assent The infinite desires of our Will and visible imperfections of our Understanding sufficiently convinceth mankind of the necessity of such Revelations The desire of happiness is natural to all and impossibility of attaining it in this life is no less evident The nature and immateriality of our Soul demonstrates that we were created for greater and more noble ends than the mean and inconsiderable enjoyments of this life that we cannot but exist for ever and are capable of Eternal Happiness and then our Will naturally prompts us to desire that this future Happiness may be commensurate to the infinite duration of our existence and not inferior to the capacity of our Nature Yet these ardent desires and possibility of obtaining them would but enhance our misery and augment our wishes unless the means of attaining them were assured to us This Divine Revelation alone can do since God alone can confer that happiness upon mankind and that he will do it can no otherwise appear than by some external Revelation The sense and evidence of these undoubted Truths have excited mankind in all Ages to enquire after such Revelation and obliged them to found all their hopes of future Happiness upon it Their Hopes and Desires induced them to attend to the proposal of it and then their Reason commanded them to acquiesce in it The assurance of the Divine Infallibility excluded all doubts and scruples and the sense of their Interest engaged in it banished even all desire of doubting Thus Divine Revelations easily gained belief and obedience in the World and if at any time they were rejected or disbelieved by men it was because their Judgment and Assent was prepossessed with some either real or feigned Revelation But then it could not be avoided but this natural reverence for Divine Revelations and proneness of believing them would produce some ill effects prejudicial to the Reason and Interest of mankind A fatal credulity would creep into the World and possess the minds of more ignorant Persons and induce them blindly to believe every bold Pretender to Revelation After a laborious and fruitless search of future Happiness men were apt to embrace any System of Religion presented to them if it flattered their hopes of future felicity they were loth to discover the error and illusion of any pleasing Revelation they wished it might be true and what at first they wished they at last believed But not only did the desires and hopes of mankind create this credulity the natural reverence of God and all divine Oracles when not rationally directed advanc'd and increas'd it Many feared they should be injurious to the Divine Majesty and incur the guilt of Atheism if they should scrupulously examine what pretended to carry the stamp of his Authority and to have been revealed by him To entertain scruples in this case was thought no less than Sacrilege and every doubt was esteemed an affront to God. To which may be added that most imagined they should contract no small merit and even lay an obligation upon God if they immediately resigned up their judgment to his supposed Revelation and blindly received it without any doubt or hesitation This in all Ages opened a wide gate and prepared the way for Error and Superstition while the whimsies of every foolish Enthusiast and fables of every bold Impostor were proposed under the venerable name of Divine Oracles and securely believed by the credulous multitude Hence all the follies and absurdities of Pagan Religion found belief and entertainment in the World and the most extravagant Impostors never wanted Proselytes Hence the most pernicious Errors of Hereticks found admission into the Church and the pretence of new Revelations in every Age seduced some part of the Christian World. All the present corruptions of the Faith are owing to it on which side soever any Errors at this day are entertained a scrupulous examination would discover them to be entertained chiefly for the precedent reasons and all modern additions to genuine Christianity will be found either to flatter the hopes or raise the admiration of the common People To this fatal credulity and danger of illusion arising from it God and Nature have assigned an excellent remedy the use of our Reason which may examine the grounds and testimonies of all pretended Revelations inquire into their truth and after a scrupulous trial pass sentence on them This the interest of Truth and the honour of our Nature requires us to perform that we may neither prostitute the former nor depreciate the latter by submitting our Understandings to the Pretensions of every bold Impostor Without this precedent enquiry our belief would be irrational and far from being meritorious would become unlawful For to violate the rules of conduct prescribed to our understanding were to overthrow all the Laws of Nature to debase the dignity of mankind and efface the Image of God imprinted in us These Rules assure us that God cannot reveal any thing foolish or ridiculous much less contrary to the testimony of our Senses or repugnant to the first principles of Reason No greater injury can be offered to the Deity than to believe him the Author of any Religion which prescribes or encourageth foolish and superstitious Practices or opposeth Sense and Reason All such Revelations would imply repugnant Attributes to be in God which if it did not destroy his existence would at least oblige us to form dishonourable Ideas of him And therefore Seneca truly saith Superstition is a most senseless Error which affronts that Object it