other Men's Understandings Nature having manifestly contrived things so that the Vulgar and the Many are fit only to be led or driven but by no means fit to guide or direct themselves To which their want of judging or discerning Abilities we may add also their Want of Leisure and Opportunity to apply their Minds to such a serious and attent Consideration as may let them into a full Discovery of the true Goodness and Evil of Things which are Qualities which seldom display themselves to the first View For in most things Good and Evil lie shuffled and thrust up together in a confused Heap and it is Study and Intention of Thought which must draw them forth and range them under their distinct Heads But there can be no Study without Time and the Mind must abide and dwell upon Things or be always a Stranger to the Inside of them Through desire says Solomon a Man having separated himself seeketh and intermedleth with all Wisdom Prov. 18. 12. There must be Leisure and a Retirement Solitude and a Sequestration of a Man's self from the Noise and Toil of the World For Truth scorns to be seen by Eyes too much fixt upon inferiour Objects It lies too deep to be fetcht up with the Plough and too close to be beaten out with the Hammer It dwells not in Shops or Work houses nor till the late Age was it ever known that any one served Seven Years to a Smith or a Taylor that he might at the End thereof proceed Master of any other Arts but such as those Trades taught him and much less that he should commence Doctor or Divine from the Shop-board or the Anvil or from whistling to a Team come to preach to a Congregation These were the peculiar extraordinary Privileges of the late blessed Times of Light and Inspiration Otherwise Nature will still hold on its old Course never doing any thing which is considerable without the Assistance of its two great Helps Art and Industry But above all the Knowledge of what is Good and what is Evil what ought and what ought not to be done in the several Offices and Relations of Life is a thing too large to be compassed and too hard to be mastered without Brains and Study Parts and Contemplation which Providence never thought fit to make much the greatest Part of Mankind Possessors of And consequently those who are not so must for the Knowledge of most things depend upon those who are and receive their Information concerning Good and Evil from such Verbal or Nominal Representations of Each as shall be imparted to them by those whose Ability and Integrity they have Cause to rely upon for a faithfull Account of these Matters And thus from these two great Considerations premised 1 st That the Generality of the World are wholly governed verned by Words and Names And 2 dly That the Chief Instance in which they are so is in such Words and Names as import the Good or Evil of things Which both the Difficulty of Things themselves and the very Condition of humane Nature constrains much the greatest Part of Mankind to take wholly upon Trust I say from these two Considerations must needs be inferr'd What a fatal devilish and destructive Effect the Misapplication and Confusion of those great Governing Names of Good and Evil must inevitably have upon the Societies of Men. The comprehensive Mischief of which will appear from this that it takes in both those ways by which the greatest Evils and Calamities which are incident to Man do directly break in upon him The First of which is by his being deceived and the Second by his being misrepresented And First for the First of these I do not in the least doubt but if a true and just Computation could be made of all the Miseries and Misfortunes that befall Men in this World Two Thirds of them at least would be found resolveable into their being deceived by false Appearances of Good First deluding their Apprehensions and then by Natural Consequence perverting their Actions from which are the great Issues of Life and Death since according to the Eternal Sanction of God and Nature such as a Man's Actions are for Good or Evil such ought also his Condition to be for Happiness or Misery Now all Deception in the Course of Life is indeed nothing else but a Lye reduced to Practice and Falshood passing from Words into Things For is a Man impoverished and undone by the Purchase of an Estate why it is because he bought an Imposture pay'd down his Money for a Lye and by the help of the best and ablest Counsel forsooth that could be had took a Bad Title for a Good Is a Man unfortunate in Marriage still it is because he was deceived and put his Neck into the Snare before he put it into the Yoke and so took that for Vertue and Affection which was nothing but Vice in a Disguise and a Devilish Humour under a Demure Look Is he again unhappy and calamitous in his Friendships Why in this also it is because he built upon the Air and trod upon a Quick-sand and took that for Kindness and Sincerity which was onely Malice and Design seeking an