Selected quad for the lemma: soul_n
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A53393
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The doctrine of devils proved to be the grand apostacy of these later times. An essay tending to rectifie those undue notions and apprehensions men have about dæmons and evil spirits.
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1676
(1676)
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Wing O366A; ESTC R19438
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87,763
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234
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THE DOCTRINE OF DEVILS PROVED To be the grand Apostacy of these later Times An ESSAY tending to rectifie those Undue Notions and Apprehensions Men have about DAEMONS AND EVIL SPIRITS LONDON Printed for the Author and are to be sold at the Kings-Arms in the Poultry 1676. TO THE READER THat the Doctrine here in this Treatise maintained is not unnecessary will be easily concluded by all those that are any way concerned in the interest and honour of the blessed Lord Jesus Christ when they consider how basely is abused villanously handled and cruelly mangled what wounds and bruises what mutibations and even decollations and that in the house of his friends such at least as pretend themselves Christians he hath received we have no comfort donbtless but by Christ nor by Christ unless it be by whole Christ sound Christ Christ divided maimed or mutilated can do us no good A bone of him must not be broken nor may an atomical fragment of him be lost And yet if we observe we may find some not only breaking his bones or tearing him piece meal one joint from another but even breaking his heart by rending his Godhead from his manhood or nulliâ—ying one joint one part one excellency one attribute or other that essentially belonged to one of these Of old some there were who despoiled him of his body others indeed allowed him a body but a body brought from heaven made of caelestial matter others but a body framed out of the Elements not a humane body or a body partaking any thing of an earthly mother Some contended his body was meerly a phantasm without any reality at all a delusive apparition We may not forget the Monoâ—helites that would not allow him as man any Will nor yet pass over the Apollonatists who though they allowed him a body denied utterly that he had any Soul The Nestorians divided him into two distinct persons each perfectly compleat subsisting in themselves apart a God and a man without any personal union of the Natures so making us indeed two Christs are we not beholding to them instead of one though indeed making us more than one they left us none at all But then came Eutiches and he takes away both Godhead and manhood at once in a sort for while he confusedly jumbles both Natures together he makes him neither God nor man perfectly but some third thing though what they know not nor any man else unless it were a confused Chaos nor flesh nor fish nor good Red Herring Quaque erat tellus illic pontus nes But I must not forget the Arians they seemed indeed to deal a little better with him for as they never denied him to be something first a man so they acknowledg him too to be God indeed but then 't was but a deified God a God by grace and purchase not by nature and essence that is a God and no God A Sacrilegist one that being but a creature in himself was so bold as to challenge not the name and title only but the honour essence and incommunicable attributes of the supream Godhead I need name no more this is enough to shew how well they used him of old But how is he used now why truly which could scarce be thought of altogether as bad Christ hath still enemies and several armies of them that march up to confront him The first are the Socinians these lead the van requiring him to lay by his Godhead and in effecth is Priesthood too This is a blow to the head Then came the Familists the spawn of Henry Nicholas who think to puff him off into meer fume and smoke as a meer Allegory these lay their ax to the root of the tree and endeavour to destroy him root and branch at once making him scarce any better than a meer nothing The Antinomians come next and these deal worse with him than the former for while they say He imposeth no Laws leaving his Proselytes to be lawless and licentious libertines they make him to be a wicked thing God man or devil no matter which a wicked thing which ever it be is worse than nothing this is a deadly thrust too A fourth sort follows I know not what to call them Novalists Enthusiasts or Quakers I know not which term to give them or whether they may not deserve all these These as I said follow for from the wild heterodoxes of the former they have with the addition of rudeness impudence ignorance and non-sense patcht up a something or a nothing from or with the Socinians they account him but a meer man at least some calling him The man that suffered at Jerusalem and with the Nicholaitans they account him but a Quality an Ignis fatuus a meer illusion a light within them which is not much better than an Allegory or rather worse and with the Antinomians they respect no laws of King or Keisar nor Christ neither in his Gospel but the dictates of their own fanatick brains is not this worse than what Pilate abhorred Shall I crucifie your King it is a crucifying or worse even a mutilating an annihilating of our King our Christ our God For the Popeling I need not say any thing it hath been often enough proved to them That by their prefering the Blessed Virgin before him as to their Addresses to her more than unto him her compassion and comfort which they suppose she affords them more than He while they worship the Picture with the same worship they do the divine person with many other particulars they ungod him and bring him into the condition of a creature while they make a creature equal if not superior to him in any excellency or perfection their magnifying his body into an immensity sometimes and then again at the same time minifying him into the smallest atomes of a wafer cake they nullifie his manhood As for his Kingly office their dispensing with his and ordaining others contrary to his Laws their abrogating his Doctrines and substituting new and contrary their offering up a wafer cake for the expiating the sins both of quick and dead take away all his offices But it is the Demonologists I am set against now in special who notwithstanding all their pretences to the contrary abuse Christ as much as any of the rest for while they equalize the Devil yea even Witches with him for stupendious and miraculous operations they cut off his head or ungod him and what can be worse He that debaseth a King unto the low degree of a common plebeian exalting the plebeian to an equality of power with the King maketh a King no King but a meer pleibeian and the plebeians no plebeians any longer but so many Kings so they that equalize devils with Christ for power make Christ either no King for power or at least devils for power Kings equal to Christ This is not a bruising of his heel only which is as much as the devil is said to do but a
