humiliations are so far from taking away the belief of his Divinity that they enforce and support it Let them be proposed to any man of sense and he will conclude 1st That his humiliations can bring no alteration to his Divinity God being wholly immutable and incapable of decay to what state soever he is pleased to descend Periculum status sui Deo nullum est Tertul. de carn Christ 2ly That if he took upon him the vile and despicable form of a man 't was because he would have it so He could have come invested with all the majesty expected from the Son of God His resurrection his ascension his fitting at the right hand of his Father are mysteries as full of Glory as the others are of shame He is instated by them in that splendid appearance the Irreligious and Jews would have him in at the beginning So that his humiliations cannot be attributed to any want of power Nor dares the Irreligious deny these glorious Mysteries unless he resolves to yield up those he looks upon as so shameful Knowing nothing of either of those but from the relation of the Evangelists he must equally receive or reject the whole matter of fact 3ly That he did it because he would do it and that he would do it because he loved us He loved man in his miseries and infirmities and who can turn into a crime so stupendious so miraculous a charity Tert ull ib. 4ly That nothing is really low or shameful but what bears the character of sin The Greatness of God shines in the number order and motion of the Heavens Nor does he fall from his Majesty when he applies his power to the formation of the vilest insects His providence maintains them His immensity renders him present in the horridest places Nor did yet any man think all these things a shame and a reproach to him Yet almighty God is as really in them after his manner as Christ in his mysteries of Humiliation CHAP. II. Christian Religion obliges us to believe impossibilities and things beyond the reach of nature Answer THat nothing is to be believed but what is seen is ridiculous in the very doctrine of Irreligion whose abetters believe many things they never saw Who of them denies Antipodes though they never were there Who of them refuses the testimony of facts related by prophane Historians because they never saw the like Who of them disbelieves many things he has been told because some of them proved false and makes his private opinion the rule of what is credible and possible But it is demonstrable the Irreligious can deny none of those miracles which are obvious in the Scripture There are but two wayes of disproving miracles First shewing their impossibility Secondly Their want of Authority It is altogether out of their power to prove the first A miracle is either impossible as being beyond the force of nature If he thinks them impossible in that sense so far we agree Or it is impossible to God and this he cannot assert according to his own principles Or impossible in it self and this cannot be made out but by demonstrating a real certain evident contradiction in them And if we consider things in themselves what impossibility is there that a soul and body which were united a little before should join again and be in the same state they were before their separation if there is a power capable of uniting them What contradiction is there that a blind man should receive his sight a dumb man his speech a Paralytick his limbs Nature doing it often with time and remedies why cannot a superiour power do it in a moment For the second viz. Want of authority no Irreligious sure will charge them with Besides the integrity of them that transmitted them to us Besides their principle that no lye was lawful but that a lye in matter of Religion was detestable they say nothing but what they have been eye-witnesses of Some of those miracles have been believed for three thousand years and preserved by a people that has built their Religion upon them The rest have been believed sixteen hundred years since and contributed to the conversion of all the nations of the Earth Their Preachers sealed them with their blood wrought the same if not greater and induced by them an infinite number of people of all Ages and Conditions to dye for the truth of the Gospel 'T is matter of fact that before Christian Religion was brought into the world all Nations the Jews excepted were Idolaters It is another matter of fact that those Idolaters changed Religion and from Infidels became Christians And what greater proof than this can be required for the authority of miracles how could such a sudden alteration be seen in the world without an infinite number of wonders which backt and supported the Gospel Were so many millions of men meer children whose mind was altered at first sight Were they so stupid and simple as to receive any new Doctrine without discernment and upon trust Is not the History full of the strange excesses Nations ran to to defend those errors the Disciples of Christ would remove from them Could they be overcome after so long so stout a resistance by any other force than that of miracles Do not the violent and lasting persecutions of the Primitive Church evince that they were of a Religion contrary to ours How could twelve Fishermen agree upon so strange a resolution as that of delivering lyes to all the world and be so obstinate as no torments could perswade them to desist from their foolish undertaking How could so many Nations assent to lies which procured nothing to their defenders but death and sufferings How could they venture their lives to maintain and transmit them to us by a constant and uninterrupted tradition Certainly one should convince us first that all those Nations were naturally mad and apt to prefer a severe law which extends its empire to the very desires of the heart and has for its Promulgators men unknown and persecuted every where to their first Religion which put no limits to their cupidity And before any body should embrace Irreligion the Irreligious is concerned to prove by solid arguments that those changes are naturally possible and the more because they are so particular to Christianity as to be found no-where else CHAP. III. The incomprehensibility of things Christian Religion obliges us to believe answered The injustice and absurdity of that reproach THe Irreligious complains many points are proposed to his belief which it is impossible for him to understand as if nothing was to be believed but what falls under his senses Which reproach may be reduced to these two Propositions That nothing is to be believed but what may be comprehended and that things are not when they are incomprehensible Then which two propositions nothing can be imagined more impertinent Besides that thereby a weak frail blind man makes his private understanding the
