and Wickedness are none of God's Creation but are Obliquities and Aberrations from those Rules and Laws he implanted in us and therefore as it is impossible the Soul should have any proper agreement with sin because 't is none of its Nature so she must needs on the other hand sensibly embrace and acquiesce in the Principles and Precepts of Holiness from that Vital Cognation they bear to her own Moral Being There is no capacious and generous Mind but will find it self wonderfully affected and inamour'd with the loveliness of Christianity there being nothing found but Principles of the highest worth and nobility and whatever else may speak true excellency and perfection The Gospel is nothing but God manifested in the Flesh an eternal Mind clothed with the condescensions of Humane Nature shewing us the Beauty and Pulchritude of that life from which we had so foully apostatiz'd and degenerated and confirming and re-establishing that Happy league which was once between our Souls and Righteousness By the tenor of which sacred Institute we are obliged to great measures and degrees of Holiness to Sobriety and Temperance Chastity and Purity to be strict observers of the Rules of Justice and Equity full of good nature and the desirable fruits of tenderness and compassion in a word we are injoyned no other things in Religion than what the best and bravest spirits the World ever knew have always accounted the flower and summity of Rational Natures And do not all considering Men find the greatest ease and satisfaction of Mind in the exercise of these things And whence comes this Heavenly calm and serenity of Soul but only from that gratefulness and symmetry that is between such things and our Intellectual Man so that the more earnestly we attend to them the more fully are we transformed into their lovely Image and likeness True Christianity is so far from debasing that on the contrary it infinitely exalts them by setting them at a true proportion to their proper Objects and raising them to such a state as all wise Men have ever acknowledged the highest Happiness and Perfection of the Soul of Man I have now shown the fitness and sutableness of the Gospel to the end for which it was designed in that it is furnished with all those Arguments of Credibility that may beget Assent in Rational Persons but its aptness and accomodateness to that great purpose of Men's salvation may further be demonstrated in that 2. Secondly It is so attemper'd to Humane Nature that Men shall certainly believe and yet no violence done to their Wills For Men being Moral Agents must be dealt withall according to their Natural Powers and Faculties and this makes the Method of saving Humane Souls by the Gospel to be indeed a Work of Wisdom and Counsel whereas if God should by his Omnipotency force them to a Belief and Obedience of it it would not have been so much an effect of Wisdome as of absolute and uncontrollable Power Now herein appears the Glory of Divine Wisdome in the choice of such means and ways as shall effectually bring to pass its end and purpose and yet no violence and force offered to that Nature in whose behalf it acts As therefore to assert that there is no necessity of the assistance of the grace and spirit of God in our progress in Virtue and Holiness but that Men may be good by the strength of the Powers of Nature is directly repugnant to the frame of Christianity delineated in the Holy Scriptures and the sense of the Universal Apostolick Church of Christ so to think that the Operation of God's Spirit upon the Hearts of Men is by an External Impetus and Force is no less precarious and absurd than the other is wicked and abominable I shall therefore wave the first of these as not being at all concerned with it but directly supposing the contrary and only discourse so far of the concourse and energy of the Spirit of God upon the minds will and affections of Men as is evidently declared in the Holy Scriptures And here I humbly conceive that the Sacred Writings do no where declare the concurrence or operation of the Spirit of God upon Men's Souls to be by an Omnipotent Power at large such as was shown in the Creation of the World or Resurrection of the Dead and which supposes us so altogether passive as not to be in the least measure capable of promoting or hindring our own good for this were to destroy that noble faculty of Humane Souls their Will and render all their Actions fatal and necessary Whereas the Christian Religion was intended to heal and cement to joyn and confirm the dislocated and disordered powers of our Souls not to take them away to perfect and compleat not to extirpate and eradicate their very Nature and Being No Man acknowledges the actions of Brutes or Engines or the results of our Animal and irrational powers capable of Moral Goodness because they act fatally and necessarily and such would the actions of Mankind be if they were produced by an irresistible Power A power and assistance then it is certain God has given us and that of his Holy Spirit under the Gospel but the manner of his Operation is not absolute and unconditionate but hypothetical like the great conciliating and formative Principle of God in Nature requiring certain terms and previous Dispositions and Qualifications without which it is as vain to hope for the compleat efformation of Christ within us as to expect the Rudiments of the Body of an Animal