but subsisted meerly by and in the other Person as a Ciens ingrafted doth in the Tree But best of all is this the Hypostatical Union of the two Natures in Christ adumbrated by the Union of the spiritual and corporeal parts in Man For as the reasonable Soul and Flesh is one Man so God and Man is one Christ as the Athanasian Creed hath it There be many resemblances of this it seems but not any kind of adumbration as yet found in nature how to shadow out the consubstantiation of two perfect compleat and subsistent individuals in one person And yet which is considerable too 2. God thought it needful to send an Angel even one of his mightiest most honourable most eloquent and most powerful even the Angel Gabriel to the blessed Virgin her self To perswade her into the belief of the possibility of that whereas they say That the Union of Devils unto Man is easily credible and generally believed without half that trouble Strange That the stranger thing should be more easily believed than the easier 3. But yet further There was great ado and much trouble about it To unite Man to God the omnipotency of the holy Ghost and the power of the Almighty God were imployed and all needful for the effecting of it Where the Devil as the Ichneumon into the Crocodile can slip into mens mouths with ease as they gape and possess them wholly as their own members And yet again 4. In the Judgment of God himself It was needful That much time even Thirty years and more should be spent I will not say for the subjugating of the Manhood to an obediential subjection towards the Godhead but for the clearer manifestation of the reality of that Union yea and Three or four years of continual Miracles to boot Where the Devil can incarnate himself possess or enter into a Person make him subservient to his will beck or nodd and manifest himself unquestionably to be the Dominus fac totum in the Person and all that with the turn of a hand in an instant 5. I might add God never did that Miracle but once the Devil doth such as are parallel every way and Super-paramount to it every week and day for many Thousand years together so that in truth the Devil seems to be the greater Miracler as out-doing out-going out-stretching the Omnipotent God in that very particular that he counts his Master-piece God manifested in the flesh is no such great Mystery the Devil can and doth do as great or greater every day Oh intolerable opinion that yields such blasphemous results Devilmongers will no doubt disclaim this charge but they shall never be able to evade the guilt CHAP. VII It undervalues Christs Miracles in that it allows Ejection of evil Spirits to Devils and Witches BUt Secondly as this Doctrine in the point of possession undervalues the Mystery of Christs Incarnation So doth it more abuse Christ in the crotchet of Dispossession A Devil nay a Witch say they by the Devils power can eject or cast out Devils out of any one possessed First out of a Person where there never was any Devil But Christ saith Satan casts not out Satan else his house should be divided and his Kingdom could not stand And yet hath and doth it stand ever since though at least as the doctrines of Devils assert Satan hath cast out Devils or Satan all the World over for these Sixteen hundred years Thus therefore this doctrine makes Christ a lyer And which is as bad it attributes more power to the Devil than ever Christ though he appeal to his stupend works for the justification of his Godhead ever exerted while here on earth Christ never so much as cast out one Devil I know men generally run away with this conceit because of these notions cast out Devils or cured a Demoniack or one possessed as we render it But if we consider That the Scripture speaketh but according to the mode and phrase of times then wherein according to the conceit of Platonizing Pharisees all great diseases afflictions or distempers wherein they thought as they did in all almost That there was 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 some extraordinary and supernatural agency we may and will be easily satisfied That when Christ is said to cast out Devils they were but dangerous diseases uncommon maladies or extraordinary distempers or else sometimes sins that are meant CHAP. VIII Christ cast not out Devils What is meant by Devils where Christ is said to cast them out CHrist himself in his return to John's Message or Quaery Art thou he that should come or do we look for another speaks nothing but of curing Diseases and Preaching the Gospel Not a word of casting out Devils though in the same hour he had cast out one Luk. 7.19 Whatever is meant by it But could he have satisfied John better than by saying Devils also are cast out if he had cast out any Devil really And yet not a word of this in his Answer unto John Baptist nor which is as remarkable doth St. John though he set himself upon that point especially to prove the Godhead of Christ producing many yea very many very great and stupend Miracles done by Christ yet doth he not so much as hint at that of ejecting Devils A great oversight in such a Person in such a business to neglect such an Argument if any such thing had ever been This would have proved him to be God indeed and his Power paramount above all Principalities and Powers and Thrones and Dominions and so God without controversie or dispute But he urgeth it not and therefore we may well conclude if we will not think that he betrayed the Cause That there was no such thing Besides Demonium habere vel Demoniacum esse are most properly and most fitly rendered Madmen When some said In furorem versus est or he is mad others said he hath Beelzebub or a Devil as being in their conceit but one and the self-same thing Mark 3.30 21 He hath a Devil or is mad seem to be Synonimies and to interpret one the other John 10.20 So because of that mad wild frantick speech of his as they accounted it If any man keep my saying he shall never see death Now say they We know that thou hast a Devil and art mad For none thought they but a Madman would have vented such a wild word John 8.51 52. And therefore Maldonat a Jesuite and one that upheld the doctrine of Devils and possession as much as any Man for the maintenance of Purgatory Alii putant Alii in the Plural number 't was not one single Doctors Fathers Schoolmans opinion but a number of them Some think That this word Demonium habere or Demoniacum esse modum suisse loquend◠quo non significarent eum vere habere Demonium sed motae esse mentis delirare insanire To have a Devil was a kind of phrase or form of speech by which they did not