principal parts of the Divine Work to which all the other parts serve The great and Ultimate ends of these intellectual Spirits unexpressible eternal joys or miseries hang all upon a meer contingency upon the motion of the Will which hath no place no part in the Divine Design which receives no form no measure from any model in the Workman or any part of the work Thus are the great consequences the great ends of the work in the great the principal parts and passages of it altogether undetermined and uncertain in the nature of the work and in the continuance of the Worker 2. Answ. Doth not this seem much rather a reflection upon than an exaltation of the Divine Goodness Justice and Wisdom that the righteousness and wickedness of intellâ—…ctual Creatures the highest good and evil in the whole work the eternal blessedness and misery of its own so great so glorious Births and Images should be of so little moment to the Divine Nature to the Divine Goodness Justice and Wisdom that they should be left entirely out of the Divine contrivance and conduct without the compass of all reason and proportion to an uncertainty an indeterminateness of which no account can be given as effects of the blindest chance which was ever entertained into the most blind and confused imagination of the most vulgar Spirits But this subject of the Divine Goodness and Justice and the Argument taken from them to justifie this freedom of the Will belongs properly to the second Book where the Reader may meet with a large discourse upon it I shall therefore thus lightly pass over it here 3. Answ. The inconsistency of the setting up intellectual Spirits in this freedome by the Divine Power and Wisdom with the very essences of all Power and wisdom with the whole nature of things created or uncreated will also find its proper place in other following Arguments which is therefore only toucht here 4. Argument Next to the Wisdom of God the Power of God seemeth to furnish a fourth Argument against this Liberty of the Will We have it proclaim'd from Heaven by the mouth of God Himself That Power belongeth to God God hath spoken once twice have I heard this That Power belongeth unto God Psal. 62. 11. Joseph saith to Pharaoh That his dream was repeated to declare the certainty of it A Repetition also is design'd to express the weight and consequence of that Truth which is twice over affirmed No Truth hath a clearer certainty or beareth a greater weight upon it in the whole nature of things than this That Power belongeth to God Jesus Christ who is the only true God is said by the word of his Power to uphold all things to bring forth and to bear up all things as the Greek word manifestly and commonly signifies This alone bringeth forth all things all spirits This alone beareth upon its bosome all its own Births as a root the plant with all its fruit Here only in the sense of this truth with an immediate repose upon it do all things all hearts find rest Power is here by the Psalmist expressed absolutely unlimited in the abstract all Power is Gods and of Him So the Hebrew phrase imports God is the first Seat and Spring of all Power in every kind All Power supernatural natural civil moral All Power in every State undetermined determined All Power in every degree the Power of acting the Power in act hath its first seat in God and cometh down from Him There is a three-fold Power 1. An Active Power 2. A Passive Power 3. A Power in Act. 1. The Power of Acting which as it belongeth to the forms of things which are either Spirits or spiritual so it self is a Spirit or a spiritual form This is defin'd to be a principle of Acting This is it self an eminent and universal Act or active form like a Spring containing and sending forth from it self variety of Acts or forms as a Spring doth streams This Power is more excellent than the Act which is produced by it 2. The Passive Power is that of matter which as an obscute shade comprehending or hiding variety of Acts or forms in it like Plants obscured and contracted there like Plants in their seeds in the Earth or the Intellectual and sensitive Soul with all its treasure of Intellectual of sensitive forms in a sleeping Body This Power is inferior to the Act which when it is brought forth is the exaltation of this Passive Power to an higher degree of Being it is indeed as a spiritual Act or form encompast with obscured within its own shade As the Sun calleth up the Plants out of their seeds and beds in the dust so the Spirit it self the Spiritual Act or form shining forth from the Active Power upon this shade of matter and of the Passive Power awakeneth it into a beautiful form 3. Power in Act. All Power purely Active is ever in Act. Such Power is alwayes abstracted from matter and a spiritual essence or form eminent above all things in matter an universal comprehending variety of Acts or spiritual forms in it self Every Active Power in matter is compounded being partly Active and partly Passive This Power is never brought into Act but as it is excited and awakened from without by its Object from above by power abstractive and purely active shedding its beams upon it Thus in the Schools they distinguish between the Active Understanding in man separated from matter in its operations and the Passive which ever worketh in Conjunction with the material and imaginative faculty like the Moon having some obscure light in it self but depending upon the illuminations of the Active Understanding as its Sun Power and Act are distinguished not as two several Beings but as the same Being in several states modifications or degrees of Being When Power as it is a spiritual and universal Act comprehending all its own Acts formally and eminently in it self being all at once in Act within it self brings forth it self into any particular or single Act in matter This is the same Power contracted and so in a less degree of perfection When a Passive Power in matter springs up into Act This Act is the perfection of the Power The Power and the Act here are the same form sleeping and awakened in the seed and in the flower All Power is Gods As he is the most pure perfect and universal Spirit so is Power in Him the most pure perfect and most universal Act. God gives this Testimony of Himself I am Alpha and Omega The beginning and the ending saith the Lord Which is and which was and which is to come The Almighty Rev. 1. 8. As the Power of God comprehendeth all Powers most eminently and most actually in â—…imself so all Powers in Him are ever most perfectly in Act being themselves pure Acts God is said to work all things after the counsel of his own will Eph. 1. 11. Power is the principle of Activity The Will is
relations from the Creature to it self Thus doth the Divine goodness in the Divine VVill terminate the relation of every created VVill to it self in the agreeableness or disagreeableness of every Act. This supream goodness then hath in it self the measure of this agreeableness and disagreeableness which it receiveth not from without but hath originally in it self So all the acts of the VVill according to their conformity with or deformity from the first goodness derive themselves from their proper Original in that goodness Accordingly the Goodness and the Will of God hath a complacency in every Act of the VVill if it be agreeable to it or an aversion from it if it be disagreeable Thus is the created VVill in all its motions with their several most exact distinctions the Object of the eternal VVill in its love or hatred Every faculty or power hath an essential relation to its proper object and dependance upon it It is drawn forth by it into the most proper Acts of its essence and receiveth from it the perfection of its essence which consisteth in its Activity The supream VVill the supream Goodness being perfectly eternally in Act hath all its Acts all its Objects by which it is actuated perfectly eternally from and in it self Object You will say How can this be Can the Divine VVill which is infinitely pure in the beauties of Holiness in the joys of all blessedness comprehend in it self Good and Evil agreeableness and disagreeableness to it self which are the proper measures and essential forms of all good and evil Can it comprehend in it self Objects of Love and Hatred Can this Fountain send forth from it self sweet and bitter waters How is it holy if there be these mixtures How is it happy if it be thus divided within it self Answ. The Flats and Sharpes the Bases and Trebles the Concords and Discords of Musick are all comprehended by the spirit of the Musician in one Act of Harmony in one simple and undivided Act of Harmony This single Act of Harmony by its proper force first invented and formed all Musical Instruments prepared them for it self through all the diversity of touches and motions actuated them that it might compleatly figure and display upon them and upon all things round about them it self in its own full sweetness according to all those rich varieties virtually and eminently comprehended within it self in one simple Act. So in one indivisible Act or Idea of beauty in the Spirit of the Painter lie together all the differing lines lights shades and colours by which that Idea reflecteth it self in Picture upon the eyes and spirits of the Beholder In like manner the far greater perfection the Will of God being a simple 〈◊〉 of Goodness supreamly indivisible and eternal containeth originally eminently within it self complacency and aversion love and hatred with their several objects in their several forms and degrees in their several risings and fallings most properly and harmoniously suited to each other From it self doth this supream Goodness bring forth its own Objects like tuned Instruments wound up or let down every way prepared for the diffusion and discovery of it self upon them in those Varieties of love and hatred complacency and aversion with their several steps or modifications which as so many distinct forms or virtues of the Divine Goodness dwell together there in the highest and most absolute Variety as in the fullest and most unconfined Unity The Will of God is commonly and rightly distinguished into positive and permissive Evil is by the permissive Good from the positive Will of God All the determinations and motions of the Will in every Spirit are at least from the permission of the Divine Will I will not now enquire how the most perfect Goodness can be permissive in that in which it is positive This only I take which is universally granted That there is no permissive Will in God without a positive Act. He permitteth nothing without a positive Act of his Will for that permission If the permission of any Act in the will of man antecede that Act then is that act or motion of the humane will the Object of a positive Act of the Divine Will for the permission of it before it be brought forth here below This objective existence in the Divine Will is either the Copy or the Original to that motion in the will of the Creature If it be universally received by all Understandings from the universal Harmony and principles of Truth that the Divine Nature can take no Copy receive no Impression of any thing from any thing without it self it necessarily followeth that all motions in the will of man flow from that antecedent existence which they have in the Divine Will as the Objects of that Thus that I may not be too long upon this Head of Arguments drawn from the Divine Nature I have contracted three sorts of Arguments into one Those from the Will the Goodness the Power of God being drawn together under that of the Divine Power I have in it built upon this sure ground The VVill of God is the first the supream the essential Goodness The Goodness of God is his Power As every thing depends upon the VVill of God in its permission or positive Act As all things in their measures of Good or Evil lie together in the Divine Goodness the Original the eternal measure of all Good and Evil so have all Powers all Acts and Motions of Power their first spring their exact form and rule in the Power of God 5. Argument The fifth Argument is the Knowledge of God This is in our present cause a most celebrated Argument I shall therefore endeavour to represent the state of it with all exactness clearness and integrity that I can bring to it I shall divide this Argument into two parts 1. The first is the perfection of the Divine Knowledge 2. The second is the Original 1. Part. The first part is the perfection of the Divine Knowledge This consisteth in two things 1. The Comprehensiveness 2. The distinctness of the Knowledge VVe then know perfectly when we know all things capable of being known when we know each thing in its proper distinction in all its distinct forms properties and relations Shall not He who made the eye see Shall not the Fountain of Knowledge contain all Knowledges after the most exact and eminent manner Shall not He know all things most accurately by whom all things know and are known St. Peter saith to Jesus Christ as to God Lord Lord thou knowest all things thou knowest that I love thee See two things remarkable here 1. The universality of Christ's Knowledge extending its self to all things 2. A confirmation of this by a particular instance Thou knowest that I love thee The instance is most pertinent to our present purpose It is that peculiar Object of Knowledge which is the ground and subject of this Discourse the Will of Man the motions of the will the freest
divinely beautiful the only beloved Person and form of his only eternal Birth his own Son there hath the view of the Will of Man in every distinct motion act and determination as in its first exemplar cause in eternity 3. The will of man then in every motion act and determination of it is from eternity predetermined in the Divine Understanding as in its first cause and Original form Upon these grounds the Knowledge of God is at once a fore-knowledge of future things and a knowledge of things present 1. It is a fore-knowledge as it sees things in their first cause in a state far above and transcendent to the state of their proper existency as they stand forth out of their causes 2. It is a knowledge of things present as eternity and the Divine duration containeth in it self the measures the exemplars and so the most exact forms of time and every successive duration in its several aspects of past present and to come Besides that as the Sun looking forth makes the Day and the Light with all the visible Images with which it beholds the Heavens and the Earth so the Divine Eye is at once a Glass to it self and a Fountain to all things by beholding things every moment in it self it doth formally every moment send them forth from it self so at once it seeth them in their formal cause and present existence 6. Argument The sixth Argument drawn from this Head is the infiniteness of God This is a Negative expression representing to us a Positive Perfection which surmounts all Assimilations all Similitudes or Images which the highest understanding of men or Angels is capable of taking in or the whole Creation united in its most abstracted and heightned Excellencies of bringing forth We figure it to our selves only by a Negation or removal of all figures of all terms or bounds We seem to touch it with the Top point and simplest Unity of Spirits by a silence and cessation of all created powers or faculties in us We seem to apprehend it only by being comprehended of it and lost in it If we knew and tasted the unexpressible Sweetnesses the high Raptures with the Divinest Pleasures in the contemplation of the Divine Infiniteness how far should we be from streightning or darkening its Glories by limiting and in limiting dividing them If God be God that is before all things and above them he is absolutely unchangeable As He is unchangeable He is every where every way the same equal and entirely perfect equally and endlesly removed from all bound and limit If God be God that is the first of all things He hath the Fountain of Life in himself Thus he is ever fresh and new ever springing into fresh and new Glories ever equally endlesly removed from any conclusion or confinement in his Births and Beauties The Divinity and Poetry of the Heathen from their most ancient most sacred mysteries teach us that Love is the Eldest and Youngest of all the gods Our God the God and Father of our Lord Jesus is the God of Love in the truest the sweetest and the best sense He alone is Love it self in an abstracted eternal Divine Essence and Substance pure Love altogether unmixt having nothing in it self different or divers from it self thus is an infinite Love a sweet and clear Sea which swalloweth up all bounds all shores and bottoms into it self This Love as it is every way the same is the ancient of Dayes the eldest of all the Gods This Love as it ever flourisheth with a perpetual Spring and Youth of all Beauties of all beautiful Delights is the youngest of all the Gods Thus is this most high and holy Love the God of Gods the First and the Last containing all things within its own blissful bosome as the bound of all but being it self every way beyond all bounds without all bounds infinite How infinite are the joys and blessedness of this Infiniteness How is this infinite God our God the only true God a Paradise of Love infinitely heightned in all the beauties and sweetnesses of Love infinitely diffused through all things beyond all things How is He at once the Paradise of Love with its infinite heightnings with its infinite amplitudes in every part in every point of things entirely perfect How is it every where the same every where new to the satisfaction to the swallowing up of all the most fixt most various most vast desires into an Aybss or Ocean of Delights equally unconfined and undivided Shall we then limit the holy One of Israel If we do not we must ascribe this greatness to Him that He contains all things in Himself In Him all things live move and have their Being We must attribute this immenseness or immensurableness to Him to fill all in all as the only distinct exact measure of all things himself still transcending all and being measured by nothing It is said of Christ That the Church is the fulness of him who filleth all in all The Humane Soul or Intellectual Spirit is a rude imperfect shadow of the Divine Infiniteness Our thoughts are living Images in various postures and motions They are in a manner the Creation the Creatures of our Souls They live move and have their being in our Souls Our Souls alone fill all in them all How far greater is the distance between God and his Creatures than between the Soul and its Creation How much more less even less than nothing are all the Creatures to God How much more truly more entirely are they all that they are in Him how much more absolutely is he their fulness silling them all in all All things then all Essences all Lives all Vital Powers and Faculties in each Essence all Motions of life all Acts or Operations of every power and faculty are in God He alone filleth all in every Essence Life Power Faculty Motion Act. All are in Him have all their distinct forms degrees modes of being in Him to the least degree or shadow of Being Thus Angels and Men the Understanding and Will of each Man of each Angel every act motion determination of each Understanding of each Will are comprehended in God God entirely filleth all every Person or Spirit every Understanding and Will every Determination and Motion Where we exclude him out of any Spirit Essence Power or Operation there we set a bound to the eternal Spirit there we limit the holy One that pure Essence and Act there we say to Him Thus far shalt thou go no farther If God be acknowledged for Being it self in its purest simplicity it is Being alone which can bound him All without him where he ceaseth and terminateth is not Being But who understands not this that that which hath no Being can be no bounds 7. Argument The seventh Argument is the causality of God The celebrated Argument of the Philosopher by which he asserts the Divine Being is the necessity of one first mover For if the causes of motion did
most beautiful Ideas of his Skill and Wisdome Shall he not here lay on the greatest Riches of his Divine Goodness Shall he not stamp on these the most glorious Seal of his Truth his Faithfulness to the work of his hands Shall he not give the most heightned life and sweetning to this Seal of his Goodness Truth and Skill Doth not he understand that the perfection of the whole work lies that the praise and glory of the Workman depends principally if not entirely upon these Joynts on which the motion of the whole in so high a degree depends I will briefly conclude this part of my Discourse Reader think of God as Sweetness it self all pure unmixt unconfined Think of God as the Spirit of Love Beauty Joy all in one in their most abstracted Essences in their highest Exaltation in their greatest amplitude in their most potent vigour incorruptible eternal Think of God as the purest and richest Spring without beginning or end as the clearest Sea without bottom or bounds of all Perfections in the highest degree of Pleasantness of all Pleasantness in the highest Perfection Think of all things together with thy self in this God the Unchangeable Original of all according to their first and truest forms according to their eternal Truths one Goodness and Sweetness together with this goodness and sweetness it self one Spirit with this Spirit of all Loves Beauties and Joys in Divine figures divinely distinct as the first and fullest Variety in the first and entirest Unity When thou hast thought thus of God now think whether all things within thee do not with the fullest concurrence meet in this one only most passionate desire that this God may alone conduct his whole Work the whole course of all things that he may be present may act may appear alone in every part in every motion of it as filling so many figures and shadows of Himself After all consider whether that ground in which is founded the desire of this as the most perfect good the Object of all desires be not as firm a foundation for the belief of this no less agreeable Truth to the Understanding than it is of good to the Will Can Goodness and Truth be separated when Truth is Goodness in its essential Image in its fullest fairest reflection Shall not the most perfect Workman bring forth the most perfect Work the best from the best Shall not the highest God the most true of Himself thus do who is the supream Good whose Will is Goodness it self where as Ficinus upon Plato speaks the highest Voluntariness and the highest Necessity most beautifully and most pleasantly meet in the most inviolable band of the most true the most perfect Good 2. Head of Arguments I pass now to the second Head of Arguments taken from the Mediation of Christ and opposed to that Liberty of the Will which is placed in a freedome from the predetermination of its Acts in its essential Principles and superior Causes My method of treating of the Mediation of Christ and directing my Discourse upon it to the service of my present design shall be this I will endeavour with all humility and holy reverence by the conduct of that sweet Light which falls from the Face of Christ by the guidance of his Eyes the only Fountain of Grace and Truth to set before us the Lord Jesus in those three principal Parts of his Mediation as he is 1. The ground 2. The way 3. The end of the whole Work of God 1. Jesus Christ is the ground of the whole Work of God This is the first and principal part of Christ's Mediation in which he is the Golden Head of the whole Image of things in Grace and Nature This well understood according to the weak capacity of our Understanding here below seemeth to make all the other parts of the Mediatorship with the whole tract of things plain and pleasant That which in Divinity and Philosophy is understood by the name of a Person is an Intellectual Being compleatly existing Therefore God Angels which are called Gods and Men made in the Image of God which are also dignified with the Name of God in the holy Scripture are only stiled and esteemed Persons The reason of the Name I humbly conceive to be this Every Intellectual Spirit according to the propriety of its Nature and Essence comprehendeth entirely within it self the principle of its own Essence its essential form and operation by comprehending in it self the whole nature of things The Understanding in its perfect Act and Being in its largest compass are said by Philosophers to meet in a mutual proportion and union the one being the proper and adequate Object of the other Therefore the Greeks call every Intellectual Spirit 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the whole The prime operation of every Intellectual Spirit is contemplation The first and immediate Object of its contemplation is its own Essence In this Glass of living and immortal Light all other things according to their proper essences in their several and essential forms appear to it most clearly and delightfully as its own Births and Beauties God the first and most perfect the Father and King of all Intellectual Spirits is the truest Person He alone in truth subsisteth in himself existeth without and above all things He truly containeth the whole compass of things in their unchangeable Truths and Substances within himself although he Himself be the most absolute and most abstracted Unity Angels and Men in the perfection of their Natures are no more than shadowy persons They have only shadowy Essences a shadowy comprehension of shadows God then alone most perfectly and substantially enjoyeth Himself in the contemplation of Himself which is the Beatifical Vision of the most beautiful the most blessed Essence of Essences This Act of Contemplation is an Intellectual and Divine Generation in which the Divine Essence with an eternity of most heightned Pleasures eternally bringeth forth it self within it self into an Image of it self According to the Perfection in which God knoweth Himself and enjoyeth Himself so is the Perfection of this Image As those are so is this clear distinct and full The more distinct the beam is from the first Light in its emanation the more strong and full is the reflectiou This Divine Image then is at once most perfectly distinct from its Divine Original most exactly equal to it and most perfectly one with it As then God is so is this essential eternal Image of God a compleat and distinct Person in it self in every point with the highest and most ravishing agreeableness answering the Divine Esseunce in its spring out of which it ariseth If this Image were not a compleat Person Gods knowledge and fruition of Himself would be incompleat without the pleasing and proportionate returns of an equal Loveliness Life and Love If this Image were not most perfectly distinct from the bosome out of which it flourisheth the knowledge and enjoyment of God would be confused more
