confirmed to them by the testimony and authority of such persons whose judgment and veracity they esteemed We have had enough of his understanding understandeth and will willeth or too much unlesse it were of more weight What a stir he maketh every other Section about nothing All the World are agreed upon the truth in this particular and understand one another well Whether they ascribe the act to the Agent or to the form or to the faculty by which he acteth it is all one They know that actions properly are of Individuums But if an Agent have lost his natural power or acquired habit as we have instances in both kinds he will act but madly He that shall say that natural faculties and acquired habits are nothing but the acts that flow from them That reason and deliberation are the same thing he might as well say that wit and discourse are the same thing deserveth no other answer but to be sleighted That a man deliberating of fit means to obtain his desired end doth consider the means singly and successively there is no doubt And there is as little doubt that both the inquiry and the result or veredict may sometimes be definite or prescribe the best means or the only means and sometimes indefinite determining what means are good without defining which are the best but leaving the election to the free Agent Castigations of the Animadversions Num. 27. I Do not know what the man would have done but for his trifling homonymy about the name of Will which affoardeth him scope to play at fast and loose between the faculty and the act of willing We ended with it in the last Section and we begin again with it in this Section The faculty of the will saith he is no will the act only which he calleth volition is the will As a man that sleepeth hath the power of seeing and seeth not nor hath for that time any sight so also he hath the power of willing but willeth nothing nor hath for that time any will Quantum est in rebus inane What profound mysteries he uttereth to shew that the faculty of willing and the act of willing are not the same things Did ever any Creature in the World think they were And that the faculty doth not alwayes act Did ever any man think it did Let him leave these impertinencies and tell us plainly whether the faculty of willing and the act of willing be not distinct things And whether the faculty of the will be not commonly called the will by all men but himself and by himself also when he is in his lucidae intervalles Hear his own confession To will to elect to chuse are all one and so to will is here made an act of the will and indeed as the will is a faculty or power of a mans soul so the will is an act of it according to that power That which he calleth the faculty here he calleth expressely the will there Here he will have but one will there he admitteth two distinct wills to will is an act of the will Here he will not endure that the faculty should be the will there he saith expressely That the will is a faculty All this wind shaketh no Oates Whatsoever he saith in this Section amounteth not to the weight of one graine If he had either known what concupiscence doth signifie which really he doth not or had known how familiar it is both name and thing in the most modest and pious Authours both Sacred and prophane which he doth not know he would have been ashamed to have accused this expression as unbecoming a grave person But he who will not allow me to mention it once to good purpose doth take the liberty to mention it six times in so many lines to no purpose There hath been an old question between Roman-Catholicks and Protestants Whether concupiscence without consent be a sin or not And here cometh he as bold as blind to determine the difference committing so many errours and so grosse in one short determination that it is a shame to dispute with him thrashing those Doctours soundly whom he professeth to honour and admire not for ill will but because he never read them He maintaineth that which the Romanists themselves do detest and would be ashamed of As first That concupiscence without consent is no sin contrary to all his much admired Doctours Secondly That there is no concupiscence without consent contrary to both parties which we use to call the taking away the subject of the question Thirdly That concupiscence with consent may be lawful contrary to all men Though the Church of Rome do not esteem it to be properly a sinne yet they esteem it a defect and not altogether lawful even without consent much lesse with consent Fourthly That concupiscence makes not the sin but the unlawfulnesse of satisfying such concupiscence or the designe to prosecute what he knoweth to be unlawful Which last errours are so grosse that no man ever avowed them before himself When lust hath conceived it bringeth forth sin that is when a man hath consented to the suggestion of his own sensuality Though he scorn the School-men yet he should do well to advise with his Doctors whom he professeth to admire before he plunge himself again into such a Whirly-pool Castigations of the Animadversions Num. 28. IF I should give over the well known terms of the rational or intellectual will so well grounded in nature so well warranted by the authority and practise of all good Divines and Philosophers