Opportunity to ruine him effectually and to overturn him in all his Interests by the Sure but fatal Handle of his own good Nature and Credulity And lastly is a Man betrayed lost and blown by such Agents and Instruments as he imploys in his greatest and nearest Concerns Why still the Cause of it is from this that he misplaced his Confidence took Hypocrisie for Fidelity and so relied upon the Services of a Pack of Villains who designed nothing but their own Game and to stake him while they played for themselves But not to mention any more Particulars there is no Estate Office or Condition of Life whatsoever but groans and labours under the Killing Truth of what we have asserted For it is this which supplants not onely private Persons but Kingdoms and Governments by keeping them ignorant of their own Strengths and Weaknesses and it is evident that Governments may be equally destroyed by an Ignorance of either For the Weak by thinking themselves strong are induced to venture and proclaim War against that which ruins them And the Strong by conceiting themselves weak are thereby rendred as unactive and consequently as useless as if they really were so In Luke 14. 31. When a King with Ten Thousand is to meet a King coming against him with Twenty Thousand our Saviour advises him before he ventures the Issue of a Battel to sit down and consider But now a false glozing Parasite would give him quite another Kind of Counsel and bid him onely reckon his Ten Thousand Fourty call his Fool-hardiness Valour and then he may go on boldly because blindly and by mistaking himself for a Lyon come to perish like an Ass. In short it is this great Plague of the World Deception which takes wrong Measures and makes false
and the Settlement of worldly Affairs to disturb and confound him and in a word all Things conspire to make his sick Bed grievous and uneasie Nothing can then stand up against all these Ruines and speak Life in the midst of Death but a clear Conscience And the Testimony of that shall make the Comforts of Heaven descend upon his weary Head like a refreshing Dew or Shower upon a parched Ground It shall give him some lively Earnests and secret Anticipations of his approaching Joy It shall bid his Soul go out of the Body undauntedly and lift up its Head with Confidence before Saints and Angels Surely the Comfort which it conveys at this Season is something bigger than the Capacities of Mortality mighty and unspeakable and not to be understood till it comes to be felt And now who would not quit all the Pleasures and Trash and Trifles which are apt to captivate the Heart of Man and pursue the greatest Rigors of Piety and Austerities of a good Life to purchase to himself such a Conscience as at the Hour of Death when all the Friendships of the World shall bid him adieu and the whole Creation turn its Back upon him shall dismiss his Soul and close his Eyes with that blessed Sentence Well done thou good and faithfull Servant enter thou into the Ioy of thy Lord For he whose Conscience enables him to look God in the Face with Confidence here shall be sure to see his Face also with Comfort hereafter Which God of his Mercy grant to us all To whom be rendred and ascribed as is most due all Praise Might Majesty and Dominion both now and for evermore Amen FINIS BOOKS newly printed for Tho. Bennet at the Half Moon in St. Paul's Church-Yard A Thenae Oxoniensis Or an exact History of all the Writers and Bishops who have had their Education in the University of Oxford from 1500 to the end of 1690. Representing the Birth Fortunes Preferments and Death of all those Authors and Prelates the great Accidents of their Lives with the Fate and Character of their Writings The Work being so Compleat that no Writer of Note of this Nation for near two hundred years past is omitted In Two Volumes in Fol. Twelve Sermons preached upon several Occasions by R. South D. D. Six of them never before printed Vol. First in Octavo Sermons and Discourses upon several Occasions by G. Stradling D. D. late Dean of Chichester Never before printed together with an Account of the Author Dr. Pocock's Commentary on the Prophets Ioel Micah Malachi c. in Fol. A Critical History of the Text and Versions of the New Testament wherein is firmly Established the Truth of those Acts on which the Foundation of Christian Religion is laid In Two Parts By Father Simon of the Oratory Together with a Refutation of such Passages as seem contrary to the Doctrine and Practice of the Church of England in Quarto Newly printed for Randall Taylor Animadversions upon Dr. Sherlock's Book entitled A Vindication of the Holy and Ever Blessed Trinity c. Together with a more Necessary Vindication of that Sacred and Prime Article of the Christian Faith from his New Notions and false Explications of it Humbly dedicated to His Admirers and to Himself the Chief of them by a Divine of the Church of England See the First Vol. p. 29 and 30. * Major Iohn Weyer see Ravillac Rediviv The Words of a great Self-opiniator and a bitter Reviler of the Clergy * A Preaching Colonel of the Parliament-Army and a Chief Actor in the Murder of K. Charles the First Notable before for having killed several after Quarter given them by others and using these Words in the doing it Cursed be he who does the work of the Lord negligently He was by Extraction a Butcher's Son and accordingly in his Practices all along more a Butcher than his Father
