Selected quad for the lemma: spirit_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
spirit_n	act_n	action_n	active_a	53	3	9.1477	4	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A29880	Religio medici	Browne, Thomas, Sir, 1605-1682.; Keck, Thomas. Annotations upon Religio medici.; Digby, Kenelm, Sir, 1603-1665. Observations upon Religio medici.	1682 (1682)	Wing B5178; ESTC R12664	133,517	400

my belief of that untractible temper as not to bow at their obstacles or connive at matters wherein there are not manifest impieties The leaven therefore and ferment of all not only Civil but Religious actions is Wisdom without which to commit our selves to the flames is Homicide and I fear but to pass through one fire into another Sect. 27 That Miracles are ceased I can neither prove nor absolutely deny much less define the time and period of their cessation that they survived Christ is manifest upon the Record of Scripture that they out-lived the Apostles also and were revived at the Conversion of Nations many years after we cannot deny if we shall not question those Writers whose testimonies we do not controvert in points that make for our own opinions therefore that may have some truth in it that is reported by the Jesuites of their Miracles in the Indies I could wish it were true or had any other testimony than their own Pens They may easily believe those Miracles abroad who daily conceive a greater at home the transmutation of those visible elements into the body and blood of our Saviour for the conversion of Water into Wine which he wrought in Cana or what the Devil would have had him done in the Wilderness of Stones into Bread compared to this will scarce deserve the name of a Miracle Though indeed to speak properly there is not one Miracle greater than another they being the extraordinary effects of the Hand of God to which all things are of an equal facility and to create the World as easie as one single Creature For this is also a Miracle not onely to produce effects against or above Nature but before Nature and to create Nature as great a Miracle as to contradict or transcend her We do too narrowly define the Power of God restraining it to our capacities * I hold that God can do all things how he should work contradictions I do not understand yet dare not therefore deny ‖ I cannot see why the Angel of God should question Esdras to recal the time past if it were beyond his own power or that God should pose mortality in that which he was not able to perform himself I will not say God cannot but he will not perform many things which we plainly affirm he cannot this I am sure is the mannerliest proposition wherein notwithstanding I hold no Paradox For strictly his power is the same with his will and they both with all the rest do make but one God Sect. 28 Therefore that Miracles have been I do believe that they may yet be wrought by the living I do not deny but have no confidence in those which are fathered on the dead and this hath ever made me suspect the efficacy of reliques to examine the bones question the habits and appurtenances of Saints and even of Christ himself I cannot conceive why the Cross that Helena found and whereon Christ himself dyed should have power to restore others unto life * I excuse not Constantine from a fall off his Horse or a mischief from his enemies upon the wearing those nails on his bridle which our Saviour bore upon the Cross in his hands I compute among Piae fraudes nor many degrees before consecrated Swords and Roses that which Baldwyn King of Jerusalem return'd the Genovese for their cost and pains in his War to wit the ashes of John the Baptist Those that hold the sanctity of their souls doth leave behind a tincture and sacred faculty on their bodies speak naturally of Miracles and do not salve the doubt Now one reason I tender so little Devotion unto Reliques is I think the slender and doubtful respect I have always held unto Antiquities for that indeed which I admire is far before Antiquity that is Eternity and that is God himself who though he be styled the ancient of days cannot receive the adjunct of Antiquity who was before the World and shall be after it yet is not older than it for in his years there is no Climacter his duration is Eternity and far more venerable than Antiquity Sect. 29 * But above all things I wonder how the curiosity of wiser heads coulds pass that great and indisputable Miracle the cessation of Oracles and in what swoun their Reasons lay to content themselves and sit down with such a far-fetch'd and ridiculous reason as Plutarch alleadgeth for it The Jews that can believe the supernatural Solstice of the Sun in the days of Joshua have yet the impudence to deny the Eclipse which every Pagan confessed at his death but for this it is evident beyond all contradiction the Devil himself confessed it Certainly it is not a warrantable curiosity to examine the verity of Scripture by the concordance of humane history or seek to confirm the Chronicle of Hester or Daniel by the authority of Magasthenes or Herodotus I confess I have had an unhappy curiosity this way * till I laughed my self out of it with a piece of Justine where he delivers that the Children of Israel for being scabbed were banished out of Egypt And truely since I have understood the occurrences of the World and know in what counterfeit shapes and deceitful vizards times present represent on the stage things past I do believe them little more then things to come Some have been of my opinion and endeavoured to write the History of their own lives wherein Moses hath out-gone them all and left not onely the story of his life but as some will have it of his death also Sect. 30 It is a riddle to me how this story of Oracles hath not worm'd out of the World that doubtful conceit of Spirits and Witches how so many learned heads should so far forget their Metaphysicks and destroy the ladder and scale of creatures as to question the existence of Spirits for my part * I have ever believed and do now know that there are Witches they that doubt of these do not onely deny them but spirits and are obliquely and upon consequence a sort not of Infidels but Atheists Those that to confute their incredulity desire to see apparitions shall questionless never behold any ‖ nor have the power to be so much as Witches the Devil hath them already in a heresie as capital as Witchcraft and to appear to them were but to convert them Of all the delusions wherewith he deceives mortality there is not any that puzleth me more than the Legerdemain of Changelings I do not credit those transformations of reasonable creatures into beasts or that the Devil hath a power to transpeciate a man into a Horse who tempted Christ as a trial of his Divinity to convert but stones into bread I could believe that Spirits use with man the act of carnality and that in both sexes I conceive they may assume steal or contrive a body wherein there may be action enough to content decrepit lust or passion to satisfie more active veneries yet in both without