to comply with his humour or distemperd imaginations I should right well deserve a Bable The intellectual appetite and the sensitive appetite are both appetites and in the same man they both proceed from the same soul but by divers faculties the one by the intellectual the other by the sensitive And proceeding from several faculties they do differ as much as if they proceeded from several souls The sensitive appetite is organical the intellectual appetite is inorganical The sensitive appetite followeth the judgement of the senses The intellectual appetite followeth the judgement of the understanding The sensitive appetite pursueth present particular corporal delights The intellectual appetite pursueth that which is honest that which is future that which is universal that which is immortal and spiritual The sensitive appetite is determined by the object It cannot chuse but pursue that object which the senses judge to be good and flie that which the senses judge to be evill But the intellectuall appetite is free to will or nill or suspend and may reject that which the senses say to be good and pursue that which the senses judge to be evil according to the dictate of reason Then to answer what he saith in particular The appetite and the will are not alwayes the same thing Every will is an appetite but every appetite is not a will Indeed in the same man appetite and will is
by special influence did necessitate the second causes to operate as they did and if they being thus determined did necessitate man inevitably unresistably by an essential subordination of causes to do whatsoever he did then one of these two absurdities must follow either That there is no such thing as sin in the World or That God is more guilty of it than man as the motion of the watch is more from the Artificer who makes it and winds it up than from the watch it self To this he answereth onely this That my consequence is no stronger then if out of this That a man is lame necessarily one should inferre That either he is not lame or that his lamenesse proceeded necessarily from the will of God And is it possible that he doth not see that this inference followeth clearly and necessarily from his principles If he doth not I will help his eye-sight All actions and accidents and events whatsoever do proceed from the will of God as the principal cause determining them to do what they are by a naturall necessary subordination of causes This is the principle I assume that which no man can deny But the lamenesse of this man whom he mentioneth is an accident or event Therefore this lamenesse upon his principles is from the will of God c. Castigations upon the Animadversions Num. 12. IN this Section he behaveth himself as the Hound by Nilus drinketh and runneth as if he were afraid to make any stay quite omitting the whole contexture and frame of my discourse onely catching here and there at some phrase or odd ends of broken sentences The authority of St. Paul was formerly his Palladium the fate of his opinion of Fate or his seven-fold shield which he bore up against all assailants And now to desert it as the Oestredge doth her egges in the sand and leave it to the judgement of the Reader to think of the same as he pleaseth seemeth strange That man usually is in some great distresse who quitteth his buckler I desire but the judicious Reader upon the By to compare my former defence with his trifling exceptions and I do not fear his veredict He saith it is blasphemy to say that God can sin so it is blasphemy also to say that God is the authour or cause of any sinne This he himself saith at least implicitly and this he cannot but say so long as he maintaineth an universal antecedent necessity of all things flowing from God by a necessary flux of second causes He who teacheth that all men are determined to sin antecedently without their own concurrence irresistibly beyond their own power to prevent it and efficaciously to the production of sinne He who teacheth that it is the antecedent will of God that men should sinne and must sinne He who maketh God to be not onely the cause of the act and of the law but likewise of the irregularity or deviation and of that very anomy wherein the being of sin so far as sin hath a being doth consist maketh God to be the principall cause and authour of sin But T. H. doth all this He saith it is no blasphemy to say that God hath so ordered the World that sin may necessarily be committed That is true in a right sense if he understand onely a necessity of infallability upon Gods presence or a necessity of supposition upon Gods permission But what trifling minsing of the matter is this Let him cough out and shew us the bottom of his opinion which he cannot deny that God hath so ordered the World that sin must of necessity be committed and inevitably be committed that it is beyond the power of man to help it or hinder it and that by vertue of Gods omnipotent will and eternall decree This is that which we abominate Yet he telleth us That it cannot be said that God is the authour of sin because not he that necessitateth an action but he who doth command or warrant it is the authour First I take that for granted which he admitteth that by his opinion God necessitateth men to sinfull actions which is