rule of all things is it not palpable that we cannot comprehend those very things which are most obvious And thus must we believe nothing that we see hear touch smell and tast since we cannot comprehend any of those things he being only said to comprehend that can know the secret causes of those effects which affect our senses make out the internal principles which compose all bodies and tell us what are the differences that distinguish beings amongst themselves which no man living can do not only in remote but even in the most ordinary things Nay the incomprehensibility of our mysteries is so far from taking away any part of their credibility that it renders them more credible The most natural consequence that can be drawn from the existence of God is that he is incomprehensible Were he not so the conclusion is evident therefore he is not Supposing then that there is a God he must be infinite and omnipotent But were he comprehensible his infinity and omnipotence were meer contradictions It is the essential character of his Nature that neither his essence nor great works can be know Should I doubt of these two qualities Religion teaches me he has the nearest way to have it cleared up would be to examine the effects attributed to him If they did not surpass my understanding I should suspect and deny them But were they incomprehensible to any humane apprehension it would be an infallible sign of their certainty I look then upon the works faith ascribes to God I read that he has made the world with nothing that he has imprinted in the Skies and Stars a motion that would be eternal were it not stopt by the same hand as formed it that he has united without mixture or confusion Divine nature to the Humane in the person of Christ that this 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 raised himself from the dead and will raise also all men those miracles surpassing infinitely the reach of my understanding I conclude they become him who is omnipotent and infinite There is no answer can be given to this except one should prove that incomprehensibility is not the consequence of an infinite being which is notoriously absurd What is then the shift the Irreligious recourse to He stares at the word incomprehensible and concludes there is no God That is he makes use of the propriety of a being to destroy the being it self he denies him by that which proves most convincingly that he is He is incomprehensible therefore he is not This is the height of absurdity I should as well conclude that man is not rational because he reasons and found out Arts and Sciences But incomprehensibility being relative to our humane apprehension whose bounds are too narrow to apprehend God who does not see that to reject the belief of his being and mysteries upon his being incomprehensible is to make ignorance and darkness a shield against Religion An absurdity equal to that of him who would not believe the Sun shines at noon because his eyes are too weak to look upon him stedfastly CHAP. IV. The Irreligious in his principles cannot avoid to believe incomprehensible things IT is now an easie thing to see how unjustly the Irreligious refuses to believe supernatural things who is forc't to admit of natural that are no less evident and incomprehensible to him And thus when he endeavors to answer the greatest evidence according to his own principles or elude miracles the fact whereof he cannot deny he falls into such absurdities as exact from him as hard a belief as the faith of Christians He cannot but see that the world and all the beings it inludes keep still the same order The vicissitude of daies and seasons the constant succession of generations whereby the world is preserved and renewed is still the same The very first thoughts that such a spectacle gives him is to know what has been or will be its duration That is whether it had a beginning or shall have an end A Christian fastning his knowledge upon Scripture believes that God created the world and shall destroy it in that time only known to him And when he has askt how such a thing would be done he acknowledges it is inconceivable tota ratio facti est potentia facientis August Ep. ad Jan. The Irreligious of the other side not being able to apprehend how God could have framed so many vast bodies with nothing had rather believe that the world ever was and will ever be as it is And so to avoid the creation which he cannot conceive he believes rather the eternity of the world which supposes it never was created Now let any body compare these two beliefs Is the eternity of the world easier to comprehend than its creation Is it harder to believe that God by his infinite power created all beings than that they did alwaies subsist without either author or dependency Is there light and conviction enough in the opinion of the eternity of the world to venture upon its eternal torments which the denial of the creation engages us to All the favour an Irreligious man can expect is that they are both incomprehensible If we cannot know how one single grain of Sand has been made of nothing much less can we conceive a chain of Years Ages and Generations which being limited of one side is so infinite of the other that the first link is not to be found Reason therefore being blind on both sides authority alone can incline our minds to one or to the other But in this also Christian Religion claims all the advantage The Doctrine of the creation of the world has been transmitted to us by Moses that is by the ancientest of all Writers as living not long after those Patriarchs whose names came down to us That tradition was preserved amongst the Jews then amongst the Christians down to us and will last to the end of the world It was received by the Heathens themselves Most of the Platonists understood their Master in that sense and they who did not but only believe that matter was eternal did confess that the world in its being and preservation depended from an eternal and independent cause They admitted of the ancient Chaos wherein all the Elements had been mixt and confused the separation whereof they attributed to the same agent who ordered them as we see Some Philosophers knowing nothing of it brought up the eternity of the world and that upon very weak conjectures The Disciples of Aristotle embrac'd it rather than confess it had been created And inundations fires plagues transportations of Nations and above all the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 of kings and the deep ignorance that attended Idolatry defaced the very remains of that tradition It was the constant opinion of some Nations that the world was eternal Hence fair play was given to their pride that disputed antiquity They imagined that to be the ancientest which gave them right to look upon the rest
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