discourse into does not naturally engage me to prove them so but onely to shew what directly and necessarily follows upon a supposal that they are so yet to give the greater Perspicuity and Clearness to the Prosecution of the subject in hand I shall briefly demonstrate them thus It is necessary That there should be some First Mover and if so a first Being And the First Being must inferr an Infinite unlimited Perfection in the said Being For as much as if it were Finite or Limited that Limitation must have been either from it self or from something else But not from it self since it is contrary to Reason and Nature that any Being should Limit its own Perfection nor yet from something else since then it should not have been the First as supposing some Other Thing Coevous to it which is against the present Supposition So that it being clear That there must be a First Being and that infinitely Perfect it will follow that all other Perfection that is must be derived from it and so we inferr the Creation of the World And then supposing the World created by God since it is no ways reconcileable to God's Wisdom that He should not also govern it Creation must need inferr Providence And then it being granted that God governs the World it will follow also that He does it by means suteable to the Natures of the Things He Governs and to the Attainment of the proper Ends of Government And moreover Man being by Nature a free moral Agent and so capable of deviating from his Duty as well as performing it it is necessary that He should be governed by Laws And since Laws require that they be enforced with the Sanction of Rewards and Punishments sufficient to sway and work upon the Minds of such as are to be governed by them and lastly since Experience shews that Rewards and Punishments terminated only within this Life are not sufficient for that Purpose it fairly and rationally follows That the Rewards and Punishments which God governs Mankind by do and must look beyond it And thus I have given a brief Proof of the Certainty of these Principles namely That there is a supreme Governour of the World and that there is a future estate of happiness or misery for Men after this Life Which Principles while a man steers his Course by if He acts piously soberly and temperately I suppose there needs no further Arguments to Evince that He acts prudentially and safely For he acts as under the eye of his just and severe Judge who reaches to his Creature a Command with One Hand and a Reward with the Other He spends as a Person who knows that He must come to a Reckoning He sees an Eternal Happiness or Misery suspended upon a few days behaviour and therefore He lives every hour as for Eternity His future condition has such a powerfull Influence upon his present Practice because he entertains a continual Apprehension and a firm Perswasion of it If a man walks over a narrow Bridge when he is drunk it is no wonder that he forgets his Caution while he over-looks his Danger But He who is sober and views that nice Separation between Himself and the Devouring Deep so that if he should slip he sees his Grave gaping under Him surely must needs take every step with Horror and the utmost Caution and Sollicitude But for a man to believe it as the most undoubted Certainty in the World that He shall be judged according to the Quality of his Actions here and after Judgment receive an Eternal Recompence and yet to take his full swing in all the Pleasures of Sin is it not a greater Phrenzy than for a man to take a Purse at Tyburn while he is actually seeing another Hanged for the same Fact It is really to dare and defy the Justice of Heaven to laugh at right-aiming Thunder-bolts to puff at Damnation and in a word to bid Omnipotence do its worst He indeed who thus walks walks surely but it is because he is sure to be damned I confess it is hard to reconcile such a stupid Course to the natural way of the Soul 's acting according to which the Will moves according to the Proposals of Good and Evil made by the Understanding And therefore for a man to run head-long into the Bottomless Pit while the Eye of a Seeing Conscience assures him that it is Bottomless and Open and all Return from it Desperate and Impossible while His Ruin stares him in the Face and the Sword of Vengeance points directly at his Heart still to press on to the Embraces of His Sin is a Problem unresolvable upon any other Ground but that Sin infatuates before it destroys For Iudas to