unpardonable piece of arrogance is it for a man to think his reason able to comprehend the things of God when there is such an infinite disproportion between them and call in question the truth of the divine revelations and measure all by this crooked and deceitful rule whether it be agreeable to his phansie or not It is a most rational and infallible ground of faith that God who has revealed these mysteries cannot utter a falshood It is more certain than demonstration if God has once said it There are some monsters in the world whose lusts and debaucheries have suggested to them doubts about the being of God and the truth of his attributes and a consciousness of their guilt has made them wish that there were none No one was ever found who acknowledged a God and did not at the same time acknowledge that he was just and true Pythagoras found no opposition when he taught that there were two things by which men became like to God 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 by speaking truth and doing good both perfections naturally streaming from the divine nature So that upon the whole matter it will appear that it is nothing but pride and a presumptuous conceit of mastering all the difficulties of religion by the strength of reason which put them upon the denial of these revealed truths and that this pride and presumption are altogether unjust and unreasonable Which was the thing to be proved From this necessary essential and fundamental notion of the divine power these following inferences relating to practise may most certainly be drawn 1. That we are to repose our whole trust and confidence in God whose power is infinite We naturally fly in case of distress and danger to a power which is able to protect and relieve us There is no man but needs a support some time or other Men are not always able of themselves to resist successfully the assaults of envy and malice but this way envy may be at last conquered and enemies brought over and reconciled or else defeated Let this therefore be the great comfort of our minds that God is both able and ready to assist us in our utmost and greatest dangers and in all the particular difficulties and distresses of our lives which may befall us It was a reflexion upon this which made David break out into those triumphant expressions Psalm xlvi 1 2 3. God is our refuge and strength a very present help in trouble therefore will we not fear tho' the earth be moved and tho' the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea tho' the waters roar and be troubled tho' the mountains shake with the swelling thereof And v. 7. The Lord of hosts is with us the God of Jacob is our refuge 2. That we are to stand in fear and awe of God and do nothing which may displease him Fear is a passion which usually results from a reflexion upon power and according to the nature and degrees of it the fear will rise and encrease proportionably and therefore the power of God who is able to punish us eternally is a most rational ground of fear S. Luke xii 4 5. says our B. Saviour to his disciples Be not afraid of them who kill the body and after that have no more that they can do but I will forewarn you whom you shall fear fear him who after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell yea I say unto you fear him And with this argument the heroic woman encouraged her young son to endure the torments and cruelties of Antiochus as his six brothers had done before him rather than save his life by violation of the divine law I beseech thee my son look upon the heaven and upon the earth and all that is therein and consider that God has made them of things that were not and so was mankind made likewise Fear not this tormentor but being worthy of thy brethren take thy death that I may receive thee again in mercy with thy brethren as you may read the tragical history in the second book of Maccabees chap. vii Whosoever reflects seriously on God's infinite power will never presumptuously do such things as may draw on him his displeasure and upon a true sense of his guilt will be restless till by repentance and a good life he is reinstated in the love and favour of God 3. That the sense of our weakness and defects should teach us humility and modesty in our enquiries into the great mysteries of religion there being as great reason for us to submit our understanding to the revealed truths of Scripture as our will to its commands He who religiously adores and believes a God and acknowledges him to be a being infinitely perfect will not dare to question the truth of his revelations and as firmly will he believe that all those promises and threats which are contained in the holy Scriptures which have a reference to a future state shall one day be fulfilled For with what pretense can any one doubt or disbelieve their fulfilling who reflects upon God's truth and power All doubt or distrust ariseth from a double cause either because men are not real in what they say and so intend it not or else want power to make their words good neither of which can possibly have any place here For God is a God of infinite veracity and all his promises are infallibly real and firm and he is able to perform them We value not indeed those menaces which are the effects of an impotent passion when we are out of their power and when they cannot reach us but there will be no flying from God his eye and hand will