Bodies 2. The freedome of Plants 3. The freedome of brnit Creatures 4. The freedome of intellectual Agents 1. The freedome of the Elements and Coelestial Bodies consisteth in that motion and rest which is generally esteemed and stiled simply natural The principle of their motion and rest is nature guiding their motions and rests in the figure of Divine motions and rests their invisible Patterns and Originals either by way of instinct or by the assistance of intelligences as the Peripateticks Schools assert or informed by Intellectual Angelical Divine Souls as the Academy teacheth The sphere of their motion and rest is their own proper place Adaequate to their Dimensions They move and rest naturally within themselves This is their liberty Such also is their liberty in their parts and mixtures which also being by violence carried out of their proper places naturally tend to them by a simple motion in a strait line This is the first Order in the liberty of things a liberty from outward force or constraint with a confinement to a single simple motion and rest at least in their material and corporeal part Thus the Peripateticks make the Spheres of the Elements the first and lowest order of Corporeal substances and compleat being confining them to Forms meerly natural and in a manner allowing them only single and simple local motion After the same manner also they circumscribe the Coelestial Spheres giving them only this two-fold preheminence 1. One of a fifth essence compounded of a distinct matter and form 2. The other of assisting forms or intelligences moving them With these their grounds agreeth the Ptolemaiical System But as before I toucht the ancient Academy sets these spheres of the world in a higher rank attributing to them 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 making them rational Beings Angels Gods Copernicus also sets them at liberty altering the whole design of their local motions and inlarging them to a greater variety 2. In the second place is the liberty of Plants which is a vital liberty The principle of their motion and rest is animate a vegetative Soul which hath in it self a variety of formal Acts or Virtues according to which it formeth to it self an Organical body composed of differing parts framed to be proper Instruments for the diversity of these vital Acts. In like manner doth this soul of the plant put forth it self into diversity of motions in its proper body yet are all these motions confined to the body of the plant it self or to a very narrow sphere round about it The plant also it self is fixt by its root in one place and immoveable there The Ratio seminalis the seminal harmony which is the essential form and the proper soul of the plant as it is a vegetative soul gives measure both to the principle of motion in the plant and to the sphere or compass of its motion being thus the ground and bound of this vital liberty This seminal harmony is the contracted and fainter off-spring of the imaginative form as those are freer clearer livelier Births and Images of rational forms which are the living pictures of the intellectual and essential Ideas either In superiour Souls or In superiour parts of the same Soul These intellectual Ideas or essences are also rich and ample streams of light and life flowing from their Divine Unities and springs in the supream eternal Unity the first seat and head of all liberty 3. The liberty of bruit Creatures hath the third place this is the liberty of sense The principle of this liberty is the sensitive soul which hath its chief seat in the imagination Here is the amplitude of its Kingdom and the power of its Rule This being immediately subordinate to the rational intellectual power is that Sea whence all the springs and streams of the inferior and outward senses as of the local motions go forth and into which they again flow with all their force and efficacy Here they are united here they have their various mixtures here they have their greatest amplitude and heightning The motions here are no more fixed in one place nor confined to the compass of their own proper Subject but enlarge themselves after their several manner according to the amplitude of the object of sense which is the whole Corporeal world There are indeed divers ranks of sensitive Creatures which have divers degrees of liberty 1. Some are confined to particular Elements 2. Others have the liberty of distinct Elements All that are perfect in the order of sensitive being agree in this that they have the liberty of progressive motion of motion from place to place variously according to the variety of their appetites governed by the ample light of their imaginations This chiefest freedom of sense is placed in the imagination this being the first and highest faculty of the sensitive Soul where it is in its perfection is as ample as the universal object of sense the whole Corporeal world Some Philosophers teach us That the imagination is the immediate former of this universal Image which comprehends all corporeity the visible Heavens and Earth in it self Others that it hath a commanding power upon this universal Image and all the parts of it having the force of all magick in its self to alter the motions of the heavenly bodies and the Constitutions of the Elements This is more universally understood that it not only takes in and enjoys the sensitive forms of all the objects of sense uniting and varying them according to its own pleasure but also that it espouseth in it self the spiritual and corporeal world to each other receiving the impressions the similitudes the illapses of the invisible Glories as the Originals into their sensitive Image and heightning the sensitive Image to a greatness and glory above it self by this communion with its invisible patterns The sensitive appetite hath an inseparable conjunction with and conformity to the imagination They mutually influence excite and govern each other They have both objects of equal extent The good of the sensitive being which is the object of its appetite is not only the preservation of its own being but its pleasure and proper happiness in the fruition of the sensitive forms of things which fruition is compleated in the imagination 4. The liberty of intellectual beings is the utmost point of liberty comprehending in the general nature of it God as the Original and Angels and Men as the immediate immortal clearest compleatest Copies of that Original This is properly the liberty of Spirits of the Father of Spirits and of the Sons of the eternal Spirit The ground of this liberty is the Divine essence and the Divine Image of that essence The sphere or compass of this liberty is being it self in its greatest extent in its first highest and most universal form with all its unbounded self-bounding varieties and in its descent into all forms of things figuring or shadowing it self upon them filling them with it self Thus the Schools teach us That ens
proper shadow Some think this following sense to be intended by St. Paul in these words Christ is the Image of the invisible God the first-born of the whole Creation or of every Creature Col. 1. God in that same second Person which is the Godhead in its essential Image which in the fulness of time took flesh of the Virgin Mary in the beginning of Time came forth from the secret and unaccessible Light of Eternity in a shadowy Image This Image was the full figure of his Person with all its Divine Glories according to the capacity of a shadow This was the whole Creation compleat in its first Draught All the Glories of the Divine Nature which are imitable were here first distinctly figured in the primitive and pure forms of all the Creatures Thus was he the Image of the Invisible God the first-born of the whole Creation in general and of each Creature in particular Thus was He in the Language of the Jews the great Adam who brought forth the little Adam in his own likeness Thus was Jesus Christ in Adam at once the life of all in his essential Glories the Original Copy or first Draught of the Creature in the whole compass of it of each Creature in particular All this in the Humane Soul in Adam as the only perfect and proper Figure of this Original I understand nothing in this interpretation of St. Pauls words contrary to the Analogy of Faith or the Scriptures There seemeth to be in it a compleat Harmony and order in the nature of things according to this sense 1. All things stand first in an Uncreated Subsistence and Essence Then in an Uncreated Subsistence or Person they come forth into Created Essences or Natures Lastly By this medium uniting all they pass in Created Subsistencies and Essences into created Persons and Natures 2. Jesus Christ gradually descends from his essential Glories into an Universal Original Figure of himself of the whole Creation of each Creature Through this He passeth into the particular form of faln man in the Womb of the Virgin So he descends to the nethermost parts of the Earth ascends again through all forms of things with all united in his own Person above all Heavens and fills All. After this manner the Lord Jesus is the Mediatour of the Creation as well as of the Reconciliation and Regeneration All things are made by him and nothing that is made or brought forth from the beginning of things to the end comes forth without him As according to his appearances in Grace or Glory the Saints appear together with him so according to his Appearances in Nature all things appear together with him He lives and subsists in the form of every Creature Every Creature subsists by its transcendental Union with him in Nature Thus it is most true That we are in this World as he is in this World We are Sojourners together with him in his Land He suffers in all our Sufferings is straitned in all our straitnings He is in all things made like unto us Sin only excepted He carries along in every particular form the Universal Harmony the Divine Glory even in all the sufferings and straitnings of every Creature The Universal Harmony and Divine Glory is to him the liberty the joy of Paradise Heaven Eternity in each straitning and suffering Sin only is the breach of this Harmony the violation of this Glory not by a privation only but a Contradiction and Enmity founded in the privation This can bear no part in the Divine Harmony save as it is reduced into Order and the Harmony carried on through the Wrath and Righteousness of God in the Death and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus But I desire to leave my self and my Reader free in this Point I have now finished in four Distinctions my Answer to the first part of the Objection made against the Variety of forms in the Unity of the Soul In this part of my Answer I have endeavoured to state the presence of God with and in the Soul of man as perspicuously as my dark and narrow mind is capable of taking in and expressing a Divine Mystery of so great an amplitude and such an heigth of Glory I pass now to the second part of my Answer which concerns the Angels 2. Answer Angels with the whole Company of invisible substances or separated Forms and immortal Spirits are contained in the Unity of the Soul these two wayes 1. They are Superior and Universal Causes subordinate to the first Cause Thus they are most intimately and inseparably present in the Constitution of the Soul As Entity or Being and substantiality in their Superiour and Universal Nature descend into incorporeal Spirits and through these into Corporeal Shapes and Bodies so do all the Angels greater in Might and Glory cloath themselves with the Incorporeal Form of the immortal Soul communicating all their divers Virtues Powers and Glories to this Form in which themselves subsist and live together with it being an head of Glory to it 2. All Angelical Immortal Spirits are another way in the Soul as making up the full diversity of all Forms in it and so composing its Essence Thus all Angels all Essences all Forms of things in their immortal Substances as Intellectual Spirits meet in the proper Unity under the peculiar Character and Diversity of each Intellectual Soul as in some obscure resemblance Variety of colours in a particular colour or as all the Elements in each Element in each mixt Form under the proper Character of the predominant Element or Form 3. Answer The Intellectual Soul containeth all Corporeal Forms or Bodies in it self two wayes 1. Virtually 2. Formally 1. The Soul hath in it self all Bodies virtually from the Angels above it as the shining Bosome where the eternal Spring through Jesus Christ powres forth its living streams Here the Soul drinketh in the Essences and essential forms of things in their Angelick Truth and Goodness These feast and fill the Understanding and the Will In the Understanding or Angelick Light of the Soul they shine as the Exemplars or Patterns of all below in the visible World In the Will as in the Angelick Love of the Soul they lie as in the Womb or in the seminal Virtue or executive Power which brings them forth 2. This Soul comprehends the Corporeal World in it self formally The Essences of all Bodies as they are Objects only of the Understanding and not of Sense so are they according to the Nature and Law of all Essences Intellectual Unities and Forms in the Unity or essential Form of this Intellectual Spirit The Soul in these distinct Essences floweth forth into these shadowy forms with which our Senses the shadows of the Intellectual Light are entertained The Intellectual Unity diffuseth it self into the continued parts of these divisible Forms This Unity formeth the Proportions of the parts in their mutual Correspondencies knitteth them together unto a mutual sympathy in each natural Body For as I have
the Act of creating as it is in God its Principle is God as it is in the Creature where it is terminated is the Creature In like manner the Privation of Grace as it hath its beginning in the Author of Grace from an Act of the Divine Wisdom and Will designing or determining the with-holding of it is thus Divinely-beautiful and good The same privation of Grace as it is terminated and seated in a created Spirit is an evil of Sin the highest deformity the first the greatest evil the fountain of all evils most properly in its own nature and in the Eye of God As being the first and foulest privation of the first Good or the heighest Beauty and the Fountain of all following Privations extending their poisonous and baleful shades to the bottomless pit to the nethermost Hell God saith in the Prophet Isaiah of Nebuchadnezzar he is a Rod in my Hand but he thinketh not so Nebuchadnezzar was as in the hand of God but as a Musicians Quill The Acts of Enmity Tyranny and Cruelty exercised by him and upon the people of God were from the Divine Musician the Master of the universal Musick skilful stroaks and tender touches upon his Harps or Lutes which are his Saints making the universal the eternal Harmony compleat in their Persons and in his whole Work But the same Acts as they were from Nebuchadnezzar were a disorder a breach of the Harmony a Contrariety of an enmity which is the highest opposition to it In the same sweet and beautiful sense of Divine Love that loveliest figure of our Lord Jesus saith to his Brethen concerning their savageness selling sacrificing him to their envy and malice directed against the Divine Glory declaring it self in him by heavenly Visions Ye thought evil against me God meant it unto good Gen. 50. 20. Thus he comforted them concerning their greatest sins who were now humbled for them After the same manner to the same end the Truth himself the Lord Jesus by his Spirit striketh upon the heart of the Jews who had crucified him that now themselves might bleed inwardly from the sense of that precious blood of his which they had shed Act. 2. 23. Him being delivered by the determinate counsel and fore-knowledge of God ye have taken and with wicked hands crucified See that Act the most bloody and direful that ever the Sun saw by which the Suns Sun in Flesh and on Earth suffered the most mournful and tragical Ecclipse attributed at once to the determinate Counsel of God and to the wickedness of men Here that was eminently true which was represented by the former Scripture in the figure that which men thought evil against their Jesus their only Joy their God their only Good and Glory the same thing the cursed sale and cruel sacrificing of their God he meant unto good to bring to pass as at this day to save much people alive to bring many Sons to eternal Life and Glory A learned man cites from Aristotle in his Metaphysicks a passage in which he affirms That all the several parts are referred to the good of the order in the whole as the end of all Upon this he discants that this good of order depends upon the vilest as well as the most precious things that it consisteth in the interval and proportion between these That in respect to this order the vilest things are determined and framed with the same most exact skill as the most curious things Thus the sufferings of Joseph the crucifying of Jesus as they lay eternally determinate in the determinate Counsel of God designed and fashioned there unto good the highest Good the supream End the universal Order the Divine Glory which wraps up in it the blessedness of all the Saints so it self was a part of the Order a part of the Glory a Grace a Beauty a Perfection in the universal Order and Divine Glory But as this proceeds from the hearts and hands of Men the Instruments of it who like Nebuchadnezzar thought not so like Josephs Brethren thought it for evil like the Crucifiers of Christ were wicked in it It is a deordination a disorder a real evil the worst of evils not only a falling short of the Glory of God which is the Divine Image and effulgency in the Harmony of things as St. Paul describes Sin nor yet a transgression and breach only of the Law which is the rule and measure of this Order as another Apostle defines sin but an Enemy to it as all sin is in its root and essence according to the Language of St. Paul in another place So the discord in Musick is truly in its own particular nature and apart a discord so a black crooked line a dark shade is in it self truly black crooked dark offensive to the eye contrary to Light Rectitude and Beauty although the discord be a part of the Harmony this line and shade a part of the Beauty in the whole Object But you will perhaps say All these things seem hitherto to confirm the Ranters in their licentious Principles and Practices For why should not Sinners with the freedom of all sinful pleasures rest and rejoyce in the absoluteness of the Divine Conduct the Perfection of the Divine Order and Beauty which giudes them through all which accompanieth them in all as the Motion and Musick of those heavenly Spheres the Divine Wisdom Power and Goodness comprehending all things with their courses as Stars fixed in them what place is there here for shame guilt displeasure or punishments Answ. I am sensible of the weight of this Work in which I have by degrees engaged my self and how unfit my shoulders are for it When that wise Queen of Sheba saw the attendance of Solomons Servants and the order of his House there was no more any spirit left in her What then is the order in the House of God in his Work from the beginning to the end of it What the attendance and ministry of all the parts of this Work as the Servants in this House according to the Divine Order What Cherubim or Seraphim would have any more any Spirit left in it while it contemplates this Order which at the height of its most ravishing Contemplations remains still for the excess of Glory incomprehensible to it This is that Wisdom in a mystery which the most princely Spirits and Understandings of the whole Creations in their natural capacities are unable to take in What then is my spirit what my faculty that I should be capable of taking off the Vail from this Divine Chain of heavenly Pearl so closely and curiously set to behold in my self by any imperfect glimps to present any glance of it in its Divine lustre and order to other eyes and to preserve it from the feet of Swine or mouth of Dogs What am I that I should attempt to take the Cloud off from this heavenly Paradise which is in the midst of us before us round about us in which all things and
Apostle scattered throughout this place fall into a most beautiful Harmony St. Paul here setteth himself in the place of all Mankind in Paradise He describeth to us as in a figure the nativity of sin its esssential form or life if we may have leave so to speak of a privation the occasion and manner of its first appearance and taking life I have now finished my Discourse upon the ends of the Law which are of the first sort proper and immediate which are called by Logicians the ends of the work I pass now to the remote and Ultimate ends which are stiled the ends of the Workman I shall make my transition by this consideration A Poetical History or work framed by an excellent Spirit for a pattern of Wisdom and Worth and Happiness hath this as a chief rule for the contrivance of it upon which all its Graces and Beauties depend That persons and things be carried to the utmost extremity into a state where they seem altogether uncapable of any return to Beauty or Bliss That then by just degrees of harmonious proportions they be raised again to a state of highest loy and Glory You have examples of this in the Divine pieces of those Divine Spirits as they are esteemed and stiled Homer Virgil Tassâ—… our English Spencer with some few others like to these The Works of these persons are called Poems So is the Work of God in Creation and contrivance from the beginning to the end named 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 God's Poem It is an elegant and judicious Observation of a learned and holy Divine That the Works of Poets in the excellencies of their imaginations and contrivances were imitations drawn from those Original Poems the Divine works and contrivances of the eternal Spirit We may by the fairest Lights of Reason and Religion thus judge That excellent Poets in the heighths of their fancies and spirits were touched and warmed with a Divine Ray through which the supream Wisdom formed upon them and so upon their work some weak impression and obscure Image of it self Thus it seemeth to be altogether Divine That that work shineth in our eyes with the greatest Beauties infuseth into our Spirits the sweetest delights transporteth us most out of our selves unto the kindest and most ravishing touches and senses of the Divinity which diffusing it self through the amplest Variety and so to the remotest Distances and most opposed Contrarieties bindeth up all with an harmonious Order into an exact Unity which conveyeth things down by a gradual descent to the lowest Depths and deepest Darknesses then bringeth them up again to the highest point of all most flourishing Felicities opening the beginning in the end espousing the end to the beginning This is that which Aristotle in his Discourse of Poetry commendeth to us as the most artful and surprising untying of the knot 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or by a discovery This is that which Jesus Christ pointeth at in himself who is the Wisdom of God The manifold Wisdom of God in whom all the Treasures of Wisdom and Knowledge lie hid in whom all the Divine contrivances are formed and perfected What will you say when you shall see the Son of Man return there where he was at first In this God himself seemeth to place the highest Beauties the sweetest Graces the richest Glories of his whole contrivance and work in bringing things down by the Ministry of the Law to the last point to the lowest state to the most lost condition to the nethermost part of the Earth to the nethermost Hell And in ways unexpected by uncomprehensible to Men Angels to raise things again by the Gospel to that first supreamGlory which was their Original Patern in eternity The Law was brought in that sin might abound That where sin had abounded grace might superabound So the Wisdom of the Heathen and of the Scripture both instructeth us That God entertaineth himself universally and divinely with this great and pleasant Work of making high things low great things little of making little things great and low things high He sendeth the rich empty away and filleth the hungry with good things He grindeth man through pain to dâ—…st and then he saith return again ye Sons of Men. But I have made a long transition I come now from these proper ends of the Law which were the deepest descents which comprehended the reign of sin by the Law unto Death an Universal Death the most killing death a spiritual never-dying death of immortal Spirits as well the natural death of Bodies separate from their Spirits to the Ultimate ends of the Law in which some glimmering lights begin to dawn of the most desired and delightful day shining from this black and hellish night All these Ultimate ends of the Law are generally comprehended in Christ the Ultimate end of the Law The end of the Artificer and of the Agent of the eternal Spirit in the Law is Christ. So saith the Spirit in the Scriptures The end of the Law is Christ Rom. 10. 4. He may well be the end of the Law who is the end of all things for whom all things are made The Law was given by Moses but Grace and Truth were by Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ came full of Grace and Truth saith St. John in the same Chapter Joh. 1. 14 17. Grace is the Divine Love opposed to the ministry of wrath by the Law Truth is the naked Face and Beauty of the Godhead the Light the brightness of the Glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ as he is opposed to the Vails and shadows of the Law Thus Christ that is God in the nakedness and simplicity of the Divine Essence as he is Love as he is Light the Light of Immortality and Glory in which there is no darkness is the end of all the darknings dividings and destructions of all the shadows and severities of the Law But this general end is to be subdivided into its several steps or degrees 1. The end of the Law is to be a prison for faln man till Christ comes This is the language of St. Paul Gal. 3. 28. But before the Faith came we were kept in custody under the Law being shut up unto the Faith to be revealed Faith is the evidence of things not seen and the substance of things hoped for The Divine Faith is a Divine evidence of Divine things divinely invisible from an excess of Divine Light and Glory too great for every natural eye or understanding The Divine Faith is the Divine substance of Divine things the objects of a Divine hope Christ is said by St. Paul to be the hope of Glory and the end of the Faith of all the Saints He also is the Light and the Life This then is the Faith and the Revelation of the Faith of the Gospel in the Saints Christ the Light of the Glory of God eternal Life the quickning Spirit the fountain of Life the heavenly eternal truth and substance of all Good