a blasphemy as well as the other Secondly his later part of his assertion is most false That he onely who commandeth or warranteth sin is the authour of it He who acteth sin he who necessitateth to sin he who first bringes sin into the World is much more the authour of it than the bare commander of it They make God to be the proper and predominate cause of sin by an essential subordination of the sin of man to the will of God and in essential subordinates allwayes the cause of the cause is the cause of the effect If there had never been any positive commandment or law given yet sin had still been sin as being contrary to the eternall law of justice in God himself If an Heathen Prince should command a Christian to sacrifice to Idols or Devils and he should do it not the commander onely but he who commits the idolatry is the cause of the sin His instance in the Act of the Israelites robbing the Egyptians of their Jewels is impertinent For it was no robbery nor sin God who is the Lord Paramount of Heaven and Earth having first justly transfered the right from the Egyptians to the Israelites and in probability to make them some competent satisfaction for all that work and drudgery which they had done for the Egyptians without payment This is certain if God necessitate the Agent to sin either the act necessitated is no sin or God is the principall cause of it Let him chuse whether of these two absurdities this Scylla or that Charybdis he will fall into The reason which he gives of Gods objurgations to convince men that their wills were not in their own power but in Gods power is senselesse and much rather proveth the contrary that because they were chidden therefore their wills were in their own power And if their wills had not been in their own power most certainly God would not have reprehended them for that which was not their own fault He saith That by interpreting hardening to be a permission of God I attribute no more to God in such actions then I might attribute to any of Pharaohs servants the not perswading their master c. As if Pharaohs servants had the same power over their master that God Allmighty had to hinder him and stop him in his evill courses As if Pharaohs servants were able to give or withhold grace as if Pharoahs servants had divine power to draw good out of evill and dispose of sin to the advancement of Gods glory and the good of his Church As if an humble petition or perswasion of a servant and a physicall determination of the will by a necessary flux of naturall causes were the same thing He who seeth a water break over its banks and suffers it to run out of its due channel that he may draw it by furrows into
Reader by these few instances which follow to judge what the Hobbain principles are in point of religion Ex ungue leonem First that no man needs to put himself to any hazard for his faith but may safely comply with the times And for their faith it is internal and invisible They have the licence that Naaman had and need not put themselves into danger for it Secondly he alloweth Subjects being commanded by their Soveraign to deny Christ. Profession with the tongue is but an external thing and no more than any other gesture whereby we signifie our obedience And wherein a Christian holding firmly in his heart the faith of Christ hath the same liberty which the Prophet Elisha allowed to Naaman c. Who by bowing before the idol Rimmon denied the true God as much in effect as if he had done it with his lips Alas why did St. Peter weep so bitterly for denying his Master out of fear of his life or members It seemeth he was not acquainted with these Hobbian principles And in the same place he layeth down this general conclusion This we may say that whatsoever a Subject is compelled to in obedience to his Soveraign and doth it not in order to his own mind but in order to the laws of his Country that action is not his but his Soveraigns nor is it he that in this case denieth Christ before men but his Governour and the law of his Country His instance in a mahumetan commanded by a Christian Prince to be present at divine service is a weak mistake springing from his grosse ignorance in case-divinity not knowing to distinguish between an erroneous conscience as the Mahumetans is and a conscience rightly informed Thirdly if this be not enough he giveth license to a Christian to commit idolatry or at least to do an idolatrous act for fear of death or corporal danger To pray unto a King voluntarily for fair weather or for any thing which God onely can do for us is divine worship and idolatry On the other side if a King compel a man to it by the terrour of death or other great corporal punishment it is not idolatry His reason is because it is not a sign that he doth inwardly honour him as a god but that he is desirous to save himself from death or from a miserable life It seemeth T. H. thinketh there is no divine worship but internal And that it is lawful for a man to value his own life or his limbs more than his God How much is he wiser than the three Children or Daniel himself who were thrown the first into a fiery furnace the last into the Lyons denne because they refused to comply with the idolatrous decree of their Soveraign Prince A fourth aphorisme may be this That which