pretends to worship For what doth it matter whether you deny or dishonour God Justly also doth Plutarch wonder why Atheism should be rather accused of Impiety than Superstition since few of are moved by any defect in the Order or Government of the World to call in question the Existence of God but the Tricks and Cheats of superstitious Persons their Enthusiastick Motions Ridiculous Actions Exorcisms Lustrations and such like give them occasion to believe it better and more rational there should be no God than such a God as the Author of such a Superstitious Religion must necessarily be So that wise Heathen If Christianity in the first and purer Ages of it had laboured with these difficulties or been obnoxious to these Objections it could never have convinced the World of its Truth or surmounted the resistance of Heathen Philosophy It would have been highly irrational and unworthy the learning of those Ages to have deserted one Superstition to embrace another so much more absurd than the former by how much the one was repugnant to Reason alone the other both to Sense and Reason It is the unhappiness of latter Ages to lye open to the force of this Objection which after so many Superstitious Practices and Opinions introduced into a great part of the Christian Church is thereby become unanswerable For whosoever considers the Fictions of Transubstantiation Purgatory and Infallibility the Impertinence of Prayers in an unknown Tongue the
aim at an extraordinary perfection and purity propose to themselves long pilgrimages terrible austerities continual prayer and a thousand other ridiculous actions which their deluded fancy suggests to be meritorious They employ their thoughts in the perpetual meditation of these imaginary perfections and in their extasies and raptures are amused with them and form pleasing Ideas of them arising from the apprehension of any exceeding merit or veneration to be obtained by the practice of them In this religious phrensy they imagine to have received the Divine approbation of them mistaking a foolish satisfaction of a deluded judgment for the suffrage and voice of the Holy Spirit acting in them and at last proceed so far as to fancy the reception of a Divine Command for the commission of these extravagancies No wonder then if after such a false perswasion they proceed to act all the whimsies and follies which a disturbed brain and violent imagination can suggest if they put off all sense of shame and modesty and setting no bounds to their extravagance deliver themselves up to the conduct and direction of an irrational fancy which inciteth them to commit such follies and trifles as are beneath the dignity of a rational Being and contrary to the dictates of common sense such ridiculous fopperies and elaborate extravagance as may justly provoke the laughter of sober Heathens and indignation of wiser Christians Such ridiculous Fanaticism is the utmost degeneracy of Christian Religion than which nothing can be more contrary to its Genius and destructive of its Principles Christianity was intended to exalt and perfect the Reason of mankind to create true notions of the nature of all moral and religious Actions and introduce the practice of a manly and rational Piety Whereas this Enthusiasm debaseth the Reason and Understanding of mankind introduceth false Ideas of Religion and Piety and exposeth both to the scorn and derision of the more judicious and intelligent World as if none but Fools and Ideots could be perfect Christians and the highest degree of madness were the most certain mark of piety Such absurd Opinions cannot but scandalize all considering Persons and cause them to conclude that either these absurdities are gross corruptions and deviations from Christianity or else Christianity it self is a grand Imposture unworthy the belief and veneration or even attention of mankind The former is not easily discernible by those who have no other notions of Christianity than what they receive from the general practice and currant opinions of their Countrey and are from their infancy prepossest that there is no true Christian Society besides their own where if such Fanaticism be publickly practised or countenanced it cannot but create in them a detestation of all Christianity But as for those who are convinced of the truth of Christianity in general and enquire after the true Doctrines of it among so many divided Communions of the Christian World they may rationally and infallibly conclude that particular Church which favours or promotes this Superstitious Enthusiasm to be infinitely corrupted and degenerate from the true Spirit and Principles of Christianity If we view the several Churches and Communions of the Christian World we shall find no Society of Christians more free from Fanaticism than the Church of England or more guilty of it than the Church of Rome It hath been the peculiar happiness of the Church of England to create a right sense of Religion and Piety in all her Communicants and secure to them the practice of a rational Devotion She makes no pretensions to private Inspirations and extraordinary Illuminations of the Holy Ghost and all her Children are more apt to deride than admire the follies and extasies of Enthusiasts If any of her Members have at any time through ambition or ignorance embraced Fanaticism they have at the same time departed from the Communion of the Church and becoming Schismaticks proclaimed themselves her Enemies Yet so far hath the sober and judicious practice and example of the Church of England