receive and swallow the Sop when His Master gave it him seasoned with those terrible words It had been good for that man that He had never been born Surely this Argued a furious Appetite and a strong Stomach that could thus catch at a Morsel with the Fire and Brimstone all flaming about it and as it were digest Death it self and make a meal upon Perdition I could wish that every bold Sinner when he is about to engage in the Commission of any known Sin would arrest his Confidence and for a while stop the Execution of his Purpose with this short Question Doe I believe that it is really true that God has denounced Death to such a Practice or doe I not If he does not let him renounce his Christianity and surrender back his Baptism the Water of which might better serve Him to cool his Tongue in Hell than onely to Consign Him over to the Capacities of so black an Apostacy But if he does believe it how will he acquit Himself upon the Accounts of bare Reason For does he think that if he pursues the means of Death they will not bring Him to that Fatal End Or does He think that He can grapple with Divine Vengeance and endure the Everlasting Burnings or arm himself against the Bites of the Never-dying Worm No surely these are things not to be Imagined and therefore I cannot conceive what security the presuming Sinner can promise Himself but upon these Two following Accounts 1. That God is mercifull and will not be so severe as his word and that his Threatnings of Eternal Torments are not so Decretory and Absolute but that there is a very Comfortable latitude left in them for Men of Skill to creep out at And here it must indeed be confessed that Origen and some others not long since who have been so officious as to furbish up and re-print his old Errors hold That the Sufferings of the Damned are not to be in a strict sense Eternal but that after a Certain Revolution and Period of Time there shall be a General Gaol-delivery of the Souls in Prison and that not for a farther Execution but a final Release And it must be further acknowledged that some of the Ancients like kind-hearted Men have talked
inwardly rejoice and after a godly sort no doubt to see another guilty of it but they delight in the mischief and disaster which they know it will assuredly bring upon him whom they hate and wish ill to They rejoice not in it as in a delightfull Object but as in a Cause and Means of their Neighbour's Ruin So gratefull nay so delicious are even the horridest Villainies committed by others to the Pharisaical Piety of some who in the mean time can be wholly unconcerned for the Reproach brought thereby upon the Name of God and the Honour of Religion so long as by the same their Sanctified Spleen is gratified in their Brother's Infamy and Destruction This therefore we may reckon upon that scarce any Man passes to a liking of Sin in others but by first practising it himself and consequently may take it for a shrewd Indication and Sign whereby to judge of the Manners of those who have sinned with too much Art and Caution to suffer the Eye of the World to charge some Sins directly upon their Conversation For though such kind of Men have lived never so much upon the Reserve as to their Personal Behaviour yet if they be observed to have a particular delight in and fondness for Persons noted for any sort of Sin it is ten to one but there was a Communication in the Sin before there was so in Affection The Man has by this directed us to a Copy of Himself and though we cannot always come to a sight of the Original yet by a true Copy we may know all that is in it 2 ly A second Cause that brings a Man to take pleasure in other men's Sins is not only a Commission of those Sins in his own Person but also a Commission of them against the full Light and Conviction of his Conscience For this also is expressed in the Text where the Persons charged with this wretched Disposition of Mind are said to have been such as knew the iudgment of God that they who committed such things were worthy of Death They knew that there was a righteous and a searching Law directly forbidding such Practices and they knew that it carried with it the Divine Stamp that it was the Law of God they knew also that the Sanction of it was under the greatest and dreadfullest of all Penalties Death And this surely one would think was Knowledge enough to have opened both a man's Eyes and his Heart too his Eyes to see and his Heart to consider the intolerable mischief that the Commission of the Sin set before him must infallibly plunge him into Nevertheless the Persons here mentioned were resolved to venture and to commit the Sin even while Conscience stood protesting against it They were such as broke through all Mounds of Law such as laugh'd at the Sword of Vengeance which Divine Justice brandish'd in their faces For we must know that God has set a flaming Sword not only before Paradise but before Hell it self also to keep Men out of this