find and lay hold on us wherever we are He who made me at first and placed the several parts of my body in that comely order in which they stand and which from time to time in continuance and in the succession of a few months were fashioned when as yet there was none of them he can raise up this very body at the last day and will raise it up and of this I cannot pretend to have the least rational doubt were it ten thousand times more difficult to conceive than it is because he has absolutely promised it and his veracity is obliged for it and his infinite power can easily make it good Does God threaten impenitent and incorrigible sinners with everlasting torment in hell I with trembling submit to the truth of this threatning because he can easily continue a creature in a miserable being unconsumed and that for ever and I know he will do it because he has said it And upon this belief and assurance we are to provide accordingly that so we may avoid the strokes the fierceness the terribleness of his revenging hand and may partake of those most glorious promises which his goodness and mercy in Christ our Saviour has made over to us in this life and which his infinite power will make good to
Two Compendious DISCOURSES The one concerning the Power of God The other about the CERTAINTY and EVIDENCE OF A Future State Published in opposition to the growing Atheism and Deism of the Age. LONDON Printed for S. Smith and B. Walford at the Prince's Arms in St. Paul's Church-yard MDCXCIX To the Honourable Samuel Pepys Esquire SIR PResuming upon your leave and favour I take the liberty of inscribing your name before two short discourses written several years since which I now publish with very little alteration In the time of a great fire no one is to be an idle stander by or looker on but he is to contribute as much as in him lyes to the extinguishing of the raging and devouring flames tho' it be onely by handing a bucket of water toward the next engine which others are laboriously managing with art and skill This seems to be our present case Dissoluteness of manners like a pestilential vapour having diffused its venimous influence farre and wide and Atheisme and Deisme growing rampant and all Religion whether natural or revealed and instituted being run down and ridiculed by several who set up for Wits and Virtuosos and pretend to greater measures of reason and understanding than their dull forefathers ever had who it seems prepossessed and prejudiced by a simple education could not attain to those new discoveries which they have made a due concerne for the honour of God and of religion which is founded upon eternal and essential rules of righteousness and wisdom will justifie any mans discreet and sober zeal in opposing the growth of such outragious and impudent blasphemy and infidelity This I alledge in defense of my little attempt tho' it may be it will be lookt upon to be almost as vaine as if I should go about to stop the violent current of water at London-bridge when it comes swelling and flowing in with full wind and tide with my naked hand all other methods and remedies at present in this wicked and licentious age being ineffectual I must not say without a temporary Inquisition but I will say without a strict and rigorous execution of the laws made by our wise and godly Ancestors which would make these bold men if not more sober honest and virtuous at least more modest reserved and decent in their behaviour and conduct Having thus made out the sincerity of my intention and design in publishing these Papers I am the less sollicitous whether I have with equal care and judgment performed the part of a Scholar as well as of a Church-man of which such excellently learned and thoroughly accomplished Gentlemen as your self are the most able and proper Judges But however whilst I am endeavouring in my mean way to serve and promote the common cause and interest of religion and virtue I readily take advantage of this address which I present as a memorial of the great respect esteem and honour I have for you upon the accompt of your public services and merit and also of the many great obligations flowing from an entire friendship which you have been pleased for several years to lay upon SIR Your most faithfull and most humble Servant Tho Smith A DISCOURSE Concerning the Power of God ALL error proceeds from an undue apprehension of things which is caused either by weakness and shallowness of judgment when there is a defect and inability in the understanding to search to the bottom of things to examine with a just and wise severity whatever is proposed before it be admitted and to weigh all circumstances in an even ballance that is according to sober fix'd and sure principles bottomed upon reason good sense and unquestionable experience and agreeable to the faculties of the mind and the notions imprinted upon it or else Which makes the error more dangerous and faulty by an inconsiderate assent and an over-hasty partiality when the affections hinder the calm and deliberate debates of sober reason and casting a mist before the understanding altogether blind it so that it shall not be able to discern truth from falshood right from wrong opinion and plausibility and conjecture from certainty and knowledge and demonstration But where the idea's of things capable of being fully known and proved are distinct and proper where the understanding