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A65817 The Leviathan found out, or, The answer to Mr. Hobbes's Leviathan in that which my Lord of Clarendon hath past over by John Whitehall ... Whitehall, John, fl. 1679-1685. 1679 (1679) Wing W1866; ESTC R5365 68,998 178

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Not but that I admit that the fourth Command as to the precise seventh day was ceremonial and is determin'd since the time of our Saviour Mr. Hobbes after he hath denied the personal Divinity of our Saviour now comes to tell us p. 286. That our Saviour nor his Apostles had any power to make Laws and that they that broke any of his dictates did not sin in it but died in their sins not being pardoned for their offences to the Laws of their respective Countries or of Nature And for this he cites Iohn 3.18 which saith They are condemned already not that they shall be condemned saith he And this conceit Mr. Hobbes grounds upon our Saviours saying his Kingdom is not of this World and he that hath no Kingdom saith Mr. Hobbes can make no Laws so our Saviour's precepts obliged not And now one would think Mr. Hobbes might rest satisfied for after as he thought he had robbed Christ of his personal Godhead now he robs him of his Authority to make Laws and so all the wicked in the World are obliged to him for setting them free from the Gospel in case they will but go into any part of the World to live where the Gospel of Christ or his Apostles are not made Canonical by the Law of that Country But in short to answer Mr. Hobbes is to give the true interpretation of the words of our Saviour Ioh. 18.36 where he saith His Kingdom is not of this World which is no more but that he designed not to take away the Romans Iurisdiction in respect of the external acts and punishments of Men but doth it therefore follow that he that was Lord of the whole Earth who Mr. Hobbes said before represented God had no power by his Word and Doctrine to oblige the Consciences of those that submitted to the Truth of them or to leave those without excuse that refused and that under the penalty of eternal Misery And that we may see that he took upon him to make Laws look Ioh. 14. 15. 1 Ioh. 2. 3. 3. 22 24. which all speak of Christ's commands and that it was the token of peoples love and obedience to him that they kept them and in another place Christ saith A new command I give unto you that ye love one another If Christ had no Authority to make Laws why are his words called commands even by him himself For had they been only directions or beseechings he and the Apostles would have stiled them so Nay Mr. Hobbes saith p. 308. That the Command is the stile of a Law So that 't is clear our Saviour had power to make Laws which he executed upon the Consciences of Men which was the Kingdom of Heaven at hand preached of by St. Iohn although he was not pleased to exercise a Temporal Iurisdiction and we may suppose it was to shew the extraordinary Spirituality of his Government in which sence he may be said to be King of the Iews though his Kingdom was not of this World And as to Mr. Hobbes his Text out of Ioh. 3. 18. whereby he would prove that those that obeyed not Christ's commands were not guilty of a sin but were condemned already for sin as he saith against Nature or the Laws of their Country Mr. Hobbes cites so much of the Text and no more than he thinks to his purpose and 't is one of the pitifullest shifts in all his Book for the latter end of the verse saith the words were spoken of Men condemned already for not believing in Christ not for disobeying the Laws of their Country Now who would trust such a juggler that hath the confidence to cite part of a verse to prove that which the residue proves the contrary But hence 't is manifest that wicked Men and Seducers grow worse and worse And now Mr. Hobbes p. 300. falls upon Cardinal Bellarmine and continues battering of him many pages together about the Supremacy of the Pope over the Church I think it might be a greater question and harder to resolve whether Cardinal Bellarmine or Mr. Hobbes was the archer Heretick That making more God's than one and this denying the one only God his Attributes and the existency of two of the Persons in the Godhead That being a Papist and the worshipper of false gods as a Wafer-cake and Pictures Angels and dead People This a worshipper of no God at all a Stock or a Stone when the Soveraign commands or when he shall change a Chistian for an Heathenish soil That being obstinate in his Religion and this ready to change as to external acts when the Soveraign bids him This question I leave to better judgments to decide Mr. Hobbes p. 323. saith That there is nothing in Scripture from whence may be inferr'd the infallibility of the Church If Mr. Hobbes mean the particular Church of Rome I shall agree with him for as to so much as I know of it 't is as full of Errors and unreasonable Tenets as the Quakers or Mr. Hobbes his Book But as to Christ's Church in general I would have Mr. Hobbes look Ephes. 5. 35 36 37. v. and he will find that Christ hath purified his Church that it might be without spot c. that is without Error And in the same Chapter he will find how Christ and his Church are one as a Man and his Wife are and that Christ loves it and cherisheth it which either must be intended in keeping it from Errors or I know not what those Texts signifie For if Christ suffer it to run into Error it will be ruined or run into decay and God will deal with it as he threatned to the particular Churches in the Revelations except they did amend And Christ saith Matth. 16. 18. That the gates of Hell should not prevail against it And 1 Tim. 3. 15. calls the Church the pillar and ground of the Truth Besides many more Texts of this kind but these are sufficient to shew Mr. Hobbes his confidence or ignorance to s●y That the Scripture contained nothing in it from whence might be inferr'd the infallibility of the Church see then how dangerous it is to believe Mr. Hobbes Yet from this Position he infers in the next page That Christians do not know the Scriptures to be the Word of God only believe it He might as well have said that Christians do not know that there is a God only believe it and 't is like this he may aim at Or he might have said that I know not having never travell'd thither there is such a place as Spain only believe it One part of this Proposition of Mr. Hobbes is true viz. That the Scriptures are believed to be the Word of God But the ignorance of Mr. Hobbes lies in this That in matters of fact which our senses have not perceived or we have not been at the transaction or institution of the best evidence the thing is capable of that is unquestionable testimony is sufficient to