the sum of all Perfections is divinely seated Having the Glory of God But let us here a while feast our Understandings and Affections our whole Persons with all our Powers upon our Jesus whom all our desires cannot equal Let us endeavour to take a more distinct and exact view of the Mediatory Glories of his blissful Person in this divinely-admirable piece his created Image For this end we will fix our eye for a short season upon the threefold Riches of this Work 1. The Variety 2. The harmonious Order in each part of the Variety 3. The Unity of the whole of each part with the whole and with it self Now gentle Reader let me humbly fore-warn thee that I may not seem too far to transgress the laws and limits of that Method which I have prescribed to my self in treating of the Mediatorship of our Lord Jesus by touching here in this part and taking in all things of the Creator and the Creature of the Fall and the Recovery of Nature and Grace I intreat thee therefore to consider and bear in thy mind when thou meetest with this these three things 1. The Person of our Lord Jesus in this Mediatory Image of which I speak unites all Here God is come down somewhat from the heighths of his unapproachable Light nearer to us Here God is with a delicate and transparent Veil of his own clearest Beams not hiding any of his Glories but tempering them after the sweetest manner to a more pleasing suitableness unto us that we may with a more agreeable familiarity and a more familiar delight feed the eyes of our minds with them Here is the Creation in the whole Circuit of it with an Amplitude and Glory far beyond far above it self Here it lies together all as one piece not only in it self but in the most richly heightned Light of Christ's Divine Person and Spirit Here it lies in Union with the Divine Nature in its essential Image filled with the eternal Ideas the numberless Original and exemplar Glories of all things composing one piece subsisting and shining in one Person together with these No Form or Person in nature drawn with greatest care and pleasure by the hand of the most skilful Painter a Titian Portogenes or Apelles or contemplated in its Idea shining in the Intellectual Light of some excellent and Divine Spirit so far transcendeth it self seen by a common eye in it self As the whole Creation with each minute part and motion is glorified here in the Spirit and Person of our blessed Jesus with an heightning far transcending the most exalted Beauties of its own proper state Here the Creation appears as the Sun-beam where it is immediately united to the Sun being far more full far more bright and crowned with the Sun This is that Divine Glass which God in his supream Wisdom hath framed that himself may have ever before him all his Works as they are presented here in one most lively and lovely view as also that his Work his Creature in this Glass alone may take a view and measure of it self of him of his way and his glory Think then Christian Reader that all things here treated of are now before thee in this Divine Spirit and Person as Flowers of Spices in those beds of Spice which are the Cheeks the Face of thy Jesus thy Beloved thy Delight Thine and Ours 2. This Discourse of the Creation and Redemption as they lie here in the Person of Christ their efficient exemplar and final Cause prepares our way for our contemplation of them in their proper places We know things by the knowledge of their Causes 3. Our stay here will be compensated with the compendiousness of our way in the following parts of our Discourse upon the Mediation of Christ. He that hath newly seen a Rose flourishing upon its stalk and root in the Garden with a more easie and transient view takes in the beauties of a painted Rose so far as he respecteth nature alone It is now time to come to a Distinct Contemplation of that threefold excellency which we mentioned The Variety in this Divine Piece the Order of the Parts the Unity of the whole and of each part 1. The Variety which renders the beauty and the delight in any piece more full is that it self be most full The things which make the Variety any where full are these 1. The Variety from its highest state extends it self to the most remote distance by even and united steps that all the distances be full 2. The Variety passeth into and loseth it self in the Contrariety carried to its greatest heighth and to the utmost point This most enlargeth the Variety most heightens and sets off the Unity the Beauty most excites enlargeth and heightens the Understanding This is of so great a moment this containeth so Divine a secret so high a mystery of something surprising transporting beyond that which is understood that no Work of God or of man wrought with any skill wanteth it or rather hath not the greatest skill laid out upon it to carry it farthest No Work pleaseth our Eye our Ear our Mind all falls flat to all where the Shades the Discords the Contrarieties are wanting The wisest man saith of the wisest God in his Ecclesiastes That God hath set one thing over against another that man may find nothing to add to the perfection of his Work Light and Darkness Life and Death Contraries one opposed to another How in an History in a Theatre do we take the greatest pleasure to have afflicting passions of pity fear grief raised in us even unto sighs a real melancholy and tears while we know that this is only a part in the whole a Scene which adorns and heighthens the beauty of the whole and then loseth the melancholy of its shade and discord in the universal lustre and sweetness 3. In the last place that which makes the Variety full is the return of the whole thorow the Contrariety by a sweet and full close into its Unity the return by the Contrariety from its low estate to its first and most perfect heighth The Lord Jesus in his Mediatory Person is the fairest the richest Draught or Portrait of the Divine Design and Work as it lies in the Divine Mind animated and heightned by the most immediate intimate mutual Union with the Divine Mind Here therefore is to be expected the most ample Variety The Lord Jesus is stiled in the Scriptures The Wisdom of God He is the Wisdom of God in every sense 1. He is the Wisdom of God in the Divine Mind 2. He is the Wisdom of God in the Divine Work brought forth from that Mind 3. He is the Wisdom of God in the Divine Model of that Mind and Work intervening between both and uniting them Proclus defines Wisdom to be 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 a fulness of things Our Jesus is the highest Wisdom the first the fullest the richest Variety St. Paul gives to this Wisdom the
to be where he is to see the Glory of his Godhead to see all Glories and themselves also like him in that Glory Thus Jesus Christ ascends and sits down at the right hand of the Father above all Principality and Power and Dominion and above every Name that is named not only in this World but in that which is to come This World is the World of Angels and of their Glories The Names of Principalities Powers Dominions Thrones are the Names of Angels and Names named in this their World The World to come is the Mediatory World the Kingdom of the Mediator where Christ alone Reigns over all and in all where Christ hath his own proper Glory above the Glory of the Angels beneath the Glory of the Father where Christ alone is named in every Name by Names above every Name which is named in this World of Angels This distinction between these two Worlds seemeth to appear plain in the comparison of this Scripture with that Heb. 2. 5. For he hath not put that World to come of which we speak in subjection to Angels Then this is confirmed by a citation of the Psalmist vers 7. Having made him a little lower than the Angels thou hast crowned him with Glory and Honour and set him over the Works of thine hands Thou hast put all things even the Angels themselves with their World and their Glory under his feet In like manner thâ—… Ascension of our Lord Jesus is represented to us in great Majesty and Glory with a great pomp and train of Glories Eph. 4. 10. He that descends is the same who also ascends far above all Heavens Behold our Jesus ascending through all the Heavens of Angels all the Hâ—…hvens of his own Mediatory Form and Kingdom leaving them all behind him Behold himat the right hand of the Father in the Bosom of the Father in the purity and simplicity of the Godhead entred into the Holy of Holies ascended to an height above every name of Heavens or Glories or any thing named in any the highest Heavens by any Glories by any the highest and sweetest Names Behold him carrying along with him up to this height in his own Person and by the Power of his Person and Spirit drawing up after him the long pomp and train of all these Heavens and their several Glories Here now Jesus sits down in his eternal Rest upon the Throne of Eternity having nothing higher to which he may ascend The Resurrection of Christ is the beginning of his Ascension his Ascension is the finishing of his Resurrection Now Jesus Christ is perfectly ascended thither where he was at first The Godhead of Christ in his Mediatory Form shineth forth immediately nakedly but gradually in answerable degrees the Humane Nature of Christ is Light in the Light of the Godhead a clear pure Light in the naked Bosom of that Light but an increasing Light Now in the Ascension of Christ the Glory of the Father shines out not only immediately and nakedly but entirely fully The Union the Communion the Conformity of the Humane Nature with the Divine is compleat as in kind so also in degree God is now all in all in the Person of Christ and in both Natures God is totus totalitèr in toto Christo in qualibet parte Christi God is entirely full and fully in the whole Person of Christ in the whole Manhood of Christ and in every part God is all with his whole Godhead all in every kind in every degree in every way and manner in all Christ in all the humanity of Christ. The Humane Nature of Christ is now by a mutual entire Union Similitude and Society married to its Idea its heavenly Pattern as it stood in the Mediatory Form of Christ being an uncreated and a created Spirit of Light Glory and Immortality in one Spirit Now this created Spirit of Light Glory and Immortality it self and the Humane Nature of Christ together with it in it lieth in the mutual embraces of its first Idea and Pattern in the simplicity of the Godhead in the high and holy place of Eternity in its highest and purest simplicity in its Idea and Pattern its ever-flourishing Father and Husband In this Bosome is the Marriage consummate In this Light the Humane Nature seeth the Godhead eye to eye is become like it embraceth it being embraced by it as it is in its full Glories fully powring forth themselves into its Bosome after which and beyond which there is no Glory This is the sense of St. Paul when he saith Col. 2. 9. That in Christ dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily that is substantially entirely distinctly FINIS The same in the Arg. of Kleg
Spirit and Person in heavenly unexpressible sweetnesses This is my first Request to you 2. Study and practise that great Command of Love as the Lesson of thy whole Life with which alone thou art to entertain thy self and all the heavenly Company both here and in eternity This is the first and great Command That thou love God with thy whole self and then That thou love thy Neighbour as thy self which is a second Law a second Love like unto the first Indeed it is so like that it is one with it Be thou thy self in thy whole Person the Sacrifice of a whole Burnt-Offering ascending in a Sacred flame of heavenly love to God the only and eternal Beauty As the zeal of the House of God which is Love flaming did eat up David and Christ so let this heavenly Love of the Divine Beauty which is the Beauty it self descending in a pure and sweet flame upon thee by consuming thee convert thee into one spiritual flame with it self Now live thou no where but where thou lovest in thy Beloved Let thy Beloved alone now live in thee when thou hast thus lost thy self by an heavenly Love in thy Beloved in thy God when thou hast thus by the Sacred and sweet mystery of this Love found thy Beloved thy God in the place of thy self Then love thy Neighbour as thy self Love thy Neighbour in thy Jesus thy God Love thy Jesus thy God in thy Neighbour Let this Neighbourhood of Divine Love be as large as the God of Love himself is Let every other Person and Spirit which lives and moves and hath its being in God within the encompassing upon the Ground and Root of the Divine Being be thy Neighbour thy Brother another self as thy self to thy self the Object to thee of an heavenly and incorruptible Love Upon this Commandment saith Jesus Christ hang all the Law and the Prophets This Love is the Centre and the Circle of all the Works of God of all Motions and Rests of all mysteries in Nature and Grace in Time and Eternity Plato saith That three sorts of Persons are led to God The Musician by Harmony the Philosopher by the beam of Truth the Lover by the light of Beauty All these Conductors to the supream Being meet in this Love of which we speak the first and only true Beauty being the first Birth the first Effulgency the essential Image of the supream Goodness is also the first the supream the only Truth the Original the measure the end of all Truth which by its amiable attractive Light conducteth all Understandings in the search of Truth and giveth them rest only in its transparent and blissful Bosom This also is the first the only the universal Harmony the Mufick of all things in Heaven and on Earth the Musick in which all things of Earth and of Heaven meet to make one melodious Consort While the holy Lover then pursues the tracts of this Beauty through all the works and ways of God he is encompassed with the Light of Divine Truth shining through him and round about him He is carried on in the Spirit by the force of the Divine Harmony He carrieth along this Harmony of things charming all things round about him as he passeth on So he seeth the God of Gods at last on Mount Sion the perfection of Beauty Harmony Truth and Goodness which all Center in the Divine Love the Divine Unity the band of perfection 3. Let no differences of Principles or Practices divide thee in thine affections from any person He who seems to me as a Samaritan to a Jew most worthy of contempt and hatred most apt to wound or kill me may hide under the shape of a Samaritan a generous affectionate Neighbour Brother and Friend When I lie wounded and dying neglected by those who are nearest to me most esteemed by me This person may pour Wine and Oyl into my Wounds with tender and constant care at his own expence bring me back to life and joy How evident hath it been in the History of all times that in Parties most remote one from the other most opposed one to the other Persons have been found of equal excellencies in all kinds of equal integrity to Truth and Goodness Our most Orthodox Divines who have been heated and heightned with the greatest zeal of Opposition to the Pope as the Antichrist yet have believed a Pope to have ascended from the Papal Chair to a Throne in Heaven Had my Education my Acquaintance the several Circumstances and Concurrances been the same to me as to this person from whom I now most of all dissent that which is now his sense and state might have been mine Have the same just equal tender respects and thoughts with the same allowances of another which thou requirest from him to thy self It is a Rule in Philosophy That there is the same reason of Contrarieties Two opposed Parties or Persons by reason of the opposition for the most part looking through the same disturbed and coloured Medium behold one another under the same uncomely form in the same displeasing Colours Hath there not been frequent experience of those who by being of differing Parties alienated exasperated having their fansies filled with strange Images of each other when they have been brought together by some intervening Providence have discovered such agreeable Beauties of Morality and Humanity such an harmonious agreement in essential in radical Principles of Divine Truth of the true and ever lasting good that they have conversed with highest delight they have departed with an higher esteem of each other their Souls have been inseparably united with Angelical kisses and embraces Some entertaining Strangers have entertained Angels Do thou so believe that in every encounter thou mayest meet under the disguise of an Enemy a Friend a Brother who when his Helmet shall be taken off may disclose a beautiful and a well known face which shall charm all thy Opposition into love and delight at the sight of it But now Reader I fall at thy feet I take hold of thy knees by all things moving and obliging I beseech thee If there be any Bowels or comforts of Love any Peace Pleasantness Strength Prosperity in Union any good in Unity that thou wouldst take deeply into thine Heart and treasure up safely there and frequently with fixed studious eyes contemplate this as I humbly conceive it most sure and reconciling Truth which I shall now as I am able represent to thee Often yea for the most part two opposed Parties have something on each side excellently good something exorbitantly evil although perhaps in unequal degrees Both mutually set after an unmoveable manner before their eyes their own good the evil on the other part Thus they blind their minds to all sense or belief of any good there Thus they lift up themselves above all sense of their own evil So they heighten themselves by self-justifications by mutual Condemnations unto an extinguishing of every beam
of good to an encrease of their evils unto a blackness of darkness until by these mutual mistakes they have drawn on upon themselves mutual and absolute ruine How much better were it to obey that Precept of the Holy Ghost which offereth it self to us like an Olive-branch in the mouth of this Sacred Dove To look every man not to his own things but to the things of another O that now I had an hundred Mouths an hundred Tongues a voice like Thunder like the Voice of God that rends the Rocks to cry to all sorts of Persons and Spirits in this Land in all the Christian World through the whole Creation Let all that differ in Principles Professions or Opinions and Forms see that good which is in each other and the evil in themselves Joyn in thiâ—… to extirpate the evil the common evil your common enemy and so quench that fire which burns upon your Estates your Houses your Relations your Bodies your Souls even to the nethermost Hell Unite the good which is in you so shall the good on one side make up that which is imperfect and defective in the good on the other side unto a perfection of good in both So shall the good on one side be as a proper Antitode to extinguish the evil on the other side Thus while the evil is the privation the loss of your selves and the good your true-selves as Hor ace calls Virgil Dimidium animae meae you will meet like two halves of each other filling up the circle of each others Being Beauties Joys and be now compleated in one How unexpressible would the fruits of this Union be How would it heighten you in all the Beauties and Blessednesses of Truth and Goodness in which your immortality and conformity to God are placed yea how would this Union strengthen those outward Interests and sweeten those natural Enjoyments for whose sake now like Adders you stop your Ears to the wisest Charmer and the most potent Charms that would draw you home into the bosom of each other for whose sake now you cast down to the ground all ingenuity and integrity You make your way over their sweetest Beauties and tenderest Bowels to the heart-blood of one another until you have drowned in blood those very darling Interests and Enjoyments together with your own Lives and Persons your native Country the Christian World the face of the whole Earth But ab when will poor Mankind on Earth be wise to understand its own good or be good that it may me wise Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lorld VVe wait for thy Salvation thy Jesus O God! To him shall the gathering of the people be the true Shiloe for whom this Glory is reserved It seemeth indeed according to my humble sense necessary to divide those Principles and Practices which divide Mankind into three Heads 1. Some seem to be of a nature perfectly indifferent neither good nor evil but according to the intention and spirit which acteth them 2. Some differ in the degrees mixtures or varieties of good and evil 3. Others differ in the whole kind of good and evil In this last state of things it is the part of every Child of Light to maintain the Divine Love in his Spirit like the Sun in the Firmament encompassing the whole Earth from one end to the other shining upon all both good and bad upon dry and sandy Desarts the Habitations of wild Beasts and venemous Serpents as well as cultivated Gardens flourishing with wholesome Herbs pleasant Flowers and all sorts of fruits Thus God himself is propounded to us for a Pattern by the Son of God Distinguish between the good and evil Love takes pleasure in the good Hate the evil Advance the good Oppose the evil upon all occasions with all your forces But every where distinguish carefully with all tenderness of Spirit between the person and the evil of the person Be wise as Serpents but innocent as Doves according to the Counsel and Command of Jesus Christ who is the supream VVisdom and Love both in one Discern the evil with a quick and curious eye guard your selves with all your might from it maintain an aversion an enmity to it eternally irreconcilable Thus be a Serpent to the evil but at the same time be a Dove to the person without gaul without any thing to offend moaning over it groaning for it as your Mate till it be recovered from the evil which captivates it into a fellowship with you in the purity and love of the Divine Nature Have always most tender bowels for and a most sensible sympathy with all Mankind in their greatest Deformities and Defilements as thy Brethren tyed unto thee by a double Consanguinity 1. All men are made of the same blood in Adam 2. All men are redeemed by the same blood of the Lord Jesus who hath given himself a Ransom for all to be testified 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 in the proper times Each person which hath his part in this Ransom hath its proper time for its discovery in him Thine may be now sooner This person also now most of all lost in the depth of all evils may have his proper time yet to come for the taking off the disguise of these filthy Rags from him for the discovery of the Glory as of a Son of God in him As his time comes later so it may come with a fuller Glory As Zipporah said to Moses whether bitterly or in the sweet sense of a Sacred mystery pointing to the Messias Thou art an Husband to me in bloods So look thou on every man as a Brother to thee in both these bloods of which one was once pure and precious as that of the Sacred Image of God in Paradise The other is eternally pure and precious as the blood of God himself Forgiving one another freely for Christ's sake is the language of St. Paul Look upon every person through this twofold Glass the Blood and the Beauties of Christ. Christ hath died for all The natural Being of every person hath his Root in the Grave of Christ and is watered with his blood Christ lives in all His Resurrection is the life of the whole Creation He is the VVisdom the Power the Righteousness of God in every work of Nature as well as of Grace He is the Root out of which every natural as well as every spiritual Plant springs which brings forth himself through every natural existence and brings forth himself out of it as the flower the brightness of the Glory of God He is the Root and Truth of all things All things are by him and for him to the praise and glory of God in him His Name is excellent through all the Earth Read then this Name of Excellency of Glory the Name of Christ in every part and point of the â—…arth the darkest the lowest the least forgive the spots upon this Name in every person for the Names-sake engravâ—…n upon it Receive