is said in the scripture it is better to obey God than men hath place in the Kingdome of God by pact and not by nature Why nature it self doth teach us that it is better to obey God than men Neither can he say that he intended this only of obedience in the use of indifferent actions and gestures in the service of God commanded by the commonwealth for that is to obey both God and man But if divine law and humane law clash one with another without doubt it is evermore better to obey God than man His fifth conclusion may be that the sharpest and most successfull sword in any war whatsoever doth give soveraign power and authority to him that hath it to approve or reject all sorts of Theologicall doctrines concerning the Kingdome of God not according to their truth or falsehood but according to that influence which they have upon political affaires Hear him But because this doctrine will appear to most men a novelty I do but propound it maintaining nothing in this or any other paradox of religion but attending the end of that dispute of the sword concerning the authority not yet amongst my Countrymen decided by which all sorts of doctrine are to be approved or rejected c. For the points of doctrine concerning the Kingdome of God have so great influence upon the Kingdome of man as not to be determined but by them that under God have the soveraign power Careat successibus opto Quisquis ab eventu facta notanda putat Let him evermore want successe who thinketh actions are to be judged by their events This doctrine may be plausible to those who desire to fish in troubled waters But it is justly hated by those which are in Authority and all those who are lovers of peace and tranquillity The last part of this conclusion smelleth ranckly of Jeroboam Now shall the Kingdome return to the house of David if this people go up to do sacrifice in the house of the Lord at Ierusalem whereupon the King took councell and made two calves of gold and said unto them It is too much for you to go up to Ierusalem behold thy Gods O Israel which brought thee out of the land of Egypt But by the just disposition of Almighty God this policy turned to a sin and was the utter destruction of Jeroboam and his family It is not good jesting with edg-tooles nor playing with holy things where men make their greatest fastnesse many times they find most danger His sixth paradox is a rapper The civill lawes are the rules of good and evill just and unjust honest and dishonest and therefore what the lawgiver commands that is to be accounted good what he forbids bad And a little after before empires were just and unjust were not as whose nature is relative to a command every action in its own nature is indifferent That it is just or unjust proceedeth from the right of him that commandeth Therefore lawfull Kings make those things which they command just by commanding them and those things which they forbid unjust by forbidding them To this adde his definition of a sin that which one doth or omitteth saith or willeth contrary to the reason of the commonwealth that is the civil lawes Where by the lawes he doth not understand the written lawes elected and aproved by the whole common-wealth but the verball commands or mandates of him that hath the soveraign power as we find in many places of his writings The civil lawes are nothing else but the commands of him that is endowed with soveraign power in the commonwealth concerning the future actions of his subjects And the civil lawes are fastned to the lips of that man who hath the soveraigne power Where are we in Europe or in Asia Where they ascribed a divinity to their Kings and to use his own phrase made them mortall gods O King live for ever Flatterers are the common moaths of great pallaces where Alexanders friends are more numerous than the Kings friends But such grosse palpable pernicious flattery as this is I did never meet with so derogatory both to piety and policy
without appointing or constituting a subjection without subjection an authorising without authorising What is this He saith that it cannot be said honourably of God that he hath parts or totality which are the attributes of finite things If it cannot be said honourably of God that he hath parts or totality then it cannot be said honourably of God that he is a body for every body hath parts and totality Now hear what he saith Every part of the Universe is body And that which is no body is no part of the Universe And because the Universe is all that which is no part of it is nothing Then if God have no parts and totality God is nothing Let him judge how honourable this is for God He saith We honour not God but dishonour him by any value lesse than infinite And how doth he set an infinite value upon God who every where maketh him to subsist by successive duration Infinite is that to which nothing can be added but to that which subsisteth by successive duration something is added every minute He saith Christ had not a Kingly authority committed to him by his Father in the World but onely consiliary and doctrinal He saith on the contrary That the kingdom of Iudaea was his hereditary right from King David c. And when it pleased him to play the King he required entire obedience Math. 21. 