none at all and this without vouchsafing a Reason of such an idle conceit And let Mr. Hobbes say what he can or any one for him this Paragraph tends only to draw wicked or unwary Readers into contempt of Religion and to make a mockery of it which must tend to their Eternal misery and to keep them from that beatifical vision which Mr. Hobbes page 30. without Sence or Reason calls a word of the Schoolmen and unintelligible Mr. Hobbes p. 32. saith That when we believe the Scriptures to be the Word of God we believe the Church or a Prophet except some immediate revelation intervene so far as 't is possible to know what he means He saith That if we believe not the Scriptures the affront is done to the Church or a Prophet and not to God as the not believing the Stories of Livy concerning the gods the affront is done to Livy and not to the gods This is to undermine the Scriptures before he comes to blow them up But let Mr. Hobbes look the 5 th of Ephes. and he shall find that the Church hath handed down the Scriptures to us so united to Christ and the Union so firm there expressed between Christ and the Church that he must needs conclude that any affront done to the Scriptures must necessarily be done to Christ and to God And I do affirm against all the conceited Irreligionists in the World that the Scriptures would have been the Word of God and the Rules of Salvation although our blessed Saviour had not appointed any Church to have handed them down to us not that I say every cavilling Atheist would have assented to them But then as Mr. Hobbes plentifully urges in his Book How shall we know that they are the Word of God And of this I shall say something more hereafter But at present say that I think 't is sufficiently satisfactory to any rational Christian that they are the Word of God because they teach us our misery by sin to which our mortality is so subject our Redemption by Christ and appoint us a Pious and Virtuous way of living here and the way to an happy immortality hereafter Besides what rational Man can suppose that the good and wise God would leave mankind without a guide to a blessed immortality and what guide is there like this So that any Man that is not frantick or resolved to quarrel with every thing other people assent to but must say that God is the Author of them and consequently the disbelief of them is an affront done to God if we deny them and not to Man only And I think good King Iosiah and all Iudah with him believed the Law to be the Word of God and thought the contrary would be an affront to God upon less or at least upon less inviting grounds 2 Kings 21. than we ought now to believe the volume of the Bible to be so But if we believe not the Fables of Livy concerning the gods the affront is only done to Livy and not to his gods for they were no gods at all and so Mr. Hobbes's Example is at best but a fallacy which he is very frequent in and I have so much charity for him as to believe that 't is not always out of design but sometimes caused by his want of a clear Iudgement for Mr. Hobbes cannot but know that a juggling Cock is often hit Mr. Hobbes after a long discourse of the passions the absurdity of which is not worth the answering p. 38. saith That the Scriptures by the Spirit of God in Man mean a Mans Spirit inclined to godliness And for this he cites Exod. 28.3 which is nothing to his purpose though not so much against him as other Texts are As 31. Exod. 3. which saith expresly I have fill'd him with the Spirit of God to work which as Mr. Hobbes saith Is Mans Spirit inclined to godliness And the 51. Psal. 11 12. where David prays That God's Spirit may not be taken from him but that he may be upheld by it is as Mr. Hobbes saith David's own Spirit without doubt David thought it God's Spirit or he would have called it by an other name and I believe David knew as well as Mr. Hobbes how to express himself So to make this Opinion sufficiently ridiculous look Iudges 15. 14. where 't is said The Spirit of the Lord came mightily on Samson and the cords brake and he kill'd the Philistines that is saith Mr. Hobbes Samson's Spirit was inclined to godliness And from hence Mr. Hobbes may raise this Observation That a mans godliness makes him able to pull cords asunder which perchance Mr. Hobbes trusted to when he wrote his Leviathan Mr. Hobbes saith p. 38 39. That all those that our Saviour is said to cast Devils out of were nothing but mad Men. And I will deal plainly with Mr. Hobbes and tell him that none but mad Men think so For was he only mad that was torn by the evil Spirit before he came out of the Man possessed Or were they only mad that were possessed by the Devils 8. Matth. 31. when the Devils spake and after Christ permitted them to go into the herd of Swine and why ran the herd of Swine thereupon into the Sea To this Mr. Hobbes may say That they were mad Swine to do so And in the 12. of Matth. 27. our Saviour saith If I by Beelzebub cast out Devils by whom do your children cast them out Here 't is agreed both by our Saviour and the unbelieving Iews that our Saviour did cast out Devils therefore the Men were something else besides mad out of whom Devils were cast And why Mr. Hobbes should be wiser or undertake to be so than either the Iews or our blessed Lord and Saviour is an hard matter to know except it be that after his labour to bring Religion and the Scriptures into contempt now thinks by a side wind to debase our Saviour in his Miracles whereof one of the most eminent was his casting out Devils before he strike at his Godhead Mr. Hobbes in his tenth Chapter hath much to do with Power and Honour and saith That good success is Power p. 41. and to flatter is to Honour p. 42. and that an action whether just or unjust if great and difficult is Honourable p. 44,45 Of which last I will give an Example If two high-way Men rob six honest Men or a Ruffian ravish a Woman of great Quality 't is Honourable And this I have Mr. Hobbes's warrant for But in short I repeated these last sentences to shew his vain humor Mr. Hobbes saith p. 50. That Ignorance of the causes of Iustice disposeth a Man to make custom and example the rule of his actions and to judge that just or unjust of the punishment or example of which they can produce an example or as the Lawyers which only use this false measure of Iustice call it a precedent Thus far he I thank Mr. Hobbes that whilst