influenced even their conduct that the most extravagant among them have been less Fanatical than the most admired Saints of the Church of Rome and whensoever the sense of their Duty and Providence of God shall induce them to return to the bosome of the Church which we heartily wish they can do it no otherwise than by deserting even all Reliques of Fanaticism Not so the Church of Rome which in all her Offices and publick Ceremonies promotes and foments it hath on many occasions given publick applause and approbation to it and oweth the greatest part of her peculiar Doctrines and present prosperity to the Enthusiasm of her Followers If we consult the publick Offices of that Church we shall find nothing intelligible directly proposed to the common People but the Prayers performed in an unknown Tongue and their Senses in the mean while amused with antick Gestures Images Processions and pompous Representations The first enforceth the minds of ignorant Persons to betake themselves to the entertainment of their own thoughts and direct their Devotion according to their own crude and indigested Ideas and then the latter inspires them with childish and absurd notions of Religion and Divine Matters and both together cause them to form wild and Enthusiastick Apprehensions of Religious Actions and direct their Conduct according to those Apprehensions If we examine the peculiar Doctrines of the Church of Rome we shall find many of them to derive their original from Enthusiastick Visions and Revelations I will instance only in Purgatory and Transubstantiation whereof the former however at this day defended was at first set a foot upon the sole Authority of these Fanatick Visions which imaginary Visions of this kind were so frequent among the Enthusiastick Monks of the sixth seventh eighth and tenth Ages that large Volumes might be compiled of them as indeed I have seen several voluminous Collections of them in Manuscript composed before the Reformation in proof of Purgatory As for Transubstantiation as it was first forged in the Cell of a Visionary Monk so it chiefly gained credit and belief in the World from the pretended Visions of supposed Saints for whose sake God divested the Sacramental Elements of their usual Accidents and offered them to their sight under the very Species of an Humane Body Scarce a Monkish Saint of any eminence after the ninth Age can be found in whose life such a Vision is not related Lastly if we view the Religious Orders of the Church of Rome where Religion and Piety is supposed to flourish in its utmost perfection and which are esteemed the grand Patterns of refined Christianity we shall find them to be so many Societies of Fanatical Enthusiasts who if we except vicious and irreligious Persons among them wholly busie themselves in wild Imaginations and ridiculous Ceremonies If any religious Persons among them escape this contagion and surmount this imperfection it is owing to the excellency of their Genius and advantage of their
extraordinary and therefore taught that none did perfectly perform his Vow of Obedience who were not like a Statue which doth not in the least resist any motion a Position which he had learned from his Master St. Francis who affirmed none to be truly obedient who were not like a dead Body which remaineth in whatsoever situation it is placed An Opinion which indeed deserveth to be chiefly urged and recommended by designing Impostors who when they have once possest their Credulous Disciples with the belief of it have obtained their Design and may securely propose their Erroneous Doctrines Therefore Apollonius above all things took care to teach his Disciples that they ought in all things to pay a blind obedience to his Commands told them that he had received Inspirations from God and was taught by him whatsoever he revealed to them that he acted by Divine Impulse and expected that they should follow his Directions as he followed God's This pretence and belief of Divine Inspiration and Impulse in Enthusiasts is usually accompanied with so great a diffidence of their own Reason and Judgment that no matters of moment must be left to their direction Heaven must be importuned and extraordinary Revelations demanded to satisfy the meanest Scruples and regulate their Actions as if no Reason had been given to Mankind to guide their Conduct and determine their Resolutions St. Francis upon any undertaking was wont to retire into solitary Places and there incessantly beg of God with inexpressible groans and importune him with continual prayer to reveal to him what he should do In all emergent Difficulties he neither trusted himself nor his Friends but by instant prayer searched out the good pleasure of the Divine Will till he were illustrated by the Oracle of supernatural Revelation Being tormented with a great Scruple whether he should employ his whole time in Prayer or betake himself to preach the Gospel he could not resolve the question by his own Reason but resolved to expect the Divine Revelation He commands St. Clara to inquire the Will of God by Prayer It is revealed to her that he should undertake the Office of Preaching It is impossible to imagine any thing more irrational or Enthusiastical than this Conduct but what follows is an unpardonable Superstition which in the Ancient Church would have been punished with Excommunication Whensoever he undertook any thing of moment he was wont to consult the Bible and take his Resolutions from that place which upon a sudden opening of the Book first presented it self to his