to be formed out of a piece of Brass or Marble For though we do not distrust the Power of God but believe he is able to raise himself up Children out of the very stones of the Fields and to change and alter the Natures of things as he pleases yet since we find him framing and guiding them not according to Will and Power alone but according to the Counsel of his Will we are likewise ascertain'd that in the conducting Humane Souls to Heaven God works sutably to their Natures and Capacities and in such an orderly Way and congruous Method as supposes the Presence of an Infinite Wisdome and Counsel in the Management of it And this not only appears from the consideration of the frame of Humane Nature which in its choicest part is wholly Intellectual and therefore not to be forced by an outward violence but moved and drawn as the Scriptures speak with bands of love and cords of a man that is by Rational means and perswasive Arguments whose force and strength must lye in their Congenerousness and sutableness with the Ancient Idea's and Inscriptions of Truth upon our Souls but is likewise manifest 1. From the resistibility of the Operations of the Spirit of God And for a demonstrative and convictive Evidence of this we need look no further than the preaching of the Son of God while he conversed with the World and dwelt amongst us who though he were
Heaven to strengthen and comfort his fainting Soul in these horrendous Conflicts 3. Christ suffering for Men's sins must needs have a distinct Apprehension of the manner measure and odiousness of them and beheld all this with a bleeding heart forasmuch as he saw himself cast into those sad circumstances bruised for the iniquities and wounded for the transgressions of Mankind All which put together were sufficient Causes of the highest grief and sorrow Consider now Jesus Christ the eternally beloved Son of God sorrowful and amazed sweating drops of Blood in his Agony bereaved of the sensibleness of Divine Assistance conflicting with the utmost Rage and Insultation of the Devil and dying a Painful and Ignominious Death upon the Cross and it gives the highest Demonstration of God's implacable Hatred against all sin that possibly can be imagined 2. The admirableness and wonderfulness of the Evangelical plot and contrivance declares it self in rendring this Way and Method effectual for the salvation of Men. That it should not be lost labour or a work to no purpose alarming the World with great hopes and expectations and at last become abortive or prove nothing but a windy birth but that it should really attain the end for which it was designed that is that men should receive benefit by it and be eternally saved To this purpose three things are necessary 1. That what God requires be in it self possible 2. That Man be endued with a sufficient power 3. That some allowance be made for our Infirmities 1. First I say that the Commands of the Gospel be possible For it were the most unreasonable and Tyrannical thing in the World to exact that of another which we know he is in no Possibility of performing and therefore being a thing so abhorrent and repugnant to the natural reason and equity of Mankind it is at no hand to be attributed to God whose very Nature is the most perfect and living Law of Justice Wherefore the Gospel being given to be the Religion of all Mankind and for no other end but their everlasting Benefit and Blessedness we cannot but imagine all the duties and commands required of them to be possible to be done for otherwise it would be so far from contributing to their advantage that it would be but an Exprobration of their misery and a Tyrannical and Arbitrarious Insultation over their calamitous condition Nay we are assured that the laws of Righteousness required of us by the Gospel are not only possible but gracious and easie and that from the mouth of the Blessed Author and giver of them My yoke says he is easie and my burden is light and the beloved Apostle has left it upon Record that the commands of God are not grievous that is they are not insupportable burdens too heavy for the nature of Man to bear nor are they fetters and shackles of Iron contrived only to ensnare and make the Creation miserable but such gracious Precepts and Constitutions as are in themselves immutably good and so infinitely agreeable to the true and proper that is the Intellectual Nature of Man that he can no sooner understand his own happiness but he would chuse them if they had never been commanded The Wisdome of God never interesses it self in unprofitable things which surely this must have been if the Observance and Practice of the Injunctions of the Gospel had been in it self impossible Besides supposing such intolerable and impracticable things imposed upon the reason of Mankind it would subvert all future rewards and punishments As for Rewards there could be no such thing for Rewards are only upon the consideration of Duty and there can be no duty where the commands are impossible Nor can there be any equitable exaction of Punishment because the Law it self is not feasible and practicable and so the transgression becomes necessary and inevitable and no more in the power of Men to help than to hinder their being born into the World Wherefore upon the whole matter unless the Gospel contain only such things as are possible it is certain no man can be accountable for them unless we will suppose