unlimited Sweetness and Liberty with the Divine Love the Divine will above Yea now the will and love enjoy a two-fold full and glorious Liberty while Goodness and Beauty are their Essence as well as their Election 1. They freely and unconfinedly rove through all the fields of Goodness and Beauty in their greatest amplitude in their richest and most unbounded Varieties as freely as through their own proper Essence and Being 2. Their Liberty in this unconfined amplitude of all Goodness and Beauty becomes most ample and triumphant while it is free from all fear danger suspicion possibility of change to any degree of confinement or constraint by this essential Connexion between it self and the highest necessity O good O beautiful O blessed Will which sits upon the Throne of Eternity which governest us and all things While in being good beautiful blessed with a perfect Liberty thou art such also with the highest necessity Thou art now as delightfully and complacentially so unchangeably absolutely universally supreamly soveraignly essentially Good beautiful and blessed in thine whole Nature Person and Duration in all â—…hy works and ways O Good Beautiful Blessed is that will also in whom Liberty and Necessity are after the same manner united by its Union with the Divine will 2. Nothing seems to present the Divine Face of Truth and the whole nature of things with such harmonious and charming Beauties to the eye of the mind as the determination of the will by its essential and universal Causes seen in one view with the Divine Love A single light seen by Mariners resting upon their Ship which as I remember was of old called by the name of Helena Threatneth a dreadful storm But two Twin-Lights known by the name of the two Brothers Castor and Pollux infuse a new life into the hearts of the Sea-men by the sweet hope of a sudden and gentle Calm After the same manner these two the divine Love and the determination of the will shining together as twin-lights entertain us with a most beautiful composure a golden Calm and Sun-shine a Divine Amity spread through the work of God in all the parts of it But either of these alone exposeth all to stormy gusts slawes and wracks We read of the Spouse in the Canticles That the Joynts of her thighs are Jewels the work of a curious workman The indeterminate motions of the Will render the work of God a dis-joynted piece exposing it in its most principal parts and motions to an ungoverned contingency without joynts or bands which may knit them together one to another and to the whole as one piece If the will with its motions by a necessary connexion in the Order of Causes be joynted into the whole and compose with the rests of the parts one entire work answering to one entire design framed in the heart and brought forth by the hand of that supream and eternal Spirit which is love it self the pure unmixt entire Spirit of love How sweet how beautiful how full of all Divine Charms and Perfections through all the parts of it What a Princely Daughter and Spouse worthy of the great and eternal King must we think this work to be which is the compleat and full contrivance of so rich and so high a Love formed in its own Bosom In the midst of all its most amiable and delightful treasures which is the outward work of a most pure and Almighty Love wrought entirely from end to end by its own hand with fingers dropping its own pure incorruptible Myrrh upon every part of it as it wrought it forming it for a compleat Image of it self and a continual delight to it self What Jewels now must we think all the Joynts of the Thighs of this Divine Image and Birth How harmonious the motions by these Joynts when the joynts and motions are all the work of so skillful so curious so faithful a Workman as Love it self the supream and eternal Love I humbly acknowledge that to my weak Understanding a created Will absolute and arbitrary determined in its course by no light of Truth no light or life of good seemeth to lead my Spirit into a Wilderness where there is no way or guide or to thrust me forth without Ballast or Rudder without a Pole-star or Needle toucht with the loadstone upon the face of an unknown and stormy Sea What a golden-thread of Harmony guides us through the nature of things and leads us into all Truth Harmony being the very Essence of all Natures and all Truths when we understand the whole nature of things from the greatest to the least parts and motions of it to be determined and that determination to be the work of the Divine Love the firmest band of sweetest Union the sweetest Life of all beautiful proportion being only Wise only Powerful inasmuch as it is the highest Unity containing all Variety Originally in it self sending it forth from it self and diffusing it self through all We are taught in Metaphysicks That Being Truth and Goodness are really one How sweet a rest now doth the Spirit with its Understanding and its Will find to itself in every Being in every Truth in every State or Motion of Being in every form of Truth When it hath a sense of the highest Love which is the same with the highest Goodness designing disposing working all in all even all Conceptions in all Understandings all Motions in every VVill Humane Angelical Divine With what a joy and complacency unexpressible doth the Will the Understanding the whole Spirit now lie down to rest every where as upon a bed of Love as in the bosom of goodness it self Let not any question the close and Divine Contexture of the whole Work in all the parts and conduct of it by a firm connexion of Causes and Effects like links in a Chain from its first beginning to its last end because he meeteth with an Hell as well as an Heaven in this work of God Divine Love which transcendently excels in all Wisdom and Prudence beyond all the highest wits of men the richest Contrivances of Poets knoweth how to joynt an Hell into its work with such Divine Artifice incomprehensible to Men or Angels that this also shall be beautiful with delights in its place and shall give a sweetness a lustre to the whole piece St. Paul saith to the Saints All things this World Life Death things present things to come are yours you are Christs and Christ is Gods and God is Love See a golden Chain see the Order of the precious Links see how in a beautiful circle the beginning is fastned to the end All Philosophy agreeth in this that the last end is the first mover In God then who is Love the first and the last links of this Chain meet All things this wicked World Death it self even the second Death and Hell deaths to come as well as deaths present are shining links in this golden Chain fastened to that superior Link the Saint the spiritual man He
of it beareth a part in it is Harmony in this Harmony Every nature and form of each thing in each kind and degree to the lowest divisions and least distinctions of things is expressed universally by 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 in Greek by Ratio in Latin which both properly express Harmony A variety bound up in an Unity an Unity diffusing it self through a variety This is God the third Person in the Trinity Harmony it self The first Harmony most perfect most absolute diffusing it self through all things endlesly and unboundedly unfolding it self into all forms of things by its Divine force as the force as the fulnesses and streams of this Harmony in its own soft and spacious Bosome enfolding all forms of things in the same Bosome as Harmonies of this Harmony Harmonies in this Harmony in each of which the universal Harmony is new and complete Can there be now any one thing in the nature of things any one thing in the will of any Spirit any one essence form power act accident or circumstance which lies not in which flows not from this first and universal spring the Divine Unity Or shall we deny this Divine Unity to be the first Unity to be an entire Unity the fountain of the God-head the only fountain of all Is there any where in any Will any distinction of power or of act of an indeterminate power and determinate Is there any varying of the Will from power to act from an undetermined to a determined State Is there any distinction in the Will any distinct qualification modification of any kind or degree which lies not most distinctly most clearly most compleatly with all its variations in this Divine this first this universal and unconfined Variety which flows not from it Hath any Spirit any Being a Will Hath any Will any liberty any motion Hath any Spirit any will any liberty any motion Have all these either joyntly in relation to each other or each a part in it self rationem aliquam any form any agrecableness which is not enfolded and wrapt up in the Divine the sirst the universal unconfined Harmony which doth not arise from which doth not feel the force and flow in the course of this Harmony Then must the Divine Harmony it self be out of tune being in a discord to this that lies without it being stopt and checkt by it Then must this it self what ever it be have no Harmony no agreeableness with any thing no not so much as with it self then must it be a discord to all Being then must it be divided from all Being and so not be at all 3. Argument The Wisdom of God comes in the third place to oppose this Liberty of the Will in question The Divine Wisdom thus expresseth it self by the mouth of Solomon in his Proverbs I Wisdom dwell with Prudence and find out witty inventions The Philosopher seemeth to furnish us with a fair Comment upon this Text when he divideth the intellectual habits or perfections of the mind into these five 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 The first is the eternal truth of things in their immediate Principles and Springs as they lie in the eternal mind and thence shine forth in the Understandings the superior parts of the inferior and created Spirits The second comprehends all forms of Knowledge as streams flowing from these springs running along together in the mind representing in one view in one entire Image the whole nature of things as a Copy of the Divine Nature and of the Original Image in the Divine mind The third Perfection in the account of the Philosopher is Wisdom which he describeth to be the union of both these foregoing Perfections in the same mind or spirit Prudence in the fourth place is the lustre or brightness of this Wisdom shining forth in our Manners in our moral Actions and Conversations This is the light of Wisdom flowing forth upon all the motions of our Will of our sensitive Appetite and Passions with their proper effects forming and figuring them according to in an harmony with the Divine Image in the universal nature of things and in its Original the Divine Nature it self as this Image shines forth in the mind Lastly That Art which compriseth all witty Inventions is composed of the emanations of this Wisdom as beams from the Sun by which Inferiour Spirits bring forth external effects works without themselves in the similitude and imitation of the Divine Work in the Divine Nature for the use of life in its necessities conveniencies and delights Thus Wisdom above and below dwells with Prudence and finds out knowledge of witty Inventions Agreeable to this is that Doctrine of another sort of Philosophers that as Wisdom is the perfection of the Understanding so the Understanding in its perfect state is the first seat and spring of Order Therefore they say where-ever there is Order where-ever there is Harmony or Beauty which consists in Order there is an Understanding The Understanding say they in its proper and native state is the immediate Son and Image of God beneath God himself the first and fullest effulgency of the God-head in its essential Image so it becomes Omniform being all forms in one with a richly heighthned Light and a Divine Order Here Order hath all its Springs and Measures here Judgment hath its Throne and Scepter comparing and measuring all forms of things according to the Order in which they lie here accordingly determining order and disorder in things below Moses in that sweet and dying Song of his where he representeth the Order and Beauty of the whole Work of God in the Nation of the Jews as a principal part of that Work and as a mysterious figure of the whole Work expresseth the whole force and form of the Divine Wisdom as the ground of his Song in the beginning of it He is the Rock his work is perfect for all his wayes are judgment Deut. 32. 4. Behold here the three parts of Wisdom the Rock the Judgment the perfection of the Work 1. The eternal truths of things in the Divine Mind the first principle and spring where they shine immediately immutably These are the Rock 2. The universal Image of things in all variety of Forms with a beautiful Order drawn forth from these springs joyned immediately to them exactly and most agreeably suited to them most harmoniously answering them in all mutual Comparisons and Relations within the Divine mind This is the Judgment 3. The production of the whole work in an apt correspondency with this inward Image that the whole answer the whole part answer part universally through the whole This is the perfection of the Work the perfection of Wisdom and Judgment in the work Thus the wayes of the Work-man in his work are Judgment If now any part of the work of God if a principal part of his work the will of intellectual Spirits in those motions in those moments which are as the hinge upon which the whole Work of God
first place with this Beatifical Vision Doth not He much more certainly with a delight proportioned to a God behold all things in this Glass of the Trinity in the supreamly beautiful face of our Jesus his own eternal Birth his own essential Image the full reflection of himself upon himself Is not this first and full birth of the Godhead its most universal Birth where by bringing forth him he brings sorth all things at once in him according to their first and fairest Births as beautiful lineaments composed of Divine Lights and Shades in this face and Divine Form where all pleasantnesses dwell Thus of a truth God co-exists with all Creatures hath in Himself in his Essence Existence and Duration the exact measure of all Essences Existencies and Durations but this is according to the manner of the Divine and Uncreated not of the created nature as he comprehends all in himself 5. I come to that now which I promised as my chief and concluding Answer Here I shall endeavour to make it appear that all this established in the most desired sense falls short or flies wide off our present Argument leaving it altogether untoucht For let it be that God doth exist together with the Creature in the proper and formal existence of each Creature yet still we fall upon this Dilemma The knowledge of each Creature in the Divine Understanding arriveth from without or ariseth from within The first of these hath following it an horrid train of direful inconveniencies represented above such as I may well tremble to mention and the holy Angels stand amazed to hear the passibility mutability dependency imperfection of the Divine Essence in it self compositions divisions in the Divine Nature in a word the desposing of God from being God The Devil indeed in all forms practiseth this as his chiefest Artifice the establishing of such imaginations and opinions in our Spirits as by the dividing of the Godhead in it self may divide God from Himself in our sense of Him and so in truth separate us from the supream Unity the only Crown of all Righteousness Rest and Joy that by dividing he may Reign If I deceive not my self thus this imagination of Gods receiving his Knowledge of created things from the objects themselves existing in their own proper forms out of their causes and present before him is thus attended with such a troop of infernal Monsters as cannot but affrighten us from entertaining any such conception The first part of the Dilemma being then removed the second is established namely that the knowledge of all things in the mind of God hath no spring from which it streameth besides God Himself All the Attributes of God all the sense which all Nations all Spirits have of God from the light of Nature or of Revelation his All-sufficiency his Being the beginning the end of all things testifie with great concurrence to this Truth It seemeth to me indeed Impertinent to use many words to clear or confirm it If then God have his Knowledge of every Creature from within he comprehendeth all the Creatures in his own Divine Essence either formally in their own proper Natures and Existencies or virtually and eminently as in their first cause No other way seemeth to me imaginable by which the Divine Mind should be at once both the Eye and the Glasse to behold all things in it self If we place any Creature according to its proper form in the Divine Essence we place it upon the Throne of the Godhead and cloath it with the form of God It remaineth then that the Divine Knowledge is the intuition or view of things in their first and eternal Original Moreover Knowledge is the Imâ—…ge of the thing known in the understanding of him who knoweth it There are only three sorts of Images 1. The Original Image the exemplar cause and pâ—…ttern 2 The essential form which is the thing it self 3. A Copy or Figure of this as the Picture taken from the life and the shadow cast from the substance Thus the Lord Jesus in his spiritual Glories as He is the Divine Understanding is the Original form of the Sun the Suns Sun To him agrees that which Plutarch delivereth to us from the ancient Philosophers that the God of the Sun which inhabits the Sun excels the Sun in the sweetness beauty and glory of his Light ten thousand times more than the Sun doth this Earth or the darkest Cloud The Sun it self shining in these visible Heavens is the essence or essential form framed by this pattern sprung forth from it The Light the Sun-shines and Suns which we severally take in with our eyes are so many figures and pictures or shadows rather of this Sun flowing from him If we believe the Creatures in their essential forms or in their shadowy figures to inhabit the Divine Understanding we either exalt them to an heighth too far above them by bringing them into the Divine Unity and so making them one God with God or we debase the Divine Nature by bringing it down to a composition with things forreign and inferior to it The Philosopher teaches us that Science or clear and certain Knowledge is only the knowledge of things in their causes The first and most perfect Spirit is only capable of this knowledge which alone is most perfectly clear and immutable the knowledge of things in their first and universal cause Thus the Divine Essence in the Person of our Jesus the Divine Wisdome and Understanding the brightness of the Divine Glory the Image of the Godhead pure naked full substantial eternal is both the only Object of the Divine Eye worthy of it and compleatly suited to it and also the Species or Image in which and by which alone all Creatures all forms of things in Heaven Earth and Hell are presented to it This is that Unity which in its pure simplicity being free from all division of parts or diversities of forms is absolutely unbounded and so diffuseth it self into the most perfect and unconfined Variety comprehending it entirely altogether undivided within it self as in a spiritual most spacious Palace of Light and Paradise of the Divine Life upon the high and flourishing Mount of Eternity This is that Unity in its first distinction and so in the most full Variety our Jesus in whom all fulness of Nature Grace and Glory dwelleth in its sweetest repose in the most perfect Harmony of all the most heightning Beauties and Delights This is the Beatisical Vision in which God clearly contemplates compleatly enjoys Himself and all things in Himself as in the Christalline Fountain of the Godhead Let me now bring home to my present mark this present Argument by drawing up my whole Discourse upon it into three short Propositions 1. God who knoweth all things distinctly and exactly knoweth every Act of the Will every actual determination of it in each Act. 2. God who only knoweth all things by beholding them in the Glasse of his own Essence in the
whole the first Image of every Creature in its distinct form in its whole compass as a part of the whole Thus is He the First-born the Excellency of Dignity the Exceliency of Strength both in respect to the Father of all and of every Birth He is the first effulgency or shining out of the Divine Glory in every form imitable or inimitable If this Nail were fastned by a Master of the Assembliés how unmoveably would it be fixed and be the frame of my design Socrates in Plato professeth to love his beautiful Friend because he alwayes generated in his mind within and his spâ—…ch without rational Discourses harmonious Forms of things beautâ—…ul Images conâ—…ting of agreeable porportions Reason in 〈◊〉 intellectual Spirit is a treasure of Divine prâ—…portions the patterns and principles of its Activity Every Intellectual Spirit by its Reason is a sacred Field replenished with Divine Powers Divine Springs and Forms of proportions and harmony which compose reason in the essence of it are at once Divine Flowers of Intellectual Beauties and Divine Springs a prolifick virtue of seminative and formative force by which they propagate themselves Our Jesus is this Field and this Paradise of Flowers and Springs in the Godhead the Understanding the Reason of the Godhead Every Workman according to the measure of his reason and wisdome hath in himself before he beginneth to work the form and perfection of his work This is the end which first moveth the Agent and setteth him on work This is the reason the rule of his works which giveth him both life to it and light in it This Harmony of skill or reason within is the Angelical Musick in the mind to which all things in the work without do move like Amphion's Lute by sound of which the Walls of Thebes were raised Thus the Workman works by wisdome For his God teacheth him Shall not the only wise God much more work in Wisdome Shall not He have the form of that Work which he intendeth perfect and plain with all its proportions in his Spirit before He begineth it Shall not He have his end the pattern the principle the reason and the rule of His Work in Himself Or doth He work blindly or by chance Or is He enlivened or enlightned from without for his Work Doth He not from the treasure and measure of all harmony in his own mind give to it its proportions and perfections Solomon bringeth in Wisdome as a Person in eternity speaking after this manner When God stretched out the Heavens when he laid the foundations of the Earth when he digged up a place for the Sea then I was with him St. John in the beginning of his Gospel takes the Vail off from his Person and discovereth this Wisdome in an eternal Person to be the Lord Jesus For he saith In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God and by him were all things made This is the internal Word of the Mind the Wisdome of God the essential Image of the Godhead the Original the eternal Image of all things In this Word are eternally contained the Patterns the prolisick Virtues by which the whole Creation with all things in it are brought forth and formed This is the Word in the Mind of God in which the whole Creation is drawn forth in which it lieth in the first and most proper draught of it from the beginning to the end before it cometh forth in it self This is our Jesus bred with the Father in eternity ever before Him who thus day by day sporteth Himself and playeth with Him whiles in all his Work â—…e multiplieth and spreadeth forth round about him to the uttermost bounds of things Divine Figures of those Archetypal and exemplar Glories which he seeth in him Can this then be Can Jesus Christ thus be the ground of the Creation and of the whole Work of God in it Can the whole piece in all its proportions and perfection lie here in the Person of this Jesus in its first draught in its exactest patterns and the will of man with the motions of it be left out of this model Is not the Will of every Intellectual Spirit are not the motions of this Will the principal parts of this Work are they not those Hinges and Engines by which the whole is turned about in all the great revolutions of it Doth not the Catastrophe the final change doth not the finishings and perfections the Ultimate and most glorious closes of the whole on which the expectations of Men and Angels are fixt in which the full Harmony of the whole Work the full glory of the Workman do consist and are discovered depend upon these the Will and its motion If therefore these also lie in this Jesus the essential the personal Wisdome of God their first ground their most perfect pattern in eternity are they not here determined as in their first cause But thus much of the Mediatorship of Christ in the ground of it as the first ground of the whole work of God lies most fair most full and flourishing in his Person in eternity 2. Jesus Christ in his Mediatorship is the way of the whole work of God from the beginning to the end of it a most beautiful and a most pleasant way I shall set this way before us in two parts 1. Part. Jesus Christ is the first and universal Creature the first created Head the first the fairest Copy of the whole Angelical Nature with all its Glories of the whole Creation the Life-Picture taken immediately from the Life it self I shall not insist much on this as seeming perhaps not so clear not having been generally received neither doth it bring any new Argument to this Cause but only add new force to the Argument immediately before taken from the ground of the Mediatorship in Christ. Yet am I not willing to pass it by without a brief offer of those Reasons which seem to give clearness and countenance to it and that upon a two-fold Consideration 1. I gladly thus far gratifie the Arians and Socinians by complying with them in giving to our Lord Jesus as a Creature this pre-existency to the whole Creation and preheminence above it I cannot but conceive fair hopes that clear and candid Spirits among them will by this link in the golden Chain of Christ's Mediatorship in which God and all his Works are by an inseparable and harmonious order fastned each to other be easily lead to that first and highest Link of the Godhead of Christ the original eternal essential form of the Divine Essence sweetly conceived and compleatly finisht there as the womb and bosome of the first Love Neither can any more doubt but that those intelligent and ingenious Persons of which I speak will as delightfully by this same Link upon a wise contemplation of it be carried to those other lower Links of Redemption and Justification Sanctification and Salvation by Jesus Christ as the purchase the
