truth is not in us and again both Iews and Gentiles are all under sin all have sinned and come short of the glory of God Every mouth then be stopp'd and all the world must plead guilty before the tribunal of God for by the deeds of the Law the Law of nature as well as of Moses no flesh can be justified in his sight It is evident then from the principles of pure Reason beside the authority of Scripture that upon the Deists Hypothesis upon the terms of natural Religion no Salvation can be obtain'd no Life and Immortality can be expected For that being the free offer and favour of God he might justly set what price he pleas'd upon it even the greatest that we can possibly pay nothing less than entire obedience than unspotted innocence than consummate virtue Thus far then even Reason evinceth and holds the Lamp to Revelation Some means of Reconciliation between God and Man the Judge and the Offender must be contrived some vicarious satisfaction to justice and model of a new Covenant or else the whole bulk of Mankind are for ever unhappy And surely to prevent that to retrieve a perishing world was a weighty concern even of greater importance than the very creating it and more worthy of the care and consult of Heaven I say the care of Heaven for alas here on Earth what expedient could Man find out How could Dust and Ashes take upon him to speak unto the Lord Could any of the Sons of Adam presume to be advocate for the rest himself one of the criminals himself in want of another advocate and what friend knew we at the court of Heaven of that high power and favour with God as to offer his intercession or so wonderfully kind to Us as to pay our satisfaction We must freely own to the Deist that here Reason was at a stand even Nature her self languish'd between hope and despair and in the stile of the Apostle the whole Creation groan'd and travell'd in pain together when behold what Revelation hath informed and assured us of the eternal Son of the Almighty the brightness of the Paternal Glory and the express image of his Substance even He vouchsafed to be our Patron and Mediator to take our Nature upon him and to dwell among Men to fulfill that Law of righteousness wherein we were deficient to bear our guilt and our burthen upon himself and to offer his most precious blood as an expiation for our offences as the seal of a new Covenant better than the Law of Nature a Covenant of more gracious terms terms of Repentance and Remission of sins so that if we truly believe in Him and sincerely endeavour to observe his Commands our imperfect Righteousness through the merits of his Sufferings shall be imputed accepted and rewarded as if it were an entire obedience to the strict Law of Works and of natural Perfection And now I dare presume to ask even our adversaries themselves what flaws or fallacies they can shew in all this If it be true then that Reason it self discovers such absolute necessity of some way of Reconciliation between God and Man and if it was necessary for Man as being the party concern'd to know the particular way that God did approve and accept of and if mere Reason could never find that out but Revelation alone must and ought to inform us and lastly if such Revelation be actually made attested and promulgated to the world what pretence is there left why we should not believe and acquiesce in it if upon examination it bear all the marks of true Revelation if it contain nothing unworthy of it self and of the wisdom and goodness of its Author And is not the Oeconomy of man's Salvation as it is set forth in Holy Scriptures every way agreeable to that divine character No if we ask our Adversaries 't is an improper and unequal method 't is inconsistent with the justice and impartiality of God Rex Iupiter omnibus idem God say they if he had design'd such an universal benefit for Mankind would have exhibited it equally and indifferently to every Age and Nation alike But the conditions of Salvation proposed in the Gospel are incompetent and much too narrow being restrain'd to those times and countries alone that can hear of the fame of Iesus and believe in his Person And what becomes then of all the former Ages of men before He was born What of those remote Nations ever since that could have no intelligence of him nor hear the least tidings of Iudea and Ierusalem must all those Myriads of Souls perish for invincible ignorance for want of impossible Faith For how could they believe on him of whom they had not heard and how could they hear without a Preacher And why should the God of the whole earth the God that is no respecter of persons no nor of nations be so unaccountably kind so unjustly fond and partial to any single country much less to a little obscure people the Iews scarce heard of in the rest of the world till they were captives and slaves in it and withdraw his paternal love from so many other Nations much more considerable and more worthy of his providence Is he God of the Iews only Is he not also of the Gentile This way of discourse we may expect from the Deists And I hope according to the advice of the text we are both able and ready to give a Reply For first as to that imagined Partiality of God in preferring any one country before the rest of the World to be the Land of Christs Nativity what a poor and contemptible cavil For upon supposition that the Messias of God was to take human nature upon him and be born of a Woman must he not of necessity be born in some one particular Country exclusively to all the rest And is not that then a ridiculous objection against any single Country that may equally be urged against all whatsoever Neither was it mere Fondness in the Deity that he chose the obscure land of Palestine for the birth place of his Son rather than Greece or Italy or Asia the theatres of Art and Learning and the seats of Empire For not to mention Abraham and the Patriarchs whose singular faith and piety justly obtain'd of God that their Posterity should have the adoption and the glory and the covenants and the promises and the consanguinity of Christ it appears also from event that the circumstances of