God such an Arbitrarious Being as acts by no other Law than that of his own Will and Authority which is all one as for a Man to think to get himself a name of Power and Soveraignty by going about all day and treading upon a few poor Worms And certainly it is all one to have no notion and apprehension of God at all and to think so meanly of him and so much below the excellency and dignity of his Blessed Nature and â—erfections But here it will be objected that if the commands of the Gospel be not only possible but easie and gracious how comes it then that Men are not presently made good and all the World become true Christians To this I have these things to reply 1. That God forces none to be good but having made us Rational Creatures he has endued us with a free Principle And without this there would be no such thing as Moral Goodness upon Earth for that which a man is compelled and forced to by the irresistible Determination of an exterior Principle is neither good nor evil in reference to him because it was not a true exertion of his will but an act of something without him And therefore should God irresistibly bend and incline the wills of Men to the Laws and Practice of Vertue it would take away the distinction of good and evil and Men would be what they are by a fatal necessity and not by choice Moreover should God forcibly make Men good it would rather destroy than recover the Nature of Mankind and make them more imperfect Creatures than they are already It is the glory of our faith that being tryed it be found unto praise and honour but what praise can be due to that which is performed by the violent constraint of an uncontroulable Power There would be little reason for the Scripture says a worthy Prelate so much to magnify the grace of faith as being so great a Vertue and so acceptable to God if every one were necessitated to it whether he would or no. 2. True Religion has a great disagreement with our present sinful Natures Christianity came into the World to curb our extravagant desires to restrain the sinful and exorbitant affections of the Animal life and to draw off our minds from the fading and inchanting Beauties of sense to the living and Immortal forms of righteousness and truth And it is no wonder if it be accounted troublesome and uneasie to a carnal mind when its whole design is to let out the corrupt life and blood of the old man and to renew men into that faultless nature sin and wickedness had destroyed Religion is not such a formidable and difficult thing such an insuperable task in it self but because 't is an affliction to our natural life to do violence to our lusts and bodily Passions
the Essential wisdome of his Father and his Discourses full of Life and Power who himself was transcendently anointed with the Spirit of God and able and willing to bestow the same according as the needs and necessities of Men required yet Jesus the Author and finisher of the salvation of Men was not always succesful but oft-times that precious and Immortal seed which he sow'd fell upon a Rock and there were some that rejected the Counsel of God against themselves and Many believed not on him and others went back and walked no more with him Shall we say now that the Spirit of God did not accompany those excellent Sermons of Jesus Christ If it did his Energy and Operation was not Absolute and Unconditionate since it was repulsed and took no effect on many Or is it not rather plain that the cause lay in the stubborness and obstinacy of their own wills according as Christ himself tells the Jews I would but ye would not A like form of Speech God uses to their rebellious Ancestors Because I have purged thee and thou wast not purged that is I have done my part towards it but thou wouldst not do thine Nor can I imagine if the work of Men's Conversion depended so wholly upon the Power of God that no precedent Qualifications were necessary to invite the Spirit of God to fall to work why Men's obstinate incredulity should debar Christ from working Miracles as we find it did or why he should not require a tractable frame of mind as a precedent Qualification for the exertion of his Almighty Power in the cure of spiritual as well as corporal diseases Nay the Apostles and Disciples of our Saviour were so far from imagining an irresistible Power accompanying the outward Word that St. Stephen tells the Jews they did resist the Holy Ghost even as their Fathers did 2. From those Arguments the Spirit of God makes use of under the Gospel wherein Men are treated with according to their Rational Natures and wrought off from Vice and sin to a firm and permanent adhesion to Virtue by kindness and love by hopes and fears by the inevitableness of impendent mischiefs and by the security of future rewards Which Oeconomy had been altogether supervacaneous if God had engaged his Omnipotent Power to make Men good Under the Gospel we are perswaded to Holiness and Righteousness by the easiness pleasantness and satisfaction of such a state to which our minds being once arrived they feel a full and entire Acquiescence and ineffable joy a Pleasure resulting from the connaturality and agreeableness of those Beautiful Forms with the inmost sense of our own Souls And because the dispositions of Mankind are various and different some being incouraged to Action out of a Principle of Gratitude and innate Nobility others not easily won but by