essential Form I design and hope so to open and establish these Propositions that the true Liberty of the Soul in its Operations may all along shine clearly forth from the Divine ground and form of its proper nature 1. Proposition The Intellectual Soul in Man is an indivisible Unity comprehending Variety Diversity Contrariety of Forms This is the first Proposition There is a three-fold Unity 1. There is an Unity in the Division of Parts This is the most imperfect Unity or rather a shadow of Unity the Unity of shadows of Corporeal substances or bodies 2. There is an Unity in Diversity of Forms or Essences above all divisibility of parts This also is an imperfect Unity This is the Unity of Essences of Intellectual Substances of all created Spirits The Unities of this sort are the Essences of things in their created state which are said to be indivisible 3. Above all Divisibility or Diversity is the first the supream the perfect Unity having in it self the first the fullest Variety and distinction This is the Unity of the Divine Nature or the Divine World This for its infinite heighth above all expression or comprehension by any created Image or Understanding for the equal concurrence of the first the most entire Unity and the first the most full Variety both alike boundless and infinite is well termed 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Above an Unity The Humane Soul is an Unity of the second Rank whether you ascend or descend in the number of Intellectual Substances like the Angels above all Division but subject to Diversity This is an Unity in a Diversity Diversity which is Variety contracted and obscured by a mixture of the Contrariety with the Unity overshadows the Unity of the Soul and rendreth it a shadowy Unity The Divine Unity and Variety lie hid and vailed beneath the Diversity in the shadowy Unity of the Souls natural Form This Diversity as it over-shadows so it also bounds the Unity and renders it finite infinitely beneath the first and supream Unity in the Divine Nature This is the Unity of the Intellectual Soul an Unity free from raised above all Division or divisibility of parts lying one without another as they appear in Bodies or Corporeal Substances The explication of this Unity in the Intellectual Operations of the Soul as I humbly conceive will be a full demonstration of it There seemeth according to common sense and language to be manifest in us a Life a Power which compareth and judgeth things which discerneth the differences of things relations proportions agreements disagreements which is delighted with Harmony Beauty Musick which taketh in entertaineth it self with the Essences of things the whole Universals as its most native and most suitable Companions which adorneth it self with Sciences The Sciences are an Angel-like building which this Life or Power hath framed by single notions or forms of things regularly composed into Propositions by Propositions in a most beautiful order laid one upon another and by fit joynts like Jewels knit together into one Body of Divine Light which setteth its Feet on the Earth and raiseth its Head into the unseen Glories of the highest Heavens This Power and Life within us which makes good all this or a similitude of this with more or less degrees of Perfection is that which we call the Intellectual Soul in Man If the Object or its Image be extended and so composed of parts which lie all one without another if the Subject which receives into it self the Object or the Image be of the same nature Now the one part of the Object is taken into and seated in one part of the Subject Another part in another Thus all lie diffused differently in different parts not only divisible but actually divided from each other Now they no where meet together in one they are no where compared and judged the Discord the Harmony the Whole is no where understood Yea These are no more in the nature of things There is no such thing as Picture Prospect or Person Life Love or Joy Death or Suffering All is an unimaginable heap of unconceivable Atomes which have no Relation to no Commerce with each other if there be no indivisible Unity in which things meet in which they are compared judged and proportioned How an Atome it self or any thing of whole or part can be without Unity which constitutes it which connects it into which it Ultimately resolves it self from which it first ariseth is of all things to me most hard to comprehend But this is a digression and more than is necessary to my present design Let us return The two essential Operations of the Intellectual Soul are to understand and to will The Objects of these are Truth and Goodness real or apparent 1. Truth is a representative conformity of the Image to its Original 2. Goodness is a mutual perfcctive Conformity or suitableness of the Original and Image or of the Object to the Faculty Power or Spirit to which it relates These two are the Divine Meat and Drink of the Soul like the Ambrosia and Nectar of the Gods or separated Spirits with the Poets But where there is any impression any sense or relish of these two Truth or Goodness in the lowest forms of things These three must meet undividedly in one The two terms or bounds of conformity or suitableness the relation between these two their suitableness and conformity to each other The Intellectual Soul riseth an higher pitch according to the Doctrine of all the Schools and its own innate testimony of it self in all its Motions in all its Virtues and Vices It is carried up upon these two soaring wings as the wings of an Angel quite out of the sight of sense above all the tumult of Individuals and particulars to the invisible Glories and Harmonies of universal Forms The universal Truth and Good are its only mark and rest where its motions terminate The heavenly Beauty of the universal Truth can be no where seen the heavenly sweetness of the universal Good can be tasted by no Spirit but that alone where all Truths all kinds and degrees of good all things in their friendships and enmities are met and concentred with a full with an exact Harmony in one indivisible Point or in a perfect Unity It is indeed a Divine Unity running like the Spirit of Musick through all these terminating them all by it self recollecting them all entirely with their several Divisions after the most undivided manner into it self which makes this Harmony the Joy the Glory the Divine Life of Angels of God and God-like men This Divine Unity can be no where received but into an Unity like it self This Unity in the Intellectual Soul makes it a Divine â—…ye Ear and Spirit capable of taking in the Beauty enjoying the Musick being entertained at the heavenly Feast of the universal Truth and Goodness in the Society of all blessed and immortal Spirits Keep the Unity of the Spirit saith St. Paul in the
Essence or inseparable from it hath also all forms of things in the same Capacity or Power and so in its Original Act. Indeed as it subsisteth in the Body this plenitude in the Original Act or power of the Soul is very much vailed by matter or corporeity at least under the fall But I pass from this Argument to another drawn from the Unity of the Soul established in the former Proposition The Soul being in its Essence by Virtue of its essential Unity altogether undivided and so above all place or time which consist of divided parts is thus uncapable of Absence Distance or Division from any thing All things then are ever present with it There is only a two-fold presence imaginable Corporeal and Spiritual 1. The Corporeal or bodily presence is after the manner of Corporeal Substances or Bodies with Division a divided presence This is the presence of two Bodies one containing the other as its proper place or of two Bodies contained in one Body as their common place one common space of Air one Field one Chamber one Bed 2. The spiritual presence is a meeting in one Incorporeal Form or in one Spirit which is an Indivisible Unity This the Schools express by the penetration of Spirits which penetration where there are no extensions or dimensions as in Bodies seemeth to me uncapable of any other sense in the strict examination of it than their subsisting together in the same undivided Unity and their mutual subsistencies in the undivided and essential Unities of each other Harmonious with this are those two well-grounded and unshaken Axioms in Philosophy 1. The Essences of things are Indivisible 2. The understanding alone reacheth to and comprehendeth the Essences and Substances of things whiles sense feeds only upon empty shadows Aiery accidental Forms Proclus thus teacheth us That all things are in the Soul 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 according to the peculiar property and character of the Soul In like manner the Lord Jesus saith to the unbelieving Jews which look for signs of the Divinity for a Pomp and Glory without in their senses The Kingdome of Heaven is within you The Heathen Philosophers stiled the Unities of things Gods This Unity to which all things were present was with them the Character of a God The Scriptures upon the same ground stile all Intellectual Spirits both Angels and Men Gods He calleth saith Christ them Gods to whom the word of God came That living Word which is the Image of the invisible God and so containeth all Forms the whole nature of things in it self cometh by Nature and by Grace although after a divers manner to all Intellectual Spirits That Scripture which our Lord Jesus relates to seemeth peculiarly to regard Humane Souls I have said ye are Gods but ye shall die like men Ye Intellectual Spirits which in your abstracted forms are immortal impassible undivided comprehensive Unities To which all forms of things in their immutable Essences are ever present by my presence with you who am the eternal Word of the Divine Mind the Divine and Universal Image of things Ye being humbled beneath the Angels into a Body of Dust a Corporeal Form in this by your sympathy with this are subject to the Government of the Elements and Coelestial Bodies of the Powers ruling in them as Tutors over you and so to their Laws of Time Place Division and Death until you grow up to the full Age of the Intellectual Life by returning into the Bosome of your first Divine Ideal Unity in me All diversity of Forms are in this manner present with the Intellectual Soul meeting together and being contained in the Unity of its Essence as in an invisible Palace or City like the City of God described by the Psalmist which is compact in it self Object Is God then are all the Angels is this visible World so present with the Soul so contained in its essential Unity as to be one Essence one Spirit with it Answ. I shall give three distinct Answers to the three parts of this Objection In relation 1. To God 2. To Angels 3. To the visible World 1. Answ. This comprehensive Unity which is the proper Character of Intellectual Spirits is called by Philosophers the Apex or supream Point the Head of the Soul hid in a Divine Glory the Divine part of the Soul in which it symbolizeth with is capable of Commerce with the Divinity it self and of enjoying in it self the Divine presence as in its most proper and beloved Temple I shall humbly present to the Readers Candor four Distinctions for the unvailing of this Divine presence in the Soul 1. Distinction God is not present in the Soul as in a place Divisible but as in an undivided Unity for he were otherwise no more a pure an infinite Spirit the first supream simple Spirit of Being Beauty of all Excellency and Virtue a Life of Sweetness a Light of Glory without allay shade or limit He were now Corporeal and finite Of this Local Circumscription which hath no place here is that Rule rightly understood The container is greater than the contained 2. Distinction God by his Omnipresence and undivided Unity is every where in every Creature in every part and point of the Creation with the fulness of his Glories and Godhead after a two-fold manner 1. God is present to himself in every Creature Secundum modum Dei after the manner of a God 2. God is present in each Creature to that Creature Secundum modum Creaturae according to the manner of the Creature 1. God is present to himself in every Creature after the manner of a God Where-ever he is present He is entirely present with all the Joys and Glories of eternity ever undivided His own Heaven to himself in the Depths of Hell beneath as in the Heighth of Heaven above in the dust of the Grave in a wave of the Sea as in the most shining Cherubim or flaming Seraphim God is not thus present to any natural Spirit no not in the purity ofits Creation with his unvailed Beauties shining forth in the brightness of his Glory in the fulness of his Godhead Then should he transfigure that Spirit into the same Image of one Divine Form and Glory with himself Then would there be no difference between Adam in Paradise the Angels in Heaven and Jesus Christ in his Paradise and Heaven above all Heavens the Bosome of the Father No after this manner God dwells in Jesus Christ alone as he is risen from the Dead in the eternal Spirit in the Glory of the Father 2. God is in every Creature present with that Creature according to the manner of that Creature By the divers manners of his Appearance as by the ingraving upon the Seal setting divers impressions upon the Creature and giving divers forms of Being to it like the Seal in the impression upon the Wax He thus becometh the fulness of every Creature filling all in all parts of it and so Omnipresent to it
Therefore the School-men say of the sending giving powring forth the coming of the Spirit to us to be in us That it is only Novus modus apparendi A new manner of appearing The Holy Spirit the third Person in the Trinity from whom the other two Persons are ever undivided God blessed for ever is ever in every Creature in every Spirit He only changeth his Appearances and Effulgencies there By the change of his Appearance he changeth and formeth each Creature each Spirit in all its Changes Thus he turneth to himself the Heavens and the Earth as the Clay to the Seal according to the Language in the Book of Job How divinely pure and pleasant a prospect or living Picture is now the nature of things while God himself according to the distinct Idea or eternal exemplar of each Creature cometh forth and appeareth together with it as Twin-brothers as Twin-Loves 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 and 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 one the reflection of the other while a Third Love breaks from both these in which they are blest and made perfect with a mutual Union and the fruition of each other The ever-glorious and eternally-joyous Trinity of the highest and first Love seems to multiply and figure it self in each Creature All Creatures now seem to be in a lively and living Beauty represented by the two Breasts of the heavenly Spouse Like two Twin-Roes of a lovely kind two Twin-Loves the Births of their heavenly Mother the Universal and Divine Image in the Person of Christ feeding among the Lillies the Ideal eternal Lights and Beauties of her soft and shining Bosome But all this is to be understood of simple Nature abstracted from the Corruption by Sin with which in the midst of the pure peaceful pleasant Varieties the charming Harmonies the golden Calms and Gardens of Divine Love cometh in a scene of War and Death of tempestuous Seas fields of Blood Contrariety and Enmity God willing to shew the Power of his Wrath. That God who is the God of Love that Will which is Love it self All Love in the beloved Soul to the beloved Soul here in its faln state puts on this strange person of an Enemy Under this dark Disguise and horrid Vizat he hideth all his Beauties and Sweetnesses he acts a part of Wrath. But this it self at last appears to the beloved Soul to be a most delightful Love-part While by it the Variety is made more full being extended to the greatest Contrariety and utmost extreams While in the reconciling of these the Divine Harmony is more full and ravishing The Divine Love heightned to an excess of Sweetness and triumphant Joys The Wisdome of the Design more admird and adored in its rich and glorious Depths All expectations of Men and Angels are suspended most happily deceived and in the end infinitely transcended But how have I wandred and delightfully lost my self by drinking in eagerly this Wine of Angels and glorified Saints the Sweetness of this Divine Light and Love I will now pass from this second Distinction to the third for the illustration of the Divine presence in the soul. 3. Distinction God is one with the Soul not formally but transcendently God is not one with the Soul formally as the formal and proper Essence of the Soul or of any created Spirit much less as a Constitutive part of its Essence This would make God and that Spirit essentially one The Essence of that Spirit would reciprocally be the Essence of God That Spirit would be essentially God Is not this the utmost heighth of Ignorance Profaneness Impiety Blasphemy Giant-like Lucifer-like to war with God for the Throne of his Godhead Besides all this evil how great were the loss to every Spirit of Angels and Men Their Sun which makes the eternal Day and Spring were now set in an hopeless Night of Clouds and Confusions All their Loves Hopes and Joys aspiring to an infiniteness above themselves would now all droop and die in their own Bosome The beginning the end of them all is taken away That distinction of things which is the Mother of all Lives Loves Beauties and Pleasures as Unity is the Father of them would now sink into a rude undistinguished Darkness the first and the fountain of all Distinctions being taken away in taking away the Distinction of the Divine Nature from the created form of things How unpleasant were it to the Eye below to be perswaded that there were no Sun besides it self above it self Now the joy in beholding the face of the Sun and of Heaven the taking in of the sweet Light of Heaven and the Sun the charming Delights in the Varieties of Lights and Shades of Colours and Pictures in the Light and the Sun-shine were no more 2. God is transcendently one with the Soul as he is with all things by the transcendency of his Unity and his Infiniteness He comprehendeth all things in one in Himself after a manner altogether incomprehensible As he is the first the Universal Cause the most immediate the most intimate the inseparable the Ideal Cause of all things He is the Unity of every Unity the Being of Beings the Essence of every Essence not formally but transcendently not after a finite but an infinite manner Cusanus saith God is the Sun in the Sun not formally finitely but after a transcendent infinite manner He is so the Sun in the Sun that he is all things with the fulness of the Divine Nature and eternity in that form 4. Distinction God is present with and in the natural form of the Soul as in an earthly and shadowy Image He is present according to his heavenly his eternal form in this shadow as vailed and hidden beneath it As Jesus Christ at his Incarnation so the first man by his Creation was made under the Law the Law the Glory of the created Image improved and heightned The Holy Spirit saith of the Law That it is a shadow of good things to come not the very Image It is commonly said That the Law is the Gospel vailed the Gospel the Law unvailed Jesus Christ as he is the essential Image the brightness of the Glory of God is the first Adam vailed beneath a shadowy Image He is there as the Truth the Original the Root of this shadow bringing it forth bearing it in himself comprehending it He is in it as the Spirit and beautiful form of a Plant in the Seed ready to spring forth through it to transfigure it into the similitude of its own Beauties to fill it so transfigured with its own Divine Life Virtues and Fruits in the proper season St. Paul makes the first man in his pure State and in his Fall a Type or Figure of Him who is to come Jesus Christ Rom. 5. God in the Light of his Glory Jesus Christ according to his heavenly Image hidden in God The Soul according to its Divine Life in the state of Grace are all present vailed in the natural man as in their
19 20 21 22. For the earnest expectation of the Creature waiteth for the manifestation of the Sons of God For the Creature was made subject to vanity not willingly but for him who hath subjected the same in hope Because the Creature it self shall also be delivered from the bondage of Corruption into the glorious liberty of the Children of God For we know that the whole Creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now Observe here that Creature and Creation are both the same word in Greek Where you read the Creature in the 19 20 21. verses you may as well read it the Creation that which you read the whole Creation verse 22. is as properly every Creature There are two Questions which here naturally arise and are absolutely waved by me as having no necessary Connexion with my present purpose Quest. 1. The first Question is this In what sense the Creature or Creation is understood by the holy Apostle Is the whole Creation one entire living sensible Image of the Divine Nature in which every Creature as a part of this Divine Image partakes of the same life according to the Doctrine of Campanella Shall we say with Plato Every thing that is is an Act of Life and so nothing of Being without life Or may it seem agreeable to the Scriptures that all the Creatures stood together at first before the breach made by the Fall in the Unity of the Spirit in Christ the Head of the Creation without whom or apart from whom nothing was made that was made as St. John teacheth us Did every Creature stand now in Union with its proper Angel through its Angel with its proper Idea in Christ the Divine Mind and the Universal Idea Was every Creature thus cloathed with the Angelical Image partaker of the Angelical Life Did it through these receive the Divine Image the Divine Life of its own Idea That the whole Creation might seem a Contexture of Angels filled with Ideal Lights all meeting together in one chief Angel and one Universal Idea which is the Lord Jesus Had every Creature thus a sight and sense of the Divine Design in the Fall was it thus capable of a willingness and an unwillingness in its submission to it as it considered that particular state or the general design with the Divine end of all As it considered it self in this dark part to be acted by it or the eternal Spirit in its universaâ—…â—…ontrivance and the Mark the heighth of Glory to which it directed all Do the Creatures still though bound in Chains of Darkness retain so much of this Angelical Ideal Light and Life as to hope to groan for a return from their Captivity into these Angelical Ideal Forms and so into the glorious liberty of the Sons of God whom St. James saith to be the First-fruits of the Creation Whether this be so or all these terms of Will of Hope of Groans be by a figure attributed to Subjects without life or sense or some other sense be righter than either of these I consider not now as being unconcerned Quest. 2. The second Question is whether the individual Creatures did all pre-exist being together in Paradise before the Fall in their Angelical Spirits and Forms Was among these Mankind with all individual Persons not only in a Representative but a Collective Adam unto whom Adam in his own distinct Person was the Head and the first born Did those thus who now groan under the ruines of the Fall then fore-see it in the Divine Design having an aversion to it in it self yet subjecting themselvns to it for God Are these who now through all Generations groan and travel in pangs for the delivery of the Divine seed in them unto the Birth of a new Glory the same who then had this Divine Seed of a sure Hope sown in them for their return And not for their return only but for their Resurrection unto a sight of the Face of God with a new and fuller Glory shining forth without any shadow or Vail purely and immediately upon them all through them taking them up into it self as a new Super-Coelestial eternal Paradise as far excelling their first Paradise as the Heavens are above the Earth as Eternity transcends Time But these then where have they been since the Fall Were they thrust down to the nethermost parts of the Earth imprisoned in the deep shades of the Earth below and bound there in Chains of Darkness Are they there reserved in the silence and sleep of that Death which came upon all by the Fall until as Seed buried in the ground they according to their several seasons spring up into Corruptible Forms and a wretched Life for a moment upon the stage of this World to act new parts in order to a refining through a Baptism with Christ in the fire of his Sufferings of his Death and the making of all new by this refining in the Glory of his Resurrection Dear Reader these Questions may be thought by some curious and difficult without use fruit or ground in the Word of God To others perhaps they may seem of great moment to open the mystery of God to unvail his Glory in the wonder of his Works which are sought out by all those who love him Some may esteem them of great advantage to enlighten the Daknesses and make easie the Difficulties about Principal Doctrines of the Christian Religion as that fundamental Truth of Original Sin that most sweet and sacred Mystery which is the Antitype to this Type Our justification by Jesus Christ the Return of all to life in the last Adam as all died in the first Others may believe that as God sheds abroad richer Anointings of the Light of his Spirit we shall see lying fair before us greater and stranger things than these which now like fresh colours in a beautiful Object appear not at all for the want of light in the Air in our Spirits As the eternal Sun shineth as the Heavens in the Scriptures and the Spirit shall open themselves they expect to see the Angels of Glory and of God the Divine Glories descending and ascending upon the Son of Man the Person of the Lord Jesus as a mystical Ladder reaching through the whole Creation from the top to the bottom where each rank of Creatures is a step in this Ladder a Divine Glory in the Angelical Form upon the Wings of its proper Angel descending and ascending But I leave these things to the freedome of every Spirit as bringing no weight to my present purpose begging thy pardon Christian Reader for this mention of them as being fairly led to by the present Scripture and willing to take the occasion of diverting thy self and me as I hope not without some spiritual pleasure and profit through the candour of thy Mind I shall take hold of that alone which seems to lie clear in the words of the Text and gives a full confirmation to my Proposition which is this That