is sound and clear and where the operations of the mind are free and undisturbed either by irregular passion or by foolish or irrational prejudice truth is readily discerned and entertained and makes its way into the mind with the same easiness and quickness as the streams of light flow upon the eye which is open and not otherwise indisposed to receive them by the help of which it may see all those glorious and astonishing objects that from every part of the visible creation present themselves For want of this rightful method and just principle in examining the truth of things many are very apt and very willing to cheat themselves and out of a lazy kind of ignorance and a foolish belief that all things are and must be as they phansie take up idle and false opinions and that not only concerning things of nature of which be our perceptions true or false it matters not much in things purely speculative if they have no influence upon life manners or government and a latitude of opinion is justly allowable in such things also as are not capable of a clear and satisfactory decision either by sense experiment or demonstration but also concerning religion opinions which contradict its holy designs and directions and commands such too as are derogatory to the nature and attributes of God such as are altogether dishonourable and unworthy of him and inconsistent with his divine perfections That God is a being absolutely perfect and consequently of infinite power nature and right reason even abstracted from revelation suggest to every considering man to admit and assent unto and no one who hath any just or true notion of God can possibly deny it without great violence done to his faculties and yet when any difficulty presents it self which we cannot master and when we are puzled and dissatisfied in our search of things we presently fly off and whatever is above the reach of our nature or above the comprehension of our knowledge or above our contrivance or above our power must be denied to be possible even to God himself because we cannot conceive it or rather will not conceive it a right thus bringing all things down to our narrow and scanty model and levelling not onely the highest mysteries of revealed religion but the essential perfections of the Godhead knowable by the light of nature and the principles of natural religion that there are such and necessarily must be so with our low dull and earthy phansies To obviate these mistakes therefore which may arise from a misapprehension of this divine Attribute I shall endeavour to settle the true notion of it upon the clearing up of which all those doubts and scruples and objections which
has the shape and pretends to the reason of a man can be found must fall into this prodigious and irrational error which no one can be guilty of without the just imputation of phrensie that all that he sees is not the production of contrivance and design but meerly of accidental hits strugglings and conjunctions of little particles of matter floating up and down in an infinite empty space that things fell into this admirable order and frame which has distracted and confounded the wits of all ages fully to understand and make out satisfactorily at first as it were of their own accord as if they had had life and sense and power to determine their own motions and mutually agreed to do this having first made themselves or which is as gross and foolish a phantasie though herein the Aristotelean Atheist thinks himself a fine wit and a subtil arguer in comparison of the Atheists of the Epicurean sect that they are improduced and eternal that the sun moves in the Ecliptic to the great advantage and benefit of the world and not in the Aequator or in any of the Parallel Circles meerly because it happened so after long shiftings and infinite irregularities of motion and that it still keeps the same course as it were out of choise and sympathy and good nature But now how difficult how false how ridiculous to say nothing of the impiety of it must such a way of arguing and proceedure be to judge of God by our narrow scantlings of wit and strength to measure his power by our weakness and the good or ill success of our endeavours and undertakings when we are ignorant of the utmost strength of nature what may be done by the conjunction and combination of several beings how and in what manner they may operate one upon another and what effects they may produce and especially if we reflect that many things have been pronounced impossible and given over as such that is in respect of us and not in the nature of the things themselves and for the wit and art of man to effect which have been discovered by the industry of after-times Why then should any man pronounce a thing impossible which involves in it no repugnancy to actual existence and hereby pretend to overthrow the doctrine and faith of miracles because they are above the strength of nature when the power of God as has been proved is immense and infinite and by the same argument he may as madly conclude notwithstanding his high-flown pretensions of arguing according to the principles of strict reason several things in the world nay the world it self not to be made and maintain dull and stupid matter to have been eternal which is a manifest gross absurdity meerly upon this supposal because if they were made they must be made by a power above natural