full Dimensions as Nature can give her none more advantagious the same Person the same Body which your Vertuous and Excellent Mother bore nine Months in her Chast and Honoured Womb and that your Nurse gave suck unto Most certainly it is the same And yet if you consider it well it cannot be doubted but that sublunary Matter being in a perpetual flux and in bodies which have internal Principles of Heat and Motion much continually transpiring out to make room for the supply of new Aliment at the length in long process of time all is so changed as that Ship at Athens may as well be called the same Ship that was there two hundred years before and whereof be reason of the continual reparations not one foot of the Timber is remaining in her that builded her at the first as this Body now can be called the same it was forty years agone unless some higher consideration keep up the Identity of it Now what that is let us examine and whether or no it will reach to our difficulty of the Resurrection Let us consider then how that which giveth the Numerical Individuation to a Body is the Substantial Form As long as that remaineth the same though the Matter be in a continual Flux and Motion yet the Thing is still the same There is not one drop of the same Water in the Thames that ran down by White-Hall yesternight yet no man will deny but that is the same River that was in Queen Elizabeth's time as long as it is supplied from the same Common Stock the Sea Though this Example reacheth not home it illustrateth the thing If then the Form remain absolutely the same after separation from the Matter that it was in the Matter which can happen only to Forms that subsist by themselves as humane Souls it followeth then That whensoever it is united to Matter again all Matter coming out of the same Common Magazine it maketh again the same Man with the same Eyes and all the same Limbs that were formerly Nay he is composed of the same Individual Matter for it hath the same Distinguisher and Individuator to wit the same Form or Soul Matter considered singly by it self hath no Distinction All Matter is in it self the same we must fancy it as we do the indigested Chaos it is a uniformly wide Ocean Particularize a few drops of the Sea by filling a Glass-full of them then that Glass-full is distinguished from all the rest of the watery Bulk But return back those few drops to from whence they were taken and the Glass-full that even now had an Individuation by it self loseth that and groweth one and the same with the other main Stock Yet if you fill your Glass again wheresoever you take it up so it be of the same Uniform Bulk of Water you had before it is the same Glass-full of Water that you had But as I said before this Example fitteth entirely no more than the other did In such abstracted speculations where we must consider Matter without Form which hath no actual Being we must not expect adequated Examples in Nature But enough is said to make a Speculative man see that if God should joyn the Soul of a lately dead man even whilst his dead Corpse should lye entire in his winding-sheet here unto a Body made of Earth taken from some Mountain in America it were most true and certain that the Body he should then lye by were the same Identical Body he lived with before his Death and late Resurrection It is evident that Sameness Thisness and Thatness belongeth not to Matter by it self for a general Indifference runneth through it all but onely as it is distinguished and individuated by the Form Which in our Case whensoever the same Soul doth it must be understood always to be the same Matter and Body This Point thus passed over I may piece to it what our Author saith of a Magazine of Subsistent Forms residing first in the Chaos and hereafter when the World shall have been destroyed by fire in the general heap of Ashes out of which God's Voice did and shall draw them out and clothe them with Matter This Language were handsome for a Poet or Rhetorician to speak but in a Philosopher that should ratiocinate strictly and rigorously I cannot admit it For certainly there are no Subsistent Forms of Corporeal things excepting the Soul of man which besides being an Informing Form hath another particular Consideration belonging to it too long to speak of here But whensoever that Compound is destroyed the Form perisheth with the whole And for the Natural Production of Corporeal things I conceive it to be wrought out by the Action and Passion of the Elements among themselves which introducing new Tempers and Dispositions into the Bodies where these Conflicts pass new Forms succeed old ones when the Dispositions are raised to such a height as can no longer consist with the preceding Form and are in the immediate Degree to fit the succeeding one which they usher in The Mystery of all which I have at large unfolded in my above-mentioned Treatise of the Immortality of the Soul I shall say no more to the first Part of our Physician 's Discourse after I have observed how his Consequence is no good one where he inferreth That if the Devils fore-knew who would be Damned or Saved it would save them the Labour and end their work of tempting Mankind to mischief and evil For whatsoever their Moral Design and Success be in it their Nature impelleth them to be always doing it For on the one s●de it is Active in the highest Degree as being pure Acts that is Spirits so on the other side they are Malign in as great an Excess By the one they must be always working wheresoever they may work like Water in a Vessel full of holes that will run out of every one of them which is not stopped By the other their whole Work must be malicious and mischievous Joyning then both these Qualities together it is evident they will always be tempting mankind though they know they shall be frustrate of their Moral End But were it not time that I made an end Yes it is more than time And therefore having once passed the limit that confined what was becoming the next step carried me into the Ocean of Errour which being Infinite and therefore more or less bearing no proportion in it I will proceed a little further to take a short Survey of his Second Part and hope for as easie Pardon after this Addition to my sudden and indigested Remarks as if I had enclosed them up now Methinks he beginneth with somewhat an affected Discourse to prove his natural Inclination to Charity which Vertue is the intended Theam of all the Remainder of his Discourse And I doubt he mistaketh the lowest Orbe or Lembe of that high Seraphick Vertue for the top and perfection of it and maketh a kind of humane Compassion to be