as well as out of the other And Conscience is the Angel into whose hand this Sword is put But if now the Sinner shall not only wrestle with this Angel but throw him too and win so complete a Victory over his Conscience that all these Considerations shall be able to strike no Terror into his Mind lay no Restraint upon his Lusts no Controll upon his Appetites he is certainly too strong for the Means of Grace and his Heart lies open like a broad and high Road for all the Sin and Villainy in the World freely to pass through The Truth is if we impartially consider the Nature of these Sins against Conscience we shall find them such strange Paradoxes that a man must baulk all Common Principles and act contrary to the Natural way and motive of all Humane Actions in the Commission of them For that which naturally moves a man to doe any thing must be the Apprehension and Expectation of some good from the thing which he is about to doe And that which naturally keeps a man from doing of a thing must be the Apprehension and Fear of some mischief likely to ensue from that Thing or Action that he is ready to engage in But now for a man to doe a thing while his Conscience the best Light that he has to judge by assures him that he shall be infinitely unsupportably miserable if he does it this is certainly unnatural and one would imagine impossible And therefore so far as one may judge while a man acts against his Conscience he acts by a Principle of direct Infidelity and does not really believe that those things that God has thus threatned shall ever come to pass For though he may yield a general faint Assent to the Truth of those Propositions as they stand recorded in Scripture yet for a through Practical belief that those general Propositions shall be particularly made good upon his Person no doubt for the time that he is sinning against Conscience such a belief has no place in his Mind Which being so it is easie to conceive how ready and disposed this must needs leave the Soul to admit of any even the most horrid unnatural Proposals that the Devil himself can suggest For Conscience being once extinct and the Spirit of God withdrawn which never stays with a Man when Conscience has once left him the Soul like the first Matter to all Forms has an Universal Propensity to all Lewdness For every Violation of Conscience proportionably wears off something of its Native Tenderness which Tenderness being the Cause of that Anguish and Remorse that it feels upon the Commission of Sin it follows that when by degrees it comes to have worn off all this Tenderness the Sinner will find no Trouble of Mind upon his doing the very wickedest and worst of Actions and consequently that this is the most direct and effectual Introduction to all sorts and degrees of Sin For which Reason it was that I alledged Sinning against Conscience for one of the Causes of this vile Temper and Habit of Mind which we are now discoursing of Not that it has any special productive Efficiency of this particular sort of Sinning more than of any other but that it is a general Cause of this as of all other great Vices and that it is impossible but a Man must have first passed this notable Stage and got his Conscience throughly debauched and hardned before he can arrive to the height of Sin which I account the delighting in other men's Sins to be 3 ly A third Cause of this Villainous disposition of Mind besides a man's personal Commission of such and such Sins and his Commission of them against Conscience must be also his Continuance in them For God forbid that every single Commission of a Sin though great for its Kind and withall acted against Conscience for its Aggravation should so far deprave the Soul and bring it to such a Reprobate Sense and Condition
things really Evil under the Notion and Character of Good And this this is the true Source and Original of this great Mischief The Will chuses follows and embraces things Evil and destructive but it is because the Understanding first tells it that they are good and wholesome and fit to be chosen by it One Man gives another a Cup of Poyson a thing as terrible as Death but at the same time he tells him that it is a Cordial and so he drinks it off and dies From the beginning of the World to this day there was never any great Villainy acted by Men but it was in the strength of some great Fallacy put upon their Minds by a false representation of Evil for Good or Good for Evil. In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die says God to Adam and so long as Adam believed this he did not eat But says the Devil In the Day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt be so far from surely dying that thou shalt be Immortal and from a Man grow into an Angel and upon this different account of the thing he presently took the Fruit and ate Mortality Misery and Destruction to himself and his whole Posterity And now can there be a Wo or Curse in all the Stores and