or nature Where the sense of deformity is there will also be the fear of infamy and so the shame When Venus and Mars were discovered in Vulcan's Net an immortal laughter arose among all the Gods who were Spectators as we read in Homer When the Soul once in its first Creation cloathed with a Divine Beauty and so placed in the Paradise of a Divine Light and Joy seeth it self despoiled of this heavenly Robe in the nakedness of those deformities of the darkness into which as hidden in the depth of its own nature it sinks when the Divine beams that raised it out of that dark Deep and enriched it with its heavenly Ornaments are retired can it be without a sense of this deformed nakedness without shame without impressions made upon it by the apprehension of that state in which the innumerable company of heavenly Spectators now behold it with a disesteem and aversion suitable to that state Neither is the justness of the aversion and disesteem in all the heavenly Spirits or of the shame in this faln Spirit lessened but rather encreased and heightned by this that the deformity springeth up with an inevitable necessity from its own proper nature for the discovery of that which this faln Soul is in it self together with every Creature and the distinction now manifested between that which is of God as the Fountain in Eden whence alone all Paradisical Beauties and Joys flow in the Creature and that which is of the Creature it self which is in it self a dark horrid and bottomless pit where all wastness woe disorder deformity confusion desolation Deaths and Hells dwell together and whence in swarms they break forth as from a cursed womb like the smoke and the locusts from the bottomless pit in the Revelation the discovery of this in the faln Spirits makes their shame and abhorrency of themselves more just and high as also the Songs of Praise which the heavenly Spirits day and night sing to their Creator and Preserver as more highly just so more highly sweet and glorious Thus much for the shame let us now pass to the guilt Guilt is the obligation of the Sinner to the Justice of God Justice and so most eminently the Divine Justice which is the measure of all Justice is that which giveth to every thing its due that which is proper to it it s own That is due to every thing which is proper and suitable to it according to its place in the whole for the preservation restrauration or perfection of the Order in the whole When a Spirit by the abstraction of the Divine Beauty and Virtue is now sunk into its natural weakness and deformity nothing now is any longer its own nothing now is suitable to it but that power of darkness that principle of waste emptiness of even dreaded and hateful nothings Now the path in which the supream Justice presiding over the Universal Order and Harmony of things acts most pertinently towards it is to abandon it to those powers of darkness which rise up from its own proper Root to display themselves more fully upon it in their ugly and hateful shapes in their tormenting horrors in their horrid torments the dissolutions of the blissful Unity in distracting divisions and confusions the extinguishing of the sweet and beautiful Light in affrightful shades of amazing darkness The chief skill in Pictures consisteth in the evenness and justness of placing the shades that according to the degrees of the declining Light the shades may gradually increase until they sink into the deepest obscurity or be bounded by a new light springing up out of these shades Such is the Law of the Divine Justice which is the great and wise Spirit of the Universal Harmony in this Divine Poem or Picture the work of the Creation as the heavenly form of goodness or beauty in the best and most beautiful season which draws it self from any part of this work Privation the principle and form of all evil spreads its black-wings over it encreasing its hellish shades and darknesses upon it in the bosome of which it hatcheth all the ugly Births of deformity woe and horror with an amazing interminating infiniteness until the sacred Light of the Divine goodness and beauty arising upon it bound those unformed shades reducing all to and binding up all with the Adamantine Chains of a triumphant Harmony in the Glory of God In this third step we have endeavoured to fix the shame and guilt of sin upon the Sinner but glory upon the Divine Justice in the sufferings which come by sin 4. Step. We are in our next step to give an answer for God to those who in their Expostulations ask why he is yet angry The solution of this doubt is obvious and common Anger resteth in the bosome of Fools Fury is not in him who worketh all things according to the counsel of his Will His Wisdom and his Will are both one His Justice and his Power are both one and one with the other two his Wisdom and his Will As he is one pure Act of Omnipotency of Beauty of Love of Joy of all Excellencies at their greatest heighth and in one so is he Wisdom Will Justice Power all in one He is Power as he is a pure Act of Almightiness He is Wisdom as he is a pure Act of highest and most Universal Harmony He is Justice as he is a pure Act of entire and most perfect Order He is Will as he is a pure Act of highest and most diffusive goodness of the richest sweetest and fullest loveliness which are the proper Objects and so perfections of the Will He is Will as he is a pure Act of most heightned and comprehensive Love Joy Complacency which are the most proper and perfect Operations of the Will Fury then is not in him who thus worketh all things according to the counsel of his Will where Justice Power Wisdom and Will meet in one at their purest heights in their greatest freedoms in their most proper and perfect Operations Anger is then attributed to God per Anthropopathiam while by the suiting of the Language to the capacity of the Hearers God is represented to us in the form and in the fashion of a man It is also a metonymical way of speaking which expresseth the effect by the cause So the Scripture speaking with the Tongue of a Man as the Jews express it representeth those effects of the Divine Providence by the names of the anger of God the wrath of God which answer to those effects that commonly proceed from anger and wrath in men Job faith in one place When the scourge falleth alike upon the innocent and the wicked God laugheth at it When wicked men suffer for their sins when innocent persons are refined by their sufferings the Eye of God is fixed upon his own Divine Loveliness and Glory alike in both The purest and most perfect Love acteth him toward this most pure and perfect Loveliness and Glory alike
in both from the meeting and blissful embraces of these two this Love and Loveliness in the Divine Nature his Joy and Complacency is alike in both equally full equally at the heighth A Divine Philosopher with a pleasant and beautiful Allegory teacheth us That the expansion of Light in the heavenly Bodies which is the Act of the Angelical World in this their most beautiful Figure is Risus Coelorum the laughter of the Heavens God maketh every thing beautiful in its proper place and time to kill as to make alive unformed deformed privations as the fairest and most flourishing forms In every Act of Providence in every accident from the beginning to the end of things he equally preserveth and perfecteth the Divine Order and Harmony This golden Harmony extended like the sweet Light of Heaven over all things is as a Divine laughter the complacency of the Divine Nature in its Work in its Image in it self I have yet one thing more to say before I take my other step We learn from Philosophers That heat and cold which continually fight in the Elements below are in the heavenly Bodies but after so eminent a manner that there they meet and enfold each other with a most harmonious agreeableness By the Laws of Divinity we are answerably taught That Anger and Love as all forms of things most discordant in the Creatures are first in the Divine Nature But they are there with an eminency with a transcendency in which they are refined and heightned far above all imperfections Here they all meet as most grateful and most agreeable Varieties in the entire and undivided Unity of the same eternal Light of the same eternal Love of the same eternal God As from this heighth of a most perfect Unity these Divine Varieties bring forth their various effects in shadowy resemblances here below they make the figure of the whole divinely one and divinely beautiful As Divine Seals they likewise impress the figure of their own Divine Unity upon each single effect Thus the whole work in general each single effect in particular is a divinely beautiful figure of the Divine Beauty shining with delightful beams upon those Eyes and Spirits which anointed with a Divine Knowledge see the golden and secret Seal this glorious and sacred impression of the Divine Unity upon it Thus we have spoken of the shame and guilt of Sin as also of Anger and in part of the Justice of God concerning which there remaineth more to be said 5. Step. We have yet before us that great Deep which swalloweth up all Understandings the face of which seemeth covered with a thick and impenitrable darkness Let us pray to the Father of Lights for irradiations from his eye that so this unfathomable Deep may discover it self to us as a blissful Deep of purest clearest and sweetest Glory If God first from the counsel of his own Will alone withdraw those beams which are all our Light and Beauty and we then by the inevitable necessity of our Natures wander as deformed shades in a wild darkness through the Regions of Sin Death and Hell Is not God now in a moral sense clearly and fully the sole Author of Sin and Evil This is the knot which indeed standeth in need of the Rosy Fingers of the heavenly Morning the beams of the eternal Day to unty it How shall we in this place vindicate the Justice and Goodness of God I have here three things to propound 1. Let us impartially and ingeniously consider whether the freedome of the VVill to determine it self absolutely in all its Acts reflect a greater Glory upon the Justice and Goodness of God than the VVill predetermined in its Essence in its superior Causes in the first and universal Cause That we may make a clearer judgment in this case let us compare these two different states of the VVill together with several Antecedents and Consequencies by placing them both in our view one by another as plainly within as narrow a compass as we can Let us set that Free-will in our eye after this manner God brings forth an Intellectual Spirit with a Divine Light of Truth in its heavenly Beauties shining upon its Understanding with a Divine Love of the true Good with all its heavenly Sweetnesses springing in its VVill. He now sets down the will of this Spirit upon such a ground of indifferency and absoluteness in it self that being undetermined into any forms of good or evil the most heavenly or the most hellish it is equally free for it in the face of all this blessed Light shining in the Understanding in the midst of all the heavenly sweetnesses flowing from the bosome of the true Good through the VVill it self to cast it self forth from the bosome of the eternal Good Appearing thus in its own naked and Divine Form and to cast it self into the embraces of the foulest evil the fountain of all evil presenting it self as evil in its own most direful and haggish shapes A great part of Intellectual Spirits far the greatest part of humane Spirits placed by the Divine Providence in this state refuse the good choose the evil so render themselves obnoxious to the Divine Justice and become by the pursuits and inflictions of that Avenger the lost Subjects of all horror and woes without end Let us now in the like manner cast our eye upon the Will predetermined in its Causes God brings forth an Intellectual Spirit compounded Ex aliquo Dei ex aliquo sui With something of God something of its own That of God in it is all the good of it the clear Face of the eternal Truth shining in its Understanding as in a Christal Mirror the sweet flame of pure Goodness and as pure a love to this Goodness burning in its VVill as upon the golden Altar in the Temple of God the beams of this Beauty and the flames of this Love unitedly spreading varying and forming themselves through the whole Person and Life of this Spirit into all Divine Virtues and Joys by which it becomes as God himself descended into a God-like Image of God himself This is that of God in the Creature That which is ofits own in this Intellectual Spirit is beneath all this heavenly beauty and goodness a deflectibility inseparable from the nature of the Creature bound up only by the heavenly charms of this Divinity resting upon the Person of this Spirit God in the depth of a design perhaps too blessed and too glorious to be penetrated and fathomed by us as the eternal Sun ascends up on high going away from this Spirit and carrying away with him his whole train of immortal beams with a Divine Light Heat and Virtue Now like a mournful and hated darkness from below the natural defectibility of this Spirit covers the whole face of it making it like Hell it self the seat of all evils both of Sin and Suffering which lie eternally upon innumerable multitudes Let us now consider the two-fold Law or
of Free-will casts upon the Glories of God in these other Attributes it doth not at all excel the other Opinion in clearing the Glory and Justice of the Divine Goodness But while as with triumphant flourishes by Rhetorical Reproaches it insulteth upon the other Opinion as equalling God in savage cruelness to the most arbitrary Tyrants to the most inhumane and ferine Man-eaters It leaveth God equally exposed to the same Reproaches and it self to the imputations of the same Blasphemies I have now finished the first thing which I had to propound in answer to that Argument against the predetermination of the Will which is taken from the goodness and justice of God 2. The second thing which I have to propound is this the holy Scripture in many places seems plainly to assert the Divine Conduct with a potent and irresistable efficacy in this dark part of things the evil as also the Glory of the Divine Justice and Goodness in this conduct equal with that in the good I will instance in three Scriptures only 1. My first instance is that of Solomon Eccles. 3. There is a season for every thing and a time for every purpose A time to be born and a time to die A time to kill and a time to heal A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embraces A time to destroy and a time to preserve A time to love and a time to hate from the first to the ninth verse He that is God hath made every thing good in his time verse 11 I know that all which God hath done this shall be for ever I shall draw forth this Scripture into a few brief Maxims which seem to arise naturally and clearly out of it 1. There is all Variety in the Unity of the Divine work a Variety extending it self to the remotest the highest Contrarieties Affirmative or Negative to the most distant perfections and privations So the holy Spirit speaketh expresly in the general every thing every purpose all that can fall within the conception or comprehension of the vastest and most incomprehensible Spirit hath its season and time So the holy Spirit speaketh in particular love and hatred war and peace embracing and abstaining from embracing life and death destruction and salvation have their time and season Do not these particular instances expresly define the highest Contrariety Affirmative or Negative of good and evil in their greatest Latitude and most universal Nature 2. God makes all this Variety and Contrariety and that in the lowest Region also even under the Sun where it appears in a dark tempestuous scene of the greatest disorder and confusion There is a time saith Solomon for all and a season for every purpose The word Season signifieth a set measured time like the times in Musick the time or season of each thing is its duration Duration is the mode or measure of the Essence and so really the same with the Essence the Essence measured and bounded As Essences and Habits so also have privations their measure and bounds as Rests and Stops have time in Musick Every Essence is the Birth of an Understanding of which it beareth the impression and Seal It is the work of an Understanding alone to give measure and bounds to things That then which setteth the time for all Varieties and Contrarieties Perfections and Privations which consequently maketh and formeth them can be no other than the Divine Understanding God in his essential and eternal Word which alone is above and before all things So we read here concerning all these Contrarieties That God hath made them beautiful 〈◊〉 their time God then hath made them God maketh all Contrarieties Affirmative and Negative Perfections and Privations but after a contrary manner He maketh Perfections as the Sun maketh light in the Air after an Affirmative manner by a positive presence power and influence He maketh privations as the Sun maketh darkness and night after a Negative manner by his absence by a drawing in his power and binding up his sweet influence But this negation also and so the privations which flow from it are called here by Solomon the Master of all Wisdom Humane and Divine Purposes There is a season saith he for every purpose then he instances in the Contrarieties following Privations then are Divine purposes that is Designs Contrivances Divine Forms designed contrived and measured in the Divine Mind Upon this ground some Philosophers teach us That God is a transcendent Good above all Beings who comprehends Originally in himself not only all Beings but all privation of Being which themselves also as darkness night absence and death in their place and time are Forms of good although not Forms of Being and Divine Forms Forms in Divinity although not natural Forms nor Forms in natural Philosophy But now I am passing to my third Conclusion Thirdly God maketh all things the Varieties and Contrarieties beautiful in their time They are the express words of Solomon from the heighth of all created Wisdom in its single state They are the words of the Uncreated Wisdom it self speaking by Solomon God hath made all beautiful in his time verse 11. This is manifestly spoken with respect to the general All in the first verse and the particular All 's of the highest Contrarieties of the most distant privations enumerated in the following verses the time of each Being respecteth its relation to the whole Beauty is an Harmony and consisteth in the suitableness or conveniency of the several parts with each other and with the whole Suitableness is a similitude similitude is an Unity in Variety an Unity of Form in distinct Subjects as the same sweetness and colour in several Flowers The same beautiful light of knowledge the same pure and lovely sweetness of Spirit which makes a Divine Friendship the highest suitableness and similitude Philosophy teaches us That the first Good and the first Unity are the most proper Names of the most high God having both the same sense and force It teaches us also That the first Beauty is an effulgency from the first Good the first Good or the first Unity shining out into a distinct Image of it self which is the first Distinction or Variety and so the supream the most ample Variety All Beauty then in its kind and degree is an Unity diffusing it self and shining forth into a Variety where from the whole and from each part it reflecteth it self upon it self with all its united Vertues Proportions and Sweetnesses meeting every where in each point Upon this ground we are taught That the first Understanding is the first Beauty and that every Beauty is the Birth and Object of that Understanding alone at least in some impressions or foot-steps of it For Beauty being the meeting of many parts or proportions in one undivided Point or an Unity in Variety can neither be nor be discerned where there is not a spiritual Form or Substance which is it self an undivided Unity Then doth the Beauty spring with
duality unfoldeth it self into the Ternary number As in the blessed Trinity the Father shines forth in the Person of the Son his Beauty and beautiful Object Both these breathe forth themselves into the Spirit the mutual Love the Marriage-Bed of these two When thus the Varieties and Distinctions of things proceed by even and just degrees springing up naturally and immediately out of the bosom of each other as they lie naturally and nakedly in the bosom of each other according to their Divine Love-sport and play in the Palace of their Father the supream Unity now the Unity shines and triumphs with a full Joy and Glory in the Face of the whole and of each part Now it flies singing and sporting it self upon the golden wings of a most ravishing Harmony over all According to these two Rules I shall proceed in my Answer upon which it rests as upon its two Pillars Jakin and Boaz Establishment and Strength God is the God of Order saith St. Paul Order is the sacred Harmony of the Divine Nature the Divine Nature the Divine Beauty the Divine Musick all in one first in their Architype then figuring themselves upon the whole Work of God sweetly flowing through it all shining smiling and playing every where upon the face of it This Order with a Divine skill by just degrees and harmonious proportions slides into its contrary which is disorder by which it sets off and heightens it self making the Variety more full The first the highest disorder the fountain of all disorder is Sin This is the disorder of Intellectual Spirits the chief of all the Works of God the Head the Guide the measure of all the rest All the other Creatures are to these as light cast forth from the body of the Sun which is the Sun's shadow or as shadows in this life the shadows of this shadow St. Jude expresseth the Sin of Angels by their disorder The Angels which kept not their first state but left their own Habitation State is in Greek Principle they kept not their first Principle the supream Unity They held not the Head as St. Paul expresseth it They left their proper Habitation the Divine Image the Divine Order and Harmony their proper place in that Harmony where they were divinely-beautiful and made an heavenly melody in the heavenly Consort and Quire The Psalmist saith of man and his sin Man being in honour continued not but became like the Beast that perisheth Honour is the delicate gloss or sparkling lustre of a true Beauty especially the beauty of Spirits delightfully shining forth and reflecting it self upon all Spirits round about it The Divine Order and Harmony alone is the true beauty every where This is immortal Thus man by sin breaks himself off from and so becomes like the Beast without any sense of or sensible subordination to the Order and Harmony of the whole While he cuts himself off from this he dies his disorder is his death the true life of man vanishing together with the Universal and Divine Harmony Every contrary supposeth or constituteth its Correlate contrary the contrary to disorder is order That then which the Scripture speaking with the tongue of a man gives the name of Displeasure Anger Wrath in God is no other than love it self in its naked and golden smiles the Divine Beauty in the purity and simplicity of its most native and unchangeable sweetness the Harmony of the Divine Nature as a Glory eternal calm and Sun-shine opposing themselves to the discord deformity enmity of Sin As they say ill natures are tormented by Musick as the evil Spirit in Saul was cast out by David's Harp So is anger in God the most delicious the most transporting melody sounding through the whole nature of things from Jesus Christ the Universal Image of the Divine Nature and the golden Harp of God which either charms the Spirit of disorder or torments it Contrariorum remedium est contrarium One contrariety is the cure and remedy of another Disorder is reduced into order by the Divine Harmony setting it self in an opposition and contrariety to it While the opposition between these contraries remains they heighten one another This state of opposition is in the Divine Poem or Work as the scene of storms and tempests of Blood Confusion of the blackness of Darkness of Death and Hell This scene coming in as a part of the Variety sets off with a greater heightning even to an extasy of wonder and delight the Sweetnesses the Beauties the Glories of the Divine Harmony surrounding it springing up shining forth with a golden calm and lustre in the midst of it St. Paul divinely represents this to us Rom. 5. ult The Law came in that Sin might abound that where Sin abounded Grace did superabound That as Sin had reigned unto Death so Grace might reign through Righteousness unto eternal Life by Jesus Christ our Lord. The Law which is the contrariety or opposition between the Harmony of Divine Love and the disorder the confusion of Lust 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 came in by the by or by the way in the course or stream of the heavenly Harmony of the general and grand contrivance of Divine Love to set it off and heighten it to raise and transcend all expectations to extend and surprise all Understandings to make the melody of the whole more full by the Variety and more gloriously triumphant by the Discords The evils of Sufferings according to the Law of the Divine Harmony which is the Image of the Divine Wisdom the first Beauty of Truth the Image of the Divine Will the first love and goodness in the Creature have their entrance three ways 1. Every Principle unfolds it self into all the powers and forms contained in it so the evil of Sin which is the root of Disorder springeth up into all manner of disorders through Spirit Soul and Body into all manner of evils of blame shame pain sorrow torment Lust when it conceiveth bringeth forth Sin Sin when it is perfect bringeth forth death All Disorders all Evils all Sufferings are steps and forms of death 2. The disorder of Sin as it is the contrariety in the Harmony is reduced into order and made harmonious in the whole by the opposition and contrariety of the Harmony as in Musick the setting the Concord by the Discord makes the Melody Now as the Harmony is all good of Grace Joy and Glory every good in every kind being a particular Harmony in the universal Harmony so where the Universal Order the Spirit of Order which is the Spirit of Christ and God setteth it self in a Contrariety to any disorderly Spirit there all good of every kind is withdrawn all evil as of loss so of pain ariseth God saith in Deuteronomy If you walk contrary unto me I also will walk contrary unto you Then all Plagues are reckoned up the natural consequencies of this Contrariety Then saith he several times over If you go on to walk contrary to me