view Ignatius having got together six Companions at Paris calls them together causeth each in particular to pray and fast and beg of God his light to direct them and then opens to them his Design He prescribed to them the same method in forming the Constitutions of his Order and choosing a General When Borgia one of his Disciples was chosen Cardinal to find out the Will of Heaven in that matter he shut up himself for three days and communicated only with God in prayer The first day he found himself wholly indifferent inclining to neither side The second day he found in himself an inclination rather of breaking the Design than permitting it to go on But the third day he was convinced that it was not the Will of God that Borgia should be made Cardinal and therefore opposed the Election I will produce but one Passage more which demonstrates both the Enthusiastick Diffidence of Ignatius and the intolerable Flattery of his Disciples Upon occasion of his seeking God by Prayer so much when he was to write the Constitutions of his Order Vitelleschi hath these words It seems there was upon this Subject an agreeable debate between the Master and the Servant the latter judging himself incapable of making any Constitution and resolving not to make any without consulting the Oracle of the Eternal Wisdom and the former taking pleasure in communicating to the other the sublime and resplendent Lights of his Treasures which he had reserved from before the beginning of time for the conduct and regulation of this Society which he conceived and gave to his Church What pity is it Ignatius should be unhappily reserved to such a learned ungrateful Age Otherwise his Disciples might have offered somewhat to his memory answerable and in nothing inferior to the Eternal Gospel of St. Francis. When the Enthusiast is advanc'd so far as to believe the Phrenzies of his Brain to be Divine Illuminations and himself on all occasions to be divinely inspired he will not fail to pretend a mighty familiarity with God and from the sentiment of any grateful motion in the Blood or Spirits imagine together with his inward Lights to have received great abundance of inward Consolations He will fancy himself to be the familiar Acquaintance of God and Favourite of Heaven and thence conceive a spiritual Pride greater and more intolerable than any which ariseth from the pomp or grandeur of the World. Apollonius boasted that he enjoyed a personal familiarity with the Gods and as a Philosopher conversed with them every morning St. Francis was commonly filled with great consolation of Spirit in praying and boasted that he could defend himself from the cold of Winter by the fervour of the Divine Spirit acting in him What large Conceits Ignatius entertained of his own Merits and published without all sense of modesty we before shewed The pretence of extraordinary Divine Consolations in his Prayers and Raptures runs through the whole fragment of his Journal before published To these we may add what the Authors of his Life relate of him That sometimes such a flood of Consolations would suddenly come upon him that he was even overwhelmed and transported out of himself that by reason of these overflowing Consolations such abundance of tears would follow that his sight was endangered by it that by the great affluence of these Consolations and tears ensuing from them in reciting the Divine Office he was forced to stop and interrupt his Prayers at almost every word and employ a great part of the day in reading the Psalms only That he continued sometimes two or three whole days together without taking any thing feeding himself only with the honey of Celestial Consolations That all the favours which God bestowed on the Society are to be attributed to the love which he bore to the Soul of St. Ignatius in which his Divine Majesty was well pleased That he burned inwardly with the fire of Charity and the Heart of Iesus was a soft Bed to him whereon he took his repose Such impertinent Jargon and unintelligible Cant is the natural effect of Enthusiasm For when the turbulent motions of the Brain are mistaken for Divine Inspirations and the Judgment willingly acquiesceth in that delusion the outward expressions which are ever conformable to the Ideas of the Mind cannot but be involved in the same obscurity
goodly Story is like to be marred by the Imprudence of the Relators The Devil it seems owed them a turn and revenged himself upon their Memory For the same Historians relate that the Devil far from being afraid at their Names their Pictures or their Letters sometimes seized upon their very Bodies and handled them very roughly Thus St. Francis being once perswaded to betray his Humility so far as to accept a Lodging in a Cardinals Palace was at night most unmercifully beaten by the Devils and left for dead Ignatius was often most cruelly scourged by the Devil more especially one Night at Rome when the Devil catch't him by the Throat and squeezed him so hard that the Saint straining himself to call upon the Name of Jesus continued hoarse many days after However these Bastinadoes might for a while mortify the Saints and intirely blast the repute of their arbitrary command over the Devils yet at least they conferred this benefit upon them that hereby they more nearly resembled the ancient Heroes of the Legend among whom the Great St. Antony underwent the same fate For unadvisedly peeping into the hole of a Rock and discovering there a whole nest of Devils the Devils sallied out upon him and beat him so unmercifully that