2. Go into the village over against you and streightway ye shall find an assetied and a colt with her loose them and bring them unto me And if any man say ought unto you ye shall say The Lord hath need of them He saith The institution of eternal punishment was before sin And if the command be such as cannot be obeyed without being damned to eternal death then it were madnesse to obey it And what evil hath excommunicatien in it but the consequent eternal punishment At other times he saith there is no eternal punishment It is evident that there shall be a second death of every one that shall be condemned at the day of Iudgement after which he shall die no more He who knoweth no soul nor spirit may well be ignorant of a spiritual death He saith It is a doctrine repugnant to civil society that whatsoever a man does against his conscience is sin Yet he himself saith It is a sin whatsoever one doth against his conscience for they that do that despise the Law He saith That all power secular and spiritual under Christ is united in the Christian Common-wealth that is the Christian Soveraign Yet he himself saith on the contrary It cannot be doubted of that the power of binding and loosing that is of remotting and retaining sins which we call the power of the keyes was given by Christ to future Pastours in the same manner as to the present Apostles And all power of remitting sin which Christ himself had was given to the Apostles All spiritual power is in the Christian Magistrate Some spiritual power that is the power of the keyes is in the successours of the Apostles that is not in the Christian Magistrate is a contradiction He confesseth That it is manifest that from the ascension of Christ until the conversion of Kings the power Ecclesiastical was in the Apostles and so delivered unto their successours by imposition of hands And yet straight forgetting himself he taketh away all power from them even in that time when there were no Christian Kings in the World He alloweth them no power to make any Ecclesiastical laws or constitutions or to impose any manner of commands upon Christians The office of the Apostles was not to command but teach As Schoole-Masters not as Commanders Yet Schoole-Masters have some power to command He suffereth not the Apostles to ordain but those whom the Church appointeth nor to excommunicate or absolve but whom the Church pleaseth He maketh the determination of all controversies to rest in the Church not in the Apostles And resolveth all questions into the authority of the Church The election of Doctours and Prophets did rest upon the authority of the Church of Antioch And if it be inquired by what authority it came to passe that it was received for the command of the Holy Ghost which those Prophets and Doctors said proceeded from the Holy Ghost we must necessarily answer By the authority of the Church of Antioch Thus every where he ascribeth all authority to the Church none at all to the Apostles even in those times before there were Christian Kings He saith not tell it to the Apostles but tell it to the Church that we may know the definitive sentence whether sin or no sin is not left to them but to the Church And it is manifest that all authority in spiritual things doth depend upon the authority of the Church Thus not contented with single contradictions he twisteth them together for according to his definition of a Church there was no Christian Church at Antioch or in those parts of the World either then or long after Hear him A Church is a company of men professing Christian Religion united in the person of one Soveraign at whose command they ought to assemble and without whose authority they ought not to assemble Yet there was no Christian Soveraign in those parts of the World then or for two hundred years after and by consequence according to his definition no Church He teacheth That when the civil Soveraign is an infidel every one of his own subjects that resisteth him sinneth against the Laws of God and rejecteth the counsel of the Apostles that admonisheth all Christians to obey their Princes and all children and servants to obey their Parents and Masters in all things As for not resisting he is in the right but for obeying in all things in his sense it is an abominable errour Upon this ground he alloweth Christians to deny Christ to sacrifice to idols so they preserve faith in their hearts He telleth them They have the license that Naaman had and need not put themselves into danger for their faith That is they have liberty to do any external acts which their infidel Soveraigns shall command them Now hear the contrary from himself When Soveraigns are not Christians in spiritual things that is in those things which pertain to the manner of worshipping God some Church of Christians is to be followed Adding that when we may not obey them yet we may not resist them but eundum est ad Christum per martyrium we ought to suffer for it He confesseth That matter and power are indifferent to contrary forms and contrary acts And yet maintaineth every where that all matter is necessitated by the outward causes to one individual form that is it is not indifferent And all power by his Principles is limitted and determined to one particular act Thus he scoffeth at me for the contrary very learnedly