and humane 2. It is most unreasonable to reject the articles of revealed religion and the mysteries of faith because we cannot fully comprehend them Before these men whether Deists or Socinians renounce the belief of such articles and mysteries let them try their reason in explaining the difficulties of nature let them resolve all those Problemes if they can which have exercised the Philosophers of all ages and if upon trial they cannot satisfie themselves or others in those ordinary phaenomena where they have their senses to assist them if they cannot tell how things are done which are done daily if many of the ordinary operations of nature be abstruse and unintelligible if they cannot trace her in all her labyrinths and windings and are quite tired and forced at last to give over the pursuit if plain matters of sense cannot be fully accompted for why should they presume upon the strength of their little knowledge and make their reason the measure and standard of divine truth allowing that onely to be true and certain which suits with it He is very unfit to judge of any piece of art suppose a picture or a watch who knows nothing of design or clock-work and especially at first view without taking notice of the several shokes and lines and the proportion of the parts of the one or the hidden springs and wheels of the other which give it that orderly and regular motion And if an Artist reject their judgment as foolish and incompetent because grounded on no principles of knowledge and skill shall we not much more reject these mens either bold determination or peremptory denial of things which they neither understand nor have throughly considered such as pretend that they cannot believe either a creation because they cannot tell how to admit of a vast empty space before the world was made or how it should be made no matter praeexisting or a resurrection because they cannot see how the scattered atomes of dust shall rally and reunite and constitute the same man again such as disbelieve the articles of the Christian faith because they cannot form clear ideas and full and comprehensive notions of them and upon the same pretense these very men who will believe nothing but what they can make out and demonstrate by reason will if they follow their own principle quickly commence down-right Atheists and deny God to be infinite omniscient and eternal of which necessary and essential attributes of the divine nature we cannot have complete and adequate conceptions our narrow faculties being no way capable of it But if there be such a vast difference between man and man upon the accompt of education industry experience learning and the several ways of advancing and improving reason and the natural faculties of the mind if the conceptions of things be clear easie and distinct in some without wracking or straining the phansie which are clouded perplext and confused in others by reason of some natural or accidental hinderances and disadvantages through dulness and stupidity or settled prejudice if we are ignorant of the possibilities of nature and cannot tell how far and in what manner natural causes may act what can be more unreasonable and unjust than for a man whose knowledge is scanty and power confined within a narrow circle and who is so apt to mistake in his judgment of things to oppose his reason to God's infinite wisdom as if it were equally clear and comprehensive to pretend that his conceptions are the adequate measures of truth and that God can do no more than what he poor finite shallow creature is able to think and to reject clear and express revelations of God concerning himself upon the accompt of a phansied incongruity and a seeming repugnancy to his reason If the creatures which are of a different order of being from us cannot at all much less fully understand and comprehend what we do according to the dictates of reason and wisdom and the results of deliberate counsel and study because life and sense and animal motion are not able to reach so far without the assistence of an higher and nobler faculty what an
us for ever in the next A DISCOURSE ABOUT THE CERTAINTY and EVIDENCE OF A Future State HOW much it is below a man to busie himself wholly in the pursuit of earthly things whether honour wealth or pleasure and how contemptible a creature he is notwithstanding all his acquists of outward greatness unless he does raise his mind to the contemplation of better and nobler objects whosoever will reflect seriously upon the nature and faculties of the mind by which he is enabled to discourse and reason and judge of things and of their consequences unless he is utterly forsaken by his reason and governed by brutal appetite will be forced to acknowledge Besides there are such continual changes and vicissitudes of things here below so much uncertainty in them and withal so little satisfaction to the rational desires of the soul such intermixtures of good and evil ebbs and flows of prosperity sickness and discontent and disappointments and various anxieties arising from irregular passion and distemper of bloud and humours and a thousand evil accidents which no wisdom or care can prevent notwithstanding the flattering intervals of health and ease and pleasurable self-enjoyment taking up the greatest part of our lives and death at last after three or fourscore years at most seizing upon us that even according to the