his Servant carried him away for dead Not only in this respect were the Writers of his Life injurious to the Memory of Ignatius in not telling their Story plausibly and without any repugnance between the several parts of it but also by their improvident zeal to raise the Honour and Grandeur of their Saint have so imprudently represented many of his most illustrious and wonderful Actions that we might justly suspect the concurrence of evil Spirits in the performance of them if we either believed the truth of those Actions or were ready to admit any such suspicions When he first dedicated himself to the Blessed Virgin as soon as he had ended his Prayer he heard a mighty noise the House trembled all the Windows of the Chamber were broke and a rent made in the Wall which remaineth to this day This Bouhours would gladly attribute to God testifying thereby the acceptance of Ignatius his Prayers as formerly of the Prayers of the Apostles by a like sign However he doth not deny that it might possibly have been caused by the Devil who by that Earthquake endeavoured to put a period to Ignatius his Life Bussieres makes no doubt of it but confidently affirms it to have been caused by the Devil A little after the Devil excited in him an extraordinary nauseousness of the Hospital into which he had voluntarily entred and shame to see himself in the company of Beggars At Manreze he appeared to him in the Habit of an honest Young man disswading him from the use of so great Austerities While he learned the Latin Tongue at Barcelona the Devil to hinder his Learning instigated him to practices of Piety filled him with Consolations raised in him such tender sentiments of God that all the time of his study was spent in devout Thoughts Of the Demoniacks which he dispossessed some were lifted up into the Air and himself in time of Prayer was often seen to be raised from the ground and be elevated in the Air. From this pendulous posture Procopius concludes that Iustinian the Emperor was a Devil and no man. That Apparition of the Devils hovering in the Air before his Eyes in form of Stars he mistook a long while for an Angelical Vision and effect of the Divine Favour to him When a Spanish Maid was brought to him under the notion of a Demoniack raging with violent contortions over all her Body he asserted she was not possest and that those extraordinary motions proceeded from a natural cause and that if the Devil had any part in it it was only in disturbing the Imagination of the sick Person Lastly being told of a Religious Woman at Bologna endued with an extraordinary gift of Prayer and having frequent Raptures and Extasies during which she had no sense of feeling altho fire were applied to her he assures Ribadeneira that God indeed did operate in his Soul and abundantly infuse into it the Vnction of his Spirit but that this happened rarely and only to Persons much in favour with God whereas the Devil who could act nothing upon the Soul I know not how this can be reconciled with the former assertion was wont to counterfeit externally Divine Operations and by such appearances impose upon the Credulous That this was the case of the Nun as in effect it was afterwards found out that all her pretended Holiness was but an Illusion of a Wicked Spirit If then the Devil can externally counterfeit Divine Operations suspend the Senses and cause extraordinary Extasies and Raptures of the Soul and by these Impostures procure to any one a great repute of sanctity and devotion in the Church of Rome If he can disturb the Imagination of Men without possessing their Bodies or taking from them the liberty of their Will If Ignatius actually mistook an Illusion of the Devil for a Divine Favour and was often observed in the same pendulous posture with Demoniacks If the Devil sometimes inspired him with good Thoughts and Resolutions as well as at other times diverted him from them Lastly if it be uncertain which miraculous Actions of Ignatius are to be ascribed to God and which to the Devil it cannot but remain infinitely doubtful whether God or the Devil had the greater share in the Actions of Ignatius whether he acted by the power and impulse of the former or by the assistance and suggestion of the latter It cannot be pretended that the Church by giving attestation to the sanctity of his Life and the truth of his Miracles in his Canonization hath removed all suspicions of this nature and vindicated the Memory of Ignatius from all possibility of disadvantageous Scruples For till the late Jesuits of Clermont proposed their Theses it never was pretended that the Church much less the Pope is infallible in determining matters of fact and that the Pope in attesting the sanctity of Ignatius was actually deceived and imposed upon the credulous World I will undeniably demonstrate In the Bull of his Canonization the Pope affirmeth that from the time of his Conversion no word or action proceeded from him which can be accounted a mortal Sin. Despair of the Divine Mercy is by Divines commonly accounted the greatest of all Sins and even this may receive greater or less aggravations as it is more or less unreasonable Ignatius committed this sin in the most aggravating circumstances some while after his Conversion when he had received frequent Illuminations from Heaven had enjoyed infinite Raptures and Extasies performed stupendious acts of apparent Charity and undergone the most severe exercises of external Mortification which if they be indeed acceptable to God as the Admirers of Ignatius and the Church of