Advantage and Interest others again not without menaces of a severe and uneasie Discipline therefore God in the Evangelical Dispensation hath interwoven the most effectual and cogent Arguments to meet with each of these tempers in Men. To the first he propounds the consideration of the Death and Passion of his only begotten Son who being in the form of God and dwelling in the Immortal Mansions of Light and Glory yet out of that dear and ineffable love and compassion which he always bare to the race of Mankind was content to banish himself from those Blessed Regions and put on our Servile Scheme being born into the World a helpless Infant subject to perpetual sorrows and afflictive circumstances leading an obscure and contemptible life befriended of few and at last dying upon that uneasie Bed of sorrows the Cross that so his Death might be an Expiatory Sacrifice for the sins of the World Which cannot but enravish every Ingenuous Breast and fill it with the highest and most faithful love to so kind and compassionate a Saviour But there being almost as few of this sort of Men as there were of old of those that embraced Virtue for it self and esteemed it eligible though divested of all appendant Rewards therefore that Eternal Wisdome which has interessed it self in the Frame and Conduct of the Gospel propounds an advantageous Portion to the sincere and unblameable Professors of Piety and Holiness and assures them that their labour shall not be in vain but that their sorrows shall find refreshment their hardships and difficult enterprises ease and pleasure and their faithful Perseverance in Righteousness be recompenced with the Happiness of possessing glorified and Immortal Bodies in the highest Heavens And if it shall happen the minds of Men to be deaf to all the charms of Gratitude and Advantage to the Allectives of good Nature and Interest and there be no way left to awake them out of their stupidity but by the Voice of Thunder then Jesus Christ the Soveraign of Men and Angels is represented to Us in Scripture coming in the Clouds of Heaven attended with Thousands of Angels to take Vengeance on those that have not known God nor obeyed his Laws and Commands And by his Powerful Operation the Seeds and Principles of Fire shall be excited and that quick and Active Element insinuate and pervade all the Commissures and Parts of the Earth and a Deluge of Flame as once of Waters shall overspread the Face of the World Into which sulphureous and burning Lake the Devil and his Angels and all those who in this life delight in wickedness and cast the fear of God behind their backs shall be plunged to Eternal Ages These are the Arguments which are dispersed up and down and urged in the Holy Scriptures as so many tyes and bands to engage us to a faithful and peremptory prosecution of the indispensable Laws of Righteousness and Truth and which as well in their own Nature as in the manner and way of their Proposal do evidently declare that they are not fatal and necessary but moral Instruments of propagating and diffusing the Life and Nature of God and as all other Rational means of Perswasion may by an obstinate and perverse spirit be slighted and contemned And certainly the Nature of the thing it self requires it should be so for if the whole conduct of Mens souls in order to their salvation were nothing but the effects and emanations of a peremptory and uncontrollable Power there would be no place left for those large Encomium's of Wisdome in this great affair Wisdome being Inventrix Mediorum and then most of all discovers its excellency in fixing and determining upon such ways as shall operate effectually and yet congruously and agreeably to the Nature of Men Moral Agents requiring Moral Instruments to allure and invite them to Action But lest any Man should carelesly mistake me and think that what I have said tends to the invalidating and weakning our belief of the Powerful Assistance of the Spirit of God I do confidently affirm That no Man ought or can attribute his beginning progress and
consider that in the contrivance conduct and management of the Gospel there is a clear and manifest demonstration of the Infinite Goodness Wisdome and Power of God I. A manifestation of Infinite Goodness The Heavens and the Earth and all the capacities of Immense space declare an Infinite Goodness but the clearest and most sensible demonstration of it is in this Mystery of the Gospel wherein that boundless love which has dispersed it self through all the orders and degrees of life shines forth with a full and perfect lustre and glory Here it is that we behold that Love which liberally fills and sustains all things more powerfully exerting its Blessed Nature in cementing the Ruines and rearing up the Foundations of a new World for as in the first Creation an Eternal and Energetical love diffused it self in the Production of whatever was made so the same Goodness moves as it were a second time in the stupendious renovation of lapsed Souls in the Evangelical Mystery and Oeconomy Which Truth may yet receive a further Evidence by these Gradations 1. The more perfect any life is the more it desires to diffuse and communicate it self God is love says St. John and he is the highest and most perfect life now love is the most diffusive and communicative Principle in all the World and the firmer any being is radicated in love the nearer approaches it