judgment of natural reason and the more refined Heathen have acknowledged it the condition of humane life would be very miserable and all things considered inferior to that of other creatures if there were no life hereafter in another world Nay amidst those corrupt principles which barbarousness and sensuality had super-induced among the wilder sort of Heathen immersed in blind and stupid ignorance and destitute of all helps and methods of knowledge and learning they yet retained a belief and exspectation of another state after this life this could not be wholly effaced out of their minds and memories these thoughts pursued them wherever they went and when they met with violence and hardship and were oppressed by the irresistible strength of invaders and suffered unjustly in all these straits and difficulties they comforted themselves with faint hopes of it and tho' they could not by reason of fatal prejudices and prepossessions taken up from sense and of the want of the true knowledge of God and his attributes have any just apprehension or notion of the resurrection of the body yet they all concluded unanimously for the life and being and subsistence of the soul. So that the wild and savage people of Afric and America as well as the more civilized and cultivated by philosophy and the discipline of laws give in full evidence against the Atheistical wits of the age who with an unparallel'd boldness maintain that when a man has acted his part in this life he goes off the stage and disappears for ever that the soul like a flame when the matter which fed it is spent is wholly extinguished and vanishes into soft air that we came into the world by meer chance and shall be hereafter as tho' we had never been as the Author of the book of Wisdom elegantly brings in the Gallants of his time triumphing and entertaining themselves with such idle phantastick and irrational hopes chap. ii 2. and that when a man dyes there is an utter end of him a dissolution of soul as well as body every element taking its own and the whole swallowed up in the universal mass of matter out of which it was at first made singing out with the chorus in Seneca's Troas Quaeris quo jaceas post obitum loco Quo non nata jacent and Post mortem nihil est ipsaque mors nihil But it ought not to be exspected as to the Heathen that they whose eyes were dim and weak and who were involved in thick clouds and mists of ignorance should have a clear view and prospect of another world and that those heavenly objects should appear to them whose understandings were darkned with false notions and principles in their full brightness However it is most certain that they did believe a life after this and made it the great incentive and encouragement of virtue and courage in dying for their country and when they did ill and that in the dark with all possible secrecy and undisturbance and with all security under no restraint of law or fear of punishment yet their hearts misgave them and in private and alone they dreaded the evil effects and consequences of their guilt I am not backward to acknowledge that this opinion belief and exspectation of another life might be oftentimes clogg'd in the best of them with mixtures of doubts the prepossessions of sense stifling the dictates of right reason and the suggestions of natural conscience Even that excellent person Socrates who was one of the first among the Greeks who freed his reason from the entanglement of vulgar opinions in matters of religion and moral philosophy which the corrupt Theology of their Poets had introduced and who died as it were a Martyr for the unity of the Godhead spake somewhat doubtfully of it in the discourse he had with his friends the very day of his death the sum of which is preserved by Plato in his dialogue entitled Phoedo or of the soul. He said he would not be positive and dogmatical but however he profest his hope that he should pass immediately to the company of those good men who died before him whose souls survived in some happy place he knew not where This was far from the heroick and steady assurance of S. Paul who after his second appearance before Nero when he saw that there was nothing but death to be exspected from the Tyrant and his bloudy Officers triumphs in his neer approaches to it as the entrance to a blessed immortality 2 Tim. ii 6 7 8. I am now ready to be offered and the time of my departure is at hand I have fought a good fight I have finished my course I have kept the faith henceforth is laid up for me a crown of righteousness which the Lord the righteous judge shall give me at that day He seemed as sure of it as if he had had the crown upon his head and had been actually in heaven What Philosophy can scarce reach being at that vast distance from it that Christianity easily discovers Reason is the same in all mankind but reason assisted by revelation is like the eye armed with a Telescope it not only sees things clearer and better but discovers new objects such as before lay hid and were indiscernible to the naked sight A Christian man that is if he be more so than in profession and if his immoralities have not altogether corrupted his mind and plunged him into the very dregs of infidelity cannot at all doubt of a future state He looks upon himself as a pilgrime and is travelling toward a better country that is a heavenly here he has no continuing city but looks for one to