us even to the confines of Heaven beyond the limits of Reason But if the Deists think to oblige us to give a natural account of those mysteries without the authority of Scripture for that we must beg their excuse We will argue from strict Reason as much as they can pretend to but we must not submit that our adversaries shall confine us to improper topicks and impossible ways of proof It appears therefore that though we should decline and despair to give any account at all of the reasons and methods of God's counsel in the mission of his Son and only appeal to the sentence of Scripture yet the Deists ought to be satisfied with that proof since the Doctrine is so expresly taught in the oracles of God But besides this what if even natural Light shall discover to us some faint but yet certain views of that mysterious instance of divine Wisdom and Goodness and exhibit to us a rational account Why the Son of God should condescend to be our Mediator and Redeemer But before we engage in this attempt let it be lawfull to implore the candor of our Friends if while we endeavour to win over our Enemies we may seem to some To do too little or perhaps to others To venture too far and to advance beyond our Lines To discern then some reasons of this wonderfull Mystery we must take our prospect from the highest mountain of Nature from the first Creation and origin of human Race GOD who at the beginning viewed all the works of his hands and behold all things were very good made Man also upright and compleat without any defect in his whole composition without any original perversness of Soul or false byass of Will or Judgment without any natural obliquity or enormity of Inclinations He made him an intelligent Being to know God and Himself to understand and feel present happiness and to secure it by consideration and contrivance for the future He endow'd him with liberty of mind that he might act not of necessity nor blind instinct like the Brutes but with consciousness and voluntary choice He implanted in him diverse Appetites and Affections all usefull instruments of his happiness if fitly imployed and none vitious and culpable radically and in their whole nature but then only when they are applied to wrong objects or in right ones are raised or sunk beside their due temper and measure I say it again for the justification of our Creator that not one of the simple affections of the Soul no not Concupiscence Hatred Anger Revenge are in themselves criminal and sinfull Some of the Affections 't is true have very bad names but those are either mere excesses of simple Passions or else mix'd and compound ones which have no proper real essence but are only notional terms as Envy for example a very bad thing indeed but 't is an evil of our own product and not of God's creating For the real constituent parts of it are Hatred and Grief very usefull and lawfull affections but the evil of it is our own when we entertain that Hatred and Grief at the good that befalls others which is what we express by the complex name of Envy God therefore having so created Man in every capacity pure and perfect might justly require of him that he should maintain and preserve this original rectitude that in all his desires designs and actions he should constantly adhere to the dictates of Reason and Nature so as the least deviation would make him obnoxious to God's displeasure and nothing less than compleat obedience recommend him to his favour according to the terms proposed to Cain If thou dost well shalt thou not be accepted and if thou dost not well sin lies at the door God I say might expect and require of man such a perfect obedience to the Law of Nature because it was both reasonable and possible for Man to perform it Reasonable it was because every Statute of that Law promotes the true interest and felicity of Mankind even in the very performance 'T is true in the present posture of human affairs a man's duty is frequently inconsistent with his temporal interest But from the beginning it was not so neither would it be now if the whole world at once could be just and innocent For 't is not my keeping the Law but anothers transgressing it that involves me in any misery The scope and tendency of the Law it self is always mine and every man's advantage For 't is not a thing foreign and aliene to our nature imposed on us purely to try our obedience but it all results from our very frame and constitution The general preservation of man's Natural good is the sole root and fountain of the Moral the universal Profit and Pleasure the publick Happiness of human Life gives being and denomination to every virtue and vice and the true rules and directions to preserve and secure that happiness make up the whole Volume the Code and Pandect of the Law of Nature Without doubt then it was reasonable to obey where nothing was commanded us but to pursue our own interest nothing forbidden us but not to do our selves harm And secondly it was possible for man to perform that entire obedience For since as we have proved before all his natural faculties are right and good and the Law it self accommodated and proportion'd to those faculties there appears no necessary intrinsic impediment why he may not adequately observe it If every particular precept be possible to be done 't is not absolutely impossible to fulfill the universal And methinks they that on other accounts acknowledge that God requires such perfect obedience upon the terms of the Law of Nature should be very averse from believing that there is a natural and fundamental insufficiency in man to perform it For certainly the just God cannot be so importune and unreasonable a Master as to enjoyn us what is physically impossible to expect to reap where he has not sown to require Bricks without allowance of Straw But then though there was no such original and natural disability in Man yet there arose a moral and circumstantial one an accidental incapacity supervening to his Nature an impossibility from event that ever any person from the beginning of the world to the last period of it always excepting the Man Christ Iesus should be wholly pure and free from the contagion of Sin For our first Parents having fallen from their native state of innocence the tincture of evil like an hereditary disease infected all their posterity and the leaven of sin having once corrupted the whole Mass of Mankind all the species ever after would be sowred and tainted with it the vitious ferment perpetually diffusing and propagating it self through all generations For let us but consider the state of human life first a perpetual conversation among evil Examples and the strongest principle of our nature Imitation and then the ignorance and prejudices of Childhood the