makes to that most excellent life and nature of God whose beneficence and kindness the whole Creation tastes of Self-love or the love of the Carkass the Bodily life restrains and contracts the free Exertions of the Mind and therefore the Apostle sets it as a note of degeneracy narrowness and anxiety when Men shall be lovers of themselves and corporeal pleasures in opposition to that Universal and Intellectual love which is the great Law of Rational Beings and by which our Minds are made wide as the World and carried forth in Benignity and Kindness to all the Creatures as they more or less partake of the Divine Life and Nature God is infinite Goodness and all the Creatures are but the issues and emanations of his exuberant Fecundity and Life and do more intimately depend upon him than Faculties and Actions upon the Principles from whence they flow It was not necessity or need nor any greedy and thirsty desire of receiving praise and glory from them that was the cause of the production of Men and Angels but only the Fulness of God's own Goodness which alone moved him to that chearful Approbation of the Works of his Hands when he saw his own life diffused in such variety of Beings And if we will do honour to God and speak according to our own faculties we may add life to this Demonstration from the inward sense and experience of every good Man who never finds a more inward joy and satisfaction of spirit than when he is carried out in desires and aspirations of Benignity and Kindness towards the whole Creation Nor does he look upon this as any Argument of Righteousness that he is at any time in a more happy state and condition than others for he could be willing that all the World were as happy as himself did he not see strong and evident Reasons in the wise Administration of Providence why it should not be so Something of this excellent Temper we find in those Passionate Eruptions of Spirit recorded in the Scriptures of Holy men who seem to be altogether transformed into love Blot me out of thy Book says Moses and I could be content to be accursed from Christ says St. Paul for my Brethrens sake Nay I am verily perswaded that he who is once throughly baptized into this spirit of Universal love would be contented to be eternally separated from the Presence of God so that he might be without sin if by that means the whole Intellectual Creation might be made happy Now if we can reason any thing of God from those Perfections we find in our selves we must needs conclude the highest and most perfect life to be most diffusive and communicative of it self 2. Goodness is so much the more excellent as the Objects are more noble about which it is conversant All things feel the effects of Divine Goodness according to their different Measures and Proportions and by how much the Rational life hath more objective reality than the sensitive by so much are the Emanations of Goodness of more worth and excellency communicated to the one than those diffused upon the other As a Man is a more noble Creature than a Brute so is the Goodness concerned with him higher and of greater value than that exercised upon a Beast God is the Father of Spirits and for that very Reason will not be implacable and irreconcileable to his own dear off-spring but though he chastise and scourge them for their bold and audacious revolt from his blessed Nature yet will not cast off for ever but in his sorest corrections remembers mercy Hence is that Prophetical Speech of the end of Christ's Death that it should be for the gathering together the scattered Sons of God though the Souls of Men had voluntarily forsaken God and travelled into a strange Land though their Iniquities had scattered them into far distant places from their own Home yet an everlasting Goodness followed them still and carefully sought the Reduction of those disobedient Sons of God who had divided and separated themselves from him 3. By how much the more fatal desperate and universal the evil is by so much the more glorious is the Goodness imployed in the recovery of the Creature from it Sin and wickedness is the misery not of a part only but of the whole Race of Mankind and this their Degeneracy became so fatal that it brought Darkness and Death it self upon all their better Faculties and placed them in an utter Incapacity for ever of recovering themselves by their own solitary power and effort into that state of immortality and life which sin had deprived them of Death passed upon all men says St. Paul for that or forasmuch as all have sinned So that all Mankind by their fall from God were under the Reign Dominion and Power of sin and death and out of this thraldome and captivity no Man could extricate and deliver himself whereby their condition became very deplorable and desperate But Divine Goodness that it might shew it self more conspicuously and gloriously to the World has brought on a more chearful scene of things under the Gospel rescuing Men from the Power of sin and death and delivering them from the Tyranny of the Devil through the meritorious Death and Passion of Jesus Christ who by his Glorious Resurrection hath fully declared himself a Powerful Conqueror of all his Enemies assuring Mankind of their re-enjoyment of Immortality and redeeming them from their Captivity under the Empire of Sin and Death and translating them into the peaceful Kingdome of Life and Righteousness Now as the