eternal life sown in it 4. The Law is an heightning to the sweetness and beauty of Christ. The Law came in that sin might abound That where sin had abounded Grace might super abound The Law is a three-fold heightning to the sweetness and beauty of Christ in the Gospel 1. The Law heightens the Glory of Christ by an Antiperistasis As in hard Frosts the Lights of Heaven shine brightest and look with sweetest Glories upon us As in the coldest season the Fire burns brightest and refeshes our Spirits with the liveliest warmth and heat So Darkness Death and Wrath in the Ministry of the Law by their opposition being carried to the greatest extremity excite and stir up the Godhead to pour forth it self from all its richest and unconfined Depths in the most full the overflowing Seas of all his sweetest richest most exalted Loves and Glories 2. The Law heightens the sweetness and beauty of Christ by being a soil to it There is more joy in Heaven over one Sinner that repenteth than over ten righteous persons continuing in their Righteousness The Father of the Prodigal in the Parable giveth this reason for the excess of Joy the unwonted Triumphs with all the heightnings of Feasts and of Musick This our Son which was lost is found which was dead is alive The Violets and Roses of the Spring are the sweeter and more beautiful for the Winter going before them How sweet and amiable is the light of life arising upon those who sit in darkness and under the shadow of death As a foil beneath a Diamond so do the darknesses and deformities of Sin the hateful stains and insupportable guilt of Sin the terrors the horrors the torments of Death and the Divine Wrath under the Law make the freedom and fulness of the Divine Grace the Righteousness the Life and Glory of God in the Person of the Lord Jesus appearing to a lost forelorn Soul in the midst of these black shades unvaluably precious infinitely amiable pleasant far surpassing all the sweetness and beauties of the loveliest Morning all the Lights and Glories of the purest Sun arising out of the darknesses of the most melancholy and tempestuous night 3. The Law heightens the brightness and delightfulness of Christ in the Day of the Gospel as fewel to that heavenly and blessed flame of Divine Love As Sin hath reigned unto Death saith St. Paul so Grace reigns through Righteousness unto eternal Life by Jesus Christ our Lord. Sin exalted its black and fiery Throne by subduing to it self the first man in all his Primitive powers and purities The first Paradise with its sweet peace and pleasantness the first Creation in the whole Compass of its Divine Glories sprung forth from and resembling the Divine World in eternity How great and deep is that darkness bottomless as Hell it self How bitter is that death as the poyson of Asps as the poyson of the old Serpent the Dragon himself which hath extinguished the light of so much Beauty which hath corrupted so much Sweetness which hath devoured and swallowed up into the black and bottomless Abyss of a first and second death an unsearchable depth of confusion and woe such a world of so Divine Sweetnesses and Beauties with all their amiable light and life But now what Tongue can express what Heart can conceive the unmeasurable heightnings of that Divine Grace and Love the unparalleled unbounded Beauties and Glories of that Righteousness the infinite purities pleasures powers perpetuities of that life the inestimable incomprehensible Sweetnesses Beauties Virtues and force of that Person our Jesus in whom all these united who by all these uniteth in his own Person reigneth over these devouring Powers of darkness and death subduing them all unto himself and carrying this whole captivity captive into the Kingdom of Light and Love unto which he himself returneth as he ascends The fire at once encreaseth its own force and flame by the great quantity of fewel on which it feeds and converts the dead fewel into one glorious spreading ascending flame with it self Shadows seen alone have little grace in them but skilfully mixt with the bright colours in a Picture and presenting themselves to the eye in one view together with them encrease the beauty of the Picture are themselves a sweet part of the Beauty and a rich Variety in it Discordant touches upon a Lute offend the Ear but in a Lesson of Musick they are themselves harmonious and enrich the Harmony of the whole Lesson Thus the first Adam who was only an earthly Image a shadowy similitude of the Divinity and made under the Law the Fall the whole reign of sin unto death by the Ministry of the Law with all its Clouds and Storms of shame terror and torment are in themselves a melancholy Image filling us with the afflicting Forms of deformity confusion desolation and woe But when these in the Gospel become fewel to that pure potent and pleasant fire of the Divine Love the eternal Spirit the Spirit of Grace and Glory now they enlarge and heighten this beautiful and blessed flame now themselves are become spiritual immortal flames of highest sweetness and beauty in this Divine flame Now these discordant notes these dark lines and stroaks in the Evangelical melody of the eternal Word in the unvailed Face of the heavenly Bridegroom the Lord Jesus in the Musick of the eternal Love in the beauty of the Righteousness the unvailed Glory of the Godhead in the Person of Christ become themselves most rich heightnings most pleasant and beautiful parts most dear and delightful Varieties in the eternal Melody and unfading Beauty of the Divine Loveliness and Love I have now finished my Reply to this Reason for Free-will in man taken from the Language of the Scripture In which Reply I have endeavoured to set before you in their clear distinctions the difference between the vail of the Letter and the mystery of the Spirit hid beneath this Vail I shall now conclude this Discourse by offering humbly to you three Rules for the right understanding of those expressions in the Scripture which are most of all pressed and pressing in this Point 1. God planteth and establisheth man upon natural Principles of rectitude in the Divine Image he leaveth him to the force and to the trial of these Principles he ministreth to him outwardly inwardly all moral assistances for the strengthning actuating and heightning of these Principles to their utmost perfections Thus God who properly hath no Will nor any thing common to the Creature or proportionable to the Creature But as a Will with other faculties and forms proper to the Creature are given to him by a fit figure and according to the manner of the Creature saith of himself I will not the death of a Sinner but rather that he return and live 2. When God appeareth unvailed in the Face of Christ who is the brightness of his Glory Righteousness Love Life Immortality Joy and Glory attend upon and
which composeth the Harmony and is the Soul of Harmony Variety it self being a singular name is an Unity Things absolutely divided and separate one from another make not a Variety This ariseth from the Unity in which they agree in which they are bound up together like Flowers in a Posie and presented in one Form in one view to the eye or to the mind A part of the Variety then which by its independancy upon the whole breaketh the Unity dividing it self from it destroyeth both the end and the essence it self of the Variety which are the Harmony and the Unity 3. Nature is the Law of Being Variety is Being varied Is not this a contradiction in the terms that the Law of Being that Being varied should call for as its Perfection a Being independant upon Being it self the first the universal Being that is should call for a Non-ens a not Being Such doth that VVill seem clearly to be in its essence motions and actions which in these in any moment and point of these in any circumstance is absolute in it self independant upon the first and Universal Cause the Fountain of Being Being thus cast into the bosom of the Divine Variety in which Nature and Grace the Fall and the Exaltation of things things visible and invisible of the Creature and the Creator lie and spring together as in their Garden-Bed Here with this Variety we will close our Discourse and in this Bosom take up our rest Jesus Christ in his Discourse to Nicodemus representeth the spiritual Birth by this similitude Joh. 3. 8. The wind bloweth where it listeth and thou hearest the sound thereof but thou knowest not whence it cometh nor whither it goeth so is every one that is born of the Spirit St. John saith 1 Epist. 2. Chap. 10. vers He that hateth his Brother is in darkness and walks in darkness and knows not whither he goes O that all the Lord's people O that all Mankind were enlightned with the heavenly brightness and splendor of the Divine Love anointing their Spirits with the heavenly perfume of the same love to their Brethren that is to every other Person or Spirit as St. Paul explains it Rom. 13. 8. He that loves another fulfils the Law That which the other Scriptures call a Neighbour a Brother is here Another every other person This Love would be an anointing of light upon the eyes of our mind giving us a clear and sweet prospect round about us in which we should not only hear a sound or a voice but see whence we came whither we go where we are the truth of all this and the way By the practice of this Divine Command To love one another we should as by a shining hand from Heaven dropping Mirth upon our Spirits be lead to the reason and the root of this Love which is the Divine Variety now mentioned the Jerusalem above the Mother of us all free and unconfined This is to love another according to the heavenly Command and to love another as my Neighbour my Brother to love every other person and thing as a fellow Branch with me in this Variety But if we will see the sweet and glorious Light of this heavenly Love we must not take the Variety alone but joyn to it the Unity and the Union of both these which are integral essential and primary parts of the Variety which are every way equal to the Variety and distinctly essentially comprehend it in themselves Thrice happy is that Spirit which by the Initiations Sanctisications and Anointings of the eternal Spirit hath been admitted to this Sacred and Supream Mystery To behold this Trinity the Variety in its first highest and unbounded form The Unity most absolute entire and undivided The Union of both these every way mutual and perfect O what Joys what Glories how pure how high how universal filling all in all transcending all things and thoughts open themselves to this Spirit who now sees himself a Variety of the same joy and glory in these joys and glories who now sees himself one eternal Joy and Glory with all these Joys and Glories in their Divine Unity What an eternal Marriage-day doth this Spirit now enjoy while at once by the bond of this Divine Union it seeth it self a distinct beauty and blessedness in the midst of all these innumerable glories equally distinct from him and one from another with the first the highest the most full distinction which is the perfection the compleatness the life of the Variety and yet in the same Scene in the same appearance and person one with them all as they all are one in the first and highest Unity This Spirit now seeth those Divine beauties and truths shining upon it with a most ravishing amiableness which we have toucht in our former discourse as the Divine ground on which the determination of the Will is built from which spring up those great and Sacred mysteries of the Gospel and the Law together with all the several Seeds or Forms of Light and Darkness Life and Death Nature Sin Grace and Glory comprehended in them The Seed of God which is the Seed of the Divine Unity and by St. Paul called one Spirit 1 Cor. 6. Hath been first before the world was in the Bosom of the Father in the Arms of Christ. So saith Jesus to his Father Thine they were and thou gavest them me This Divine Seed is brought down into a shadowy Image as a sleep and a dream in a sleep It still descends lower by the Fall not only to the remotest distance from the Purity Pleasantness and Glory of its Original but to the greatest estrangedness from it and opposition to it as a tragical dream of some excellent Person or Prince in a troubled sleep God several times mentioneth it with several senses and applications as a Sacred and Divine mystery That he calleth his Son out of Egypt It is his own Seed his own Son which first descended into Egypt the House of Bondage a Land of darkness and of Devils where almost every Creature was an Idol-god and so a Devil By an heavenly and Divine Call as by the returning of the Sun in the Spring to the Plants This Seed of Glory and Eternity sown and sunk so low by degrees comes up and returns again through all the beautiful the various the encreasing Forms of Light and Love springing up out of Darkness and Wrath. So at length it arriveth at its first habitation of Glory and Delights in the Arms of Christ in the Bosom of the Father It now flourisheth in the prime in the full blown Beauties and Joys of that life which it had at first which it ever hath had hidden with Christ in God the Life of eternity Thus is the Variety compleat thus is the whole Variety fully displayed in the heavenly Seed being carried along through all distinctions diversities contrarieties of forms and states of Good and of Evil. Thus is the Seed it self preserved pure through
Contexture of Beams living in and springing immediately freshly every moment from this entire Person which is all one most clear and lively Face of the most compleat and Original Beauty The Divine Person is not hid but shown by this Garment Mi Jesu pelluces Our Jesus shines all clearly thorow it far more clearly than a beautiful Person swimming all naked in a clear stream or the richest Diamond in a Case of purest Christal The Person here the Divine Sun is at once the eminent Head of all the Beams shining above them the vigorous Root of all the Beams springing up in them the pleasant and glorious flower flourishing forth from the end of every Beam the full Glory filling with it self each part of the Beam and every where in every Beam presenting it self entirely to every eye All the Beams in One are one entire Image of this Sun Every distinct Beam a distinct Birth and Figure of a distinct Ideal Light and Glory in this Sun Yet is the Sun in that full compass of all its Glories seen by every eye in every Beam For so is this Divine Sun the essential Idea of the Godhead the same one undivided entire full in all the Ideas in all the Original Forms and Patterns of each Creature The Beams here are Daughters Sisters and Brides to the Sun They flow forth immediately from it They stand upon the same root of the Divine Nature and Personality God is the only Person in this Jesus Both are cloathed with the same Image Both by mutual embraces lie in the bosoms of each other wrapt up together in the same Joys and Glories Yet are the Beams and created Beauties in this Mediatory Image not only distinct as the Ideas in the Godhead where the most perfect Distinction is married to the most absolute Unity with a most exact equality But all the Forms of created Glory here have besides a distinction from their Sun the Divine Glory and from each other a diversity also an inequality a subordination in an hypostatical or personal Unity But I now anticipate my self This will have a more proper place in the following Character of our Jesus in his Mediatory Kingdom 4. Christ here in his created Nature is a Spirit a great and universal Spirit comprehending the whole Creation eminently in himself before it have a subsistence in it self The whole Creation is here in greater majesty in greater clearness and glory than in it self when it is freshest and fairest It is the very Iustre and effulgency of the Godhead it self all transparent the Divine Essence at once shining thorow it filling it cloathing and comprehending it as a Temple founded upon it self framed by it self of its own most immediate Light and clearest brightness The King's Daughter is said to be all glorious within and her Garments of wrought Gold Psal. 45. The first Marriage is that of the most High and holy Trinity to which eternity it self is the Marriage-day celebrated with Joys and Glories transcending all measures or bounds The Father and the Son are here mutually the Bridegroom and the Bride while both are in both the Father in the Son the Son in the Father the Love-Spring in its lovely and beautiful Image the Lovely-Image the first and highest Beauty in its Love-spring the first the sweetest the fruitfullest Love and Fountain of Loves The Holy Spirit the conspiration of both these in One is their Marriage-band and Marriage-bed where they preserve entire their Unity and their Distinction in a most blissful Union to make their Loves and Joys more full From this Marriage-bed doth flow the God-like Race of Divine Ideas surmounting all numbers and natures of things The second Marriage is in this Middle-Glory between the Uncreated and created Beauty joyned together in one Divine eternal Person and Spirit The Divine Nature is here the King and the Bridegroom this created Spirit is the Kings Daughter his Queen and his Bride This Queen is described to be all glorious within and to have her Garment of wrought Gold The Hebrew word within signifieth properly in her Person in her naked Face which are within all her Garments and Vails Her God her Bridegroom Jesus in his essential Image her eternal Idea is her Person her Face her internal Form Thus is she all glorious within For the Lamb himself her Bridegroom is her Glory The Glory of the Lord himself in his eternal Splendors enlightneth all within This Queens Garment is all of wrought Gold The word Wrought signifieth properly a work of Eyes set all over the Garment So Dr. Hammond expoundeth it Her Garment was all over set with round Oes like so many Eyes or Suns wrought in Gold The created form of this Spirit being the pure lustre of the eternal Sun the Divine Essence is the Queen's Garment The numberless Ideas of the Divine Nature in each of which the Godhead it self is entire in its Sacred Unity comprehending all its Ideas or Variety in a Variety entirely thorowout infinitely fresh and new form in this Garment secondary Ideas their own most immediate fairest and fullest Effulgencies or Life-Pictures In every one of these is this Queen also according to the Original Patterns in her Father King and Bridegroom compleat with all the full Glories of her Person and equally distinct in a new Variety of all her Glories as a new Queen a new Person a distinct Spirit These are the Divine Suns and Eyes in the Garment of this Queen in which the eternal Eyes and Suns shining in the Divine Essence look forth as thorow Casements of pure living and immortal Christal Each Form each distinction of every kind in the Creation here below is such an eye such a Sun wrought in Gold such a Spirit of incorruptible Glory such a Bride and Queen to the eternal King Every one in particular is a spiritual and heavenly Member all together make up the spiritual and heavenly Body of our Jesus in this Personal Kingdom of his where he in his own Person is a Kingdom to himself containing the Creator with the Creation in all their Amplitudes and Varieties married together into one Person Spirit and Glory which is to it self Bride-groom Bride Ofspring and All. See if this be not that heavenly Hierusalem the Hierusalem above which is indeed free in the spacious embraces and unlimited Amplitudes of the Godhead which at the same time is by the inviolable sweetness of a sweetly-invincible necessity the eternal Law of supream Love confined to these embraces in which she becometh the glorious Virgin-Mother of us all Is not this the Hierusalem whose heavenly transparencies whose Divine lustre whose unstain'd incorruptible Beauties and Virtues are figured by Gold Pearls precious Stones and Glass Glass of Christal Is not this that Bride of the Lamb which cometh down from God out of the Heaven of the essential Image of the Godhead as out of the Bosom of her Father and Bridegroom with this Character in which the perfection of Beauty and
darkest disguise upon the eternal Love the eternal Meekness and Gentleness the Lamb our Jesus In this state of Contrariety Sin and Death have their entrance Our Jesus the Lamb eternal Love is here slain and crucified by the Sin of the Creature In this death of his the whole Creation dies Here this Lamb the Divine Love in the region of Death in the midst of the Powers of Darkness and Death becomes a Sacrifice for every Creature By dying for sin as he dies by sin he makes an end of sin and death he takes away the subject the ground of Sin and Death the mutability of the Creature the shadowyness of the shadowy Image in its dissolution and restauration He at once scattereth the fearful dream and awakens it out of its sleep that it may dream no more but see the light of Life Divine Poets which with most inspired and acquired skill raise refine and delight the best Minds by awakning in them the richest the liveliest Images of the Divine Work and the Divine Mind place the greatest the sweetest life and heightning of their Figures in the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 and the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the knot and the untying of the knot This part in the Divine Design and Work is both these the knot and the untying of the knot The Law lets in Sin Sin brings in Death the shadowy Image is the Root and Seat of all these The death of Jesus Christ makes an end of Sin swallows up Death into Victory dissolves the shadowy Image sows it again by its dissolution in the Bosom of the Divine Love as they lie down together in its grave Here it springs up again immediately into a Child of Light in the Image of Light the heavenly Image In this Light it springs up an Immortal Bride in the Arms of its Bridegroom the eternal Love Thus the Grave of Love is changed into a Bridal Bed O that I had the anointing of Bezaleel and Aholiab upon me to draw the Divine Model of the Tabernacle of God in this part of the heavenly Image the Contrariety the Scene of Wraht We should see without Badgers skins sullied parched with dust sand and Sun We should see it in the midst of a desolate Wilderness round about it a Land of Graves and fiery Serpents But all this while within shine flourish and flow all the precious the pleasant things of the whole Creation and in the Bosom of these as Divine Figures unfold themselves all the blissful and glorious mysteries of the eternal Beauties and Sweetnesses of the Divinity unvailed Within are the richest materials colours works In the midst of all as the Center the Spring of all is God himself upon the golden Mercy Seat the Thrones of Grace and Love within the golden Wings which the Cherubims of Glory spread round about it to make a Pavilion for it Thus true is it that the Law is the Gospel eternal Love vailed the Gospel eternal Love and Beauty shine forth with naked Faces in the Law it self when the Vail is taken off But let us trace more exactly the steps of Divine Love which all drop Myrrh incorruptible Sweetnesses as he passeth thorow the Divine Mazes the curious Windings of this Divine Labyrinth To this end we will consider this state of Contrariety or of Wrath in its several Causes efficient material formal final St. Paul lays a clear and rich ground for us when he treats of this Subject His words are these What if God willing to declare the Power of his wrath Having such an Idea of the Divine Goodness of God that he is the supream Love the supream Unity the supream Good which are all divers words expressing one thing Where I meet with the darkest the dreadfulest appearance in his Births his Works I find my Spirit excited to seek the sweetest and delicatest Roses among these Thorns a Face filled with the richest smiles beneath these Vails the Divinest Wealth Skill and Figures in the Vails themselves as in that before the Holy of Holies Those Scriptures on such occasions sound with an heavenly Melody in mine Ears awakning and calling forth my Spirit to the expectation of some divinely-beautiful transporting and transforming sight He putteth the greatest comeliness upon the most uncomely parts It is the Glory of God to hide the Matter the Word the eternal Word or Wisdom the Divine Beauty and Love But it is the Glory of a King of the Royal Priesthood the Kingly and Priestly Mind to find it out to enter within the Vail to draw aside the Vail and discover the Glory These words What if God willing to declare the Power of his Wrath present to us this whole state of Wrath as it comprehends the Law Sin and Death in its three-fold Cause Efficient Exemplar Final The Idea of Wrath in the Divine Mind is a Variety in the gloriouslyample and delightfully-vast Variety of the supream Unity the eternal Love This Ideal Wrath in the Idea of the Godhead the Person of Christ as he is the essential Image of the Father in the Bosom of the Father is a beautiful and blissful Variety in the Beauty and most high blisses of the Godhead It is a Love-part in the triumphantly-joyous and glorious Variety of the eternal Love This Sun-like Idea in the supream and eternal Sun of the Divine Essence is the efficient the exemplar and final Cause of this Contrariety this wrathful state This is its first it s most universal most intimate efficient This its Original exactest Pattern This its Principal its Ultimate End Eternal Love it self in this Idea is the Divine Framer the Divine Actor the Divine Close of the whole Scene of this Wrath-part in the Love-play Here it begins here is its way here it ends in its Divine Ideâ—… in the Bosom in the Face in the midst of the Varieties the Beauties the Blisses of eternal Love Without this part in the Variety they were all imperfect Love it self without this Lovespot this beautiful and delightful Wound would have an eternal Cloud and Wound upon it A great Philosopher teacheth us That Power is an Unity containing manifold Forms in it self which it shoots up and sends forth from it self according to the Law of its own proper Harmony Every Idea in the eternal Mind is a Divine Unity The Ideal Wrath there is an Unity comprehending in Divine Images all the Forms all the Varieties of this Love-part the Divine Wrath in it self This is the eternal Reason of the whole Ministery of the Law and of Wrath in the Creation the displaying of this part of the Divine Variety by Divine Figures in its proper place in the Divine Work Thus God shows the Power of his Wrath. He seals the Creature with this Idea with the impression of the Divine and eternal Glory in this Divine Idea also According to the Language of St. Paul Now Grace Divine Love overflows us in all Wisdom and Prudence Jesus that essential compleat Idea of the Godhead
a Divine Satisfaction a Divine Atonement The Wrath and the Contrariety now ceaseth being reconciled and charmed by these Divine Harmonies into the Unity of eternal Love Thus is the Cross of our Lord Jesus the utmost bound of things In this Cross the Divine Design is finished the Mystery is finished the Vail is rent all things in Heaven and on Earth are reconciled and gathered up into One tuned to a Divine and Universal Harmony which is the Musick of Eternity Now is that Song sung O Death where is thy sting O Grave where is thy Victory The sting of Death is Sin and the strength of Sin is the Law but thanks be to God who giveth us the Victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ on his Cross hath swallowed up the Law Sin and Death in the Victory of the Divine Love the Divine Purities the Beauties of Holiness and eternal Life Eternal Life eternal Love that is our Jesus now cries with a triumphant shout O Death I will be thy Plague and Death This is the Day of the manifestation of the Righteous Judgments of God Now in the close and end of all the Divine Design through all the parts and passages of it clearly opens and unfolds it self Now it appears unto all Eyes and Hearts to be all throughout in every point of it divinely-beautiful and pleasant transcending the Understanding the Affections the Expectations the Desires the most unbounded Imagination of all Men or Angels proportioned only to a God and that God which is so Light that there is no darkness in him So Love that there is no Fury in him Now is that found clearly compleatly true All his ways are ways of peace and all his paths are pleasantness This is our God and we will praise him our Fathers God and we will exalt him This is our Jesus whom our Soul loves we will rejoyce in him and wait for him Pardon me courteous Reader if I seem something longer in this tract of my Discourse describing that most beautiful and Divine Harmony with which all things lie together most delightfully in this shining Seat of all Truth and enflaming Object of all Love the dear and adored Form and Person of our great Mediator This is the Eye the Heart of my design and work If the entire and naked Face of Divine Truth were rightly drawn and set before us in any degree answerable to the Life in this heavenly Image how powerfully would it attract all Understandings into its embraces how pleasantly would it subdue them to it self far beyond the force of all Disputes and Syllogisms which gather up only small divided and dead parts of this Divine Form like Ae as collecting the scattered members of his Son Absertus thrown up and down at diverse distances by his bloody Sister Medea to retard his way Or like the Philosophers in Boetius which take hold of the Garment only of Divine Truth and tear that into deformed shreds of which they possess themselves and in which they glory If I could entirely conceive that of which I seem to my self to have some little but rich and pleasant glances If I could clearly express and conveigh into the Minds of men that which I conceive of the nature of God and his Work which appeareth to me to have been gathered from all things Humane and Divine from Poetry Philosophy and Theology From Nature and Grace the letter of the Scriptures and the Spirit according to my little acquaintance with them and less understanding of them I am perhaps too vainly apt to perswade my self that I should make the noblest Conquest a Conquest of Hearts which would be equally Conquerors with me partaking equally in the Joy and Glory of the Conquest For what Understanding would not gladly be swallowed up into the richly unfathomable Depths of the Divine Wisdom if it were touched with this sense that the whole Understanding and Mind of God in its utmost and unlimited compass is taken up and filled with a Love of equal extent to it and equally unlimited What Understanding would not joyfully lie down for ever and lose it self in the gloriously soft and bright Bosom of the Divine Wisdome if it once by the least sweet glimpse perceived this that the Divine Wisdom throughout is no other than the beautiful and blissful Harmony of the Divine Love that all the Work of his Wisdom within and without is a deep delightful God-like contrivance of Love on which the whole Godhead layeth out it self to the utmost of all its unbounded fulnesses and treasures For this Love to bring forth and express it self with all possible advantage with all beautifyings sweetnings and heightnings as in the whole contrivance so in each part and point of it through all which this Love by this Wisdom conducteth it self with an inevitable force and sweetness This is that which the holy Apostle hath testified speaking of things which he had seen when the Father revealed Jesus Christ in his Spirit that God by Jesus Christ in his Grace that is his Love hath abounded towards us in all Wisdom and Prudence What Will of Man or Angel if it had in it self the greatest Arbitrarinâ—…s and highest Soveraignty over its own Actions would not with unexpressible pleasure resign its Arbitrariness its Soveraignty its self and all to the Divine Will when this Will should appear unto it in nothing Arbitrary but Goodness it self it s own Object Rule and Perfection a Goodness eternal unalterable and inviolable The supream and universal Goodness containing in it self all kinds and degrees of Goodness at an equal height with it self A Goodness which bringeth forth it self into the supream and universal Beauty its proper and essential Image to which every Will by its own Principle and most essential activity and motion is carried with a necessity and irresistableness most rational and most voluntary that is most divinely-harmonious and agreeable What Spirit endued with an Understanding and a Will can forbear from casting it self with most enamoured and most sweetly forcible transports into the Arms and absolute Conduct of this our Jesus this our God when by the first and most obscure beam of his own Light it is awakned unto this Divine Sight that this Jesus our God is Goodness it self most pure most perfect whose continued Birth and essential Image is Truth it self Beauty it self Truth and Beauty in their clearest Glories in their highest Sweetnesses in their fullest Amplitude Extent and Majesty Truth and Beauty comprehending all things within themselves as one Truth and Beauty with themselves bringing forth all things from themselves as Flowers from their Garden-beds filling all shining through all forming themselves upon all Shall not the Understanding and Will of every Spirit now be as Wings of Divine Light and Love on which the Spirit flies with a sweet and a swift strength into the Bosom of the Lord Jesus that here by its Understanding it may feast it self with an Appetite and Delight ever
new upon the supream Goodness in its heavenly Image of the eternal Truth that here by its Will it may lie down for ever with a most blissful Rest with the fulness of all unexpressible complacency in the fruition of the supream Goodness shining forth upon it immediately clasping and enfolding in its own naked immortal most precious most pleasant Form the perfection of Beauty the Essence of all Beauty Truth Goodness and Love in One But it is time now for me to pass from this second Excellency in the Mediatory Form and Person of our Jesus the Harmonious Order and Proportion of the parts The third Excellency in this Mediatory Form of Christ is the Unity of the whole and of the parts as in themselves so with the whole The ground of this Unity is two-fold 1. The Spiritual Nature 2. The Divine Person 1. One ground of this Unity is the Spiritual Nature of all things here St. Paul speaking of the Lord Jesus in this his proper Kingdom and Glory saith of him The Lord is that Spirit That Spirit in the same place he describeth to be the Spirit in which the Vail the Shade and Cloud of Flesh is entirely removed where all things are with open face in the Liberty of the Divine Light and Glory The Lord Jesus faith of himself The words that I speak unto you they are Spirit and they are Life It is the Spirit which quickneth the Flesh profiteth nothing Jesus in his Mediatory Kingdom and Glory casts off the Vail of Flesh as from his Divine so from his Humane Nature The days of his Flesh are now past He is a quickning Spirit all Spirit and Life His Humane Nature is now all Spirit and by having the Godhead hath the Fountain of Spirits and Life in it self All his words in this spiritual state are substantial living immortal Spirits springing forth from and abiding in himself as their heavenly Root and Element After this manner do all Forms of things arise and flourish in him being his words of Power and Glory as the Images in Humane or Angelical Understandings are the words of those Minds Spirits are Unities There is with them no distance of Space or division of Parts All Spirits intimately entirely throughout penetrate possess and inhabit each other transcending all this Image and measure of space of place of corporeal extension The streets in the heavenly Jerusalem are said to be Gold and Glass If I conjecture aright Jesus Christ in his Mediatory State is this glorious City where the great Assembly of the First-born all Spirits born of the Father of Lights Humane or Angelical on Earth or in Heaven dwell together in One. It is expresly said That this City hath the Glory of God that the Glory of the Lord 〈◊〉 it and that the Lamb is the Light thereof How agreeth all this with that Description of Christ the brightness of the Glory of God In this City of glorious and immortal Spirits which is it self the Spirit of Unity and of Glory where Jesus Christ is built up not only into a Temple but into a City in this Spirit the streets the lowest Forms of things are Gold and Glass Such gold as hath the transparency of glass Such glass as hath the substance the solidity the glory the incorruptibleness of Gold Thus is the Unity in the spiritual Nature of things most beautifully and most agreeably figured to us Like Gold it is every where full of it self compact and uniform sending forth continually all various Forms as Beams of Glory Like Glass it discovereth all Forms of things within it self in every point of it self by a perfect transparency all Forms of things endlesly appear in each form At every single view at every single glance the eye of the Spirit is every where terminated no where bounded every where at rest no where restrained 2. The second ground of the Unity in this heavenly Image is the Divine Person All things here are joyned by an hypostatical or personal Union all are one Person A Person is an Intellectual Unity an Intellectual Essence compleatly existing and subsisting in it self The Unity here is not that only of an Intellectual but of a Divine Person God is the Person here As is the Person such is the Unity both are supream The eternal Spirit God himself in the height of Eternity makes both Natures the Uncreated with the Created one in our Lord Jesus without any confusion or lessening the Distinction between the Natures themselves The Unity of a Person is understood by these three Maxims concerning it in Metaphysicks 1. The Person is the Subsistence or the Existence that Unity which is both the Spring and the Chanel the Center and the Circle of the whole Essence or Nature by which it is one by it self and distinct from all other things distinct from it self as it lies in its Causes and is there one with them 2. All Operations are from the Person 3. All denominations belong to the Person The Person then is the indivisible Unity which within it self according to its amplitude springs up into all Varieties of Forms Operations Denominations through the whole Essence and Nature in its utmost extent This is that which works all in all Operations which appears in all Forms which hath all names and denominations which in all these is one and the same hath one Form one Name which comprehendeth all entirely clearly distinctly undividedly According to these grounds we shall see a three-fold Divine and Personal Unity in this Mediatory Form of Christ. 1. The whole is one entire and Divine Person altogether compleat all over divinely beautiful and pleasant All Distinctions Diversities Distances Divisions Contrarieties meet here without distance diversity or division in the supream Unity of one Divine Person onc all-glorious Spirit one Life one most harmonious Image one Love one eternal Joy Behold the Beauty of this more than heavenly Person in these several Elements which compose all Beauty 1. Here is the Variety of lines and colours All forms of things in their richest Variety lie together here 2. Here is Light The substance of the created Image in this Person is the Flower of Light the most immediate sweetest freshest Sun-shine from the Face of the Godhead it self 3. Here is Life esteemed the chief part of Beauty Here is the Life of Love As it is Life which heightens so is it Love which sweetens all A Divine eternal Spring of Life and Love openeth it self in every part and from every part with most pleasant intermixtures diffuseth it self through the whole Thus are all the Beauties here perpetually in sweetest motion in the liveliest and loveliest activity of mutual fruition and the delightful exchange of their Divine Sweetnesses their never-fading Pleasures 4. All this Variety Light Life and Activity are composed into and governed by the most charming the most exact the most universal Harmony 5. The eternal Sun of Beauty it self the eternal Spirit of Harmony the
Curse with all evils in their greatest extent and extremity shame pain the pain of loss and of sense then fell most sensibly upon him when he cryed out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me A Wound is said to be a solution or separation of the Continuity or parts united by one common Life The Sun was eclipsed at the Death of Christ beyond the course of Nature for it was eclipsed totally not by the interposition of a dark Body between that and the Earth but by the failing of the Light it self in the very body of the Sun Was ever any Wound so bitter so full of pain and anguish as this Was ever any Eclipse so prodigious so dreadful and direful God in his own Person in the most sweet most vital the supream Unity of his Divine Person is separated and divided from himself by the force and fury of an unexpressible Wrath. The Person of God in his own Spirit in its Divine Strengths Solaces and Glories by a fury sharper and fiercer than any Sword or Flame is divided from himself in his own Flesh. The all-chearing and all-quickning Light of the eternal Sun faileth in the Person of God as he is in Flesh being turned into Sack-cloth and Blood Jesus now truly suffereth 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the Torments not only of an Eve-eternity but of Eternity for his Sufferings are extended and heightned not only according to the capacity of a particular individual man in flesh of an immortal Soul or an Angel great in Power but according to the proportion of the Super-Angelical Head of the whole Creation eminently and transcendently comprehending all Creatures in himself And not only so but his Sufferings in this nature are suited to the Divine and eternal Person subsisting and supporting the Nature and to the Divine and eternal Person offended coming down upon him in the full weight of his Wrath in the full Opposition the full Contrariety the full Enmity of all the Attributes of God of his entire Godhead to his proper most contrary irreconcilable Enemy the evil of Sin This is the manner of Christ's Sufferings Thus God personally suffered in Flesh. The merit of these Sufferings consisteth in this that this Flesh which suffereth and the Sufferings of this Flesh stood in the Unity of the Divine Person Our Jesus was God and Man in one Person that being Man he might suffer and this Man being God might merit by suffering By this hypostatical or personal Union by this mutual and indivisible Unity of the same Person in both Natures the Righteousness the Beauty the Sweetness the Glory all the united Excellencies and Blessedness of the Godhead stood entirely in every Wound in every Sigh in every Blush of shame in every pang of pain in every part in every degree of sufferings through the whole flesh of Christ. All these reciprocally were filled and encompassed with the full Glory with the united Excellencies of the Divine Nature Thus were they a Divine Price indeed paid down for us in the Blood and Life of our dear Saviour Now the same Divine Person the God of all Loves and Lovelinesses the God of all Peace Righteousness Joy and Immortality in the Tempests and Flames of Divine Justice and Wrath from above In the tempests and flames of all guilt sufferings and shame from below meeteth with himself on both sides in all these So the tempests and flames of Justice and Wrath from above in a moment vanish into a golden Calm and Sun-shine of Divine Loveliness and Love In the same moment the tempests and flames of guilt shame and sufferings below are transformed into the Divine unspotted Beauty of an everlasting Righteousness into the triumphs of an eternal Life Love and Joy In a word the whole Contrariety thus come to its utmost point returns into and is swallowed up in the most pure the most perfect Sweetness and Harmony of that Divine Unity from which it went forth So is our Jesus become Hylasterion the Propitiation the Atonement Thus the Blood of God in the Person of Christ washeth Crimson and Scarlet sins double died in the Blood of God himself unto the whiteness of the wool of the Lamb of God and of the Snow coming down new unstained from Heaven As Jesus Christ was a Divine Person so was he an universal Person in his Sufferings As Christ is God he is the universal Being in which all things have their Being which is most intimately and universally in each thing as the Being of every Being He is the Mediator by which all things in every kind or degree of Being descend and ascend He is the Head the Root the pure and primitive Spirit of the whole Creation as the Spirit containeth in it self the outward Form and Image He goes forth into all forms and states of things from above the highest Heavens to the nethermost parts of the Earth filling all He espouseth into the Unity of his Divine Person the Humane Nature the Harmony and Model of the whole Creation unconfined by any particular personality He takes upon him the Humane Nature in its lowest state in fading frail and dying flesh The Father hath given him to the World and for the World Joh. 3. He hath â—…iven himself for us Gal. 2. ult Thus he suffereth as an universal Person and becomes a ransome for all So St. Paul layeth down the ground of this Ransome and this Ransome 1 Tim. 2. There is one God the Father of all there is one Mediator between God and man the man Christ Jesus who gave himself a Ransome for all The Death of Jesus Christ is the finishing of his Sufferings and of his abode in Flesh. This is as the Mid-night that Point in which the Sun of the Godhead in the Heaven of Christ's Person is gone to the utmost distance from him to the utmost degree of Contrariety to him and now is returning towards him again in the beautiful and blessed Unity of the Divine Love There is a two-fold mystery in the Death of Christ 1. An universal Dissolution 2. An universal Resolution 1. The Death of Christ is an universal Dissolution He spoiled Principalities and Powers making a shew of them openly and triumphing over them on his Cross Col. 2. This true Sampson dying taketh hold of the Pillars of the World by a Divine force in his Death pulls them down and the whole Creation to fall together with himself into his Grave Some teach us That the Sun is the Center the Corner-stone the immediate Foundation of this visible World and that if this should fall out from Heaven or should lose its Light and Course in Heaven all Motions and so all Forms of things here would cease and be no more Jesus Christ of a truth is the true Sun the shining Pillar which holds the Foundation of all things visible and invisible the Root of all created Light and so of the whole World He dying all things die in him all things die together with
chiefly turneth about in respect to its Beauty and Deformity its Misery and Felicity its Eternity have no Connexion with or Dependance upon the other parts of the work the Image or Original Model in the Divine mind Can there be an Order here in the whole Can all the parts in the whole have an harmonious proportion to each other Can the Work outward agree with the inward Model the whole agreeing with the whole and each part answering each part Can this work be perfect Can it be wrought in Judgment Is the whole way of this work the way of Judgment Is there in each step of it the foot-step of a Divine Understanding the impression of a Divine Wisdom which is an entire uninterrupted Order Do all the parts in this Work according to the Model or Image in the mind of the Work-man lie together in one whole piece in one beautiful body knit together by fit joynts and bands ministring to each other by these joynts and bands mutual strength beauties and perfections from the same Head whose Unity runneth through shineth in the whole and all its several parts thus uniting them as one body to each other and to its self Doth not this supposition of such an independent Liberty in the Will to Contrarieties and Contradictions naturally lead us to an imagination of two Gods one Good the other Evil striving together in the composure of the same work bringing in consusion upon it by crossing and interrupting each other according to the sense of the Manichees Or doth it not favour that Opinion of some Platonists of a matter the subject of the Divine Work co-eternal with the Divine Spirit the Work-man which being in some parts of it altogether intractable resisting the skill and power of the Archytect or working Spirit receiveth not the Divine form which that would introduce could not be made beautiful and so brought Confusion War all Evil into the Work Or if that seem more probable would it not incline us to the belief of fortuitous motions of numberless Particles confusedly concurring which have neither beginning rule nor end of themselves their shapes or motions What skilful Poet makes his Poem so that the great Chain and final Catastrophe in the conduct and government of which the chief beauty of the whole Work is plac'd from which arise the greatest Consequences together with the perfection and praise of the whole piece should be derived from a meer Contingency which hath no coherence with any antecedent part which receiveth no force from any thing of any reason proportion or order in the whole which hath no place nor form in the design of the Poet Would any wise Work-man who had an absolute power over his work who brought forth from himself entirely both the matter and form of it according to his will frame a work in which the great end of the principal parts and of the whole should be undetermined by being dependant upon the great and chief motion of the work which can have no complete Idea in the mind of the Worker from which it may receive its form which is uncapable of having any certain conformity to the will of the Workman to derive from thence an agreeable sweetness and goodness through the veins of the whole and of all the parts that the spirit which hath wrought it may have rest and complacency in the work it self in the harmony of the work within it self and in the harmony of it with the Model in its own Understanding Would he frame a work which in this its principal motion should be altogether out of its own power should have no natural no moral necessity or certainty from any antecedent causality and reason which should be altogether fortuitous which should be thus rendred altogether uncapable of being one entire piece where all the parts first contained in the Potentiality and Unity of the whole flowing forth from it by virtue of that Unity are united among themselves by their mutual Relations and Proportions making up a beautiful harmony in the whole This in all learning and observation hath been esteemed the first and chief part of wisdom to fix determinately with full strength of inclination thought and contrivance the end of every work This the second part next to it particularly stiled Prudence to dispose and direct all the means efficaciously and infallibly to those ends Object 1. Perhaps some one will say That the parts of the Divine Work have their coherence connexion and proportion while this grand motion of which wespeak the determination of the Will flows from the power of the Will which flows from God the Fountain of causality in the centinued stream of second causes Answ. This indeed is often spoken of Let us see if it be well understood if there be no fallacy or ambiguity latent or manifest in this Assertion If the power of the Will be the cause of its determination if God in the order of second causes be the Author of this Power then also is the determination of the Will from Him after the same manner by the force of that Rule Quicquid est causa causae est causa causati The cause of any cause is also the cause of the effect produced by that cause Now is the Will no more free with an undetermined freedome or liberty being thus predetermined in its superior causes from which it receives both the power of determining and the determination of its power Now is the power of its Will in its state of acting not undetermined or indifferent to contradictory and contrary terms or bounds of its motion If it be replyed that the power of the Will in determining it self is from God in the natural course of things but the act of that power in the determination of it self from the power of the Will alone with an absolute and universal independancy upon all things antecedent to it either natural or moral Although this be very difficult to be understood yet I shall not at present make any other opposition to it than this that it leaves my present Argument untoucht in its full strength and vigour Object 2. There is something of greater moment which perhaps may seem to shake the structure and strength of this Reason The great and Ultimate ends of God in his Work are the glories of his Goodness and his Justice In this the Divine Wisdom shines out with a lustre dazling the eyes of our Reason of every created Understanding in finding out this the most proper and effectual way to these ends viz. The setting up of intellectual Spirits free in the determination of themselves to good or evil and compensating this good and this evil with suitable torments suitable triumphs Answ. Three Answers offer themselves to this Objection 1. Answ. This also yieldeth that on which the whole weight of the Argument against Free-will lieth the righteousness and wickedness of intellectual Spirits that is the highest Beauty the foulest Deformity upon the