Magazines of Vengeance equal to the Malignity of such a Practice of which one single Instance could involve all Mankind past present and to come in one universal and irreparable confusion God commanded and told Man what was Good but the Devil fur-named it Evil and thereby baffled the Command turned the World topsy-turvy and brought a new Chaos upon the whole Creation But that I may give you a more full Discussion of the sense and design of the Words I shall doe it under these following Particulars As First I shall give you some general Account of the Nature of Good and Evil and the Reason upon which they are founded Secondly I shall shew that the Way by which Good and Evil commonly operate upon the Mind of Man is by those respective Names or Appellations by which they are notified and conveyed to the Mind And Thirdly and Lastly I shall shew the Mischief directly naturally and unavoidably following from the Misapplication and Confusion of those Names And I hope by going over all these Particulars you may receive some tolerable satisfaction about this great Subject which we have now before us 1. And first for the Nature of Good and Evil what they are and upon what they are founded The Knowledge of this I look upon as the Foundation and Ground-work of all those Rules that either Moral Philosophy or Divinity can give for the Direction of the Lives and Practices of Men and consequently ought to be reckoned as a first Principle and that such an one that for ought I see the through Speculation of Good will be found much more difficult than the Practice But when we shall have once given some Account of the Nature of Good that of Evil will be known by Consequence as being only a Privation or Absence of Good in a Subject capable of it and proper for it Now Good in the general Nature and Notion of it over and above the bare Being of a Thing Connotes also a certain sutableness or agreeableness of it to some other thing According to which general Notion of Good applied to the particular Nature of Moral Goodness upon which only we now insist a Thing or Action is said to be Morally Good or Evil as it is agreeable or disagreeable to Right Reason or to a Rational Nature And as Right Reason is nothing else but the Understanding or Mind of Man discoursing and judging of Things truly and as they are in themselves and as all Truth is unchangeably the same that Proposition which is true at any time being so for ever so it must follow That the Moral Goodness or Evil of men's Actions which consist in their Conformity or Unconformity to Right Reason must be also Eternal Necessary and Unchangeable So that as that which is Right Reason at any Time or in any Case is always Right Reason with relation to the same Time and Case In like manner that which is Morally Good or Evil at any Time or in any Case since it takes its whole measure from Right Reason must be also Eternally and Unchangeably a Moral Good or Evil with relation to that Time and to that Case For Propositions concerning the Goodness as well as concerning the Truth of Things are necessary and perpetual But you will say May not the same Action as for instance the killing of a Man be sometimes Morally Good and sometimes Morally Evil To Wit Good when it is the Execution of Justice upon a Malefactor and Evil when it is the taking away the Life of an Innocent person To this I Answer That this indeed is true of Actions considered in their General Nature or Kind but not considered in their Particular Individual Instances For generally speaking to take away the Life of a Man is neither Morally Good nor Morally Evil but capable of being either as the Circumstances of Things shall determine it but every particular Act of Killing is of necessity accompanied with and determin'd by several Circumstances which actually and unavoidably constitute and denominate it either Good or Evil. And that which being performed under such and such Circumstances is Morally Good cannot possibly under the same Circumstances ever be Morally Evil. And so on the contrary From whence we inferr the Villainous falsehood of Two Assertions held and maintained by some persons and too much countenanced by some others in the World As First That Good and Evil Honest and Dishonest are not Qualities existing or inherent in Things themselves but only founded in the Opinions of Men concerning Things So that any Thing or Action that has gained the General Approbation of any People or Society of Men ought in respect of those Persons to be esteemed Morally Good or Honest and whatsoever falls under their general Disapprobation ought upon the same account to be reckoned Morally Evil or Dishonest which also they would seem to prove from the very signification of the word Honestus which originally and strictly signifies no more than Creditable and is but a Derivative from Honor which signifies Credit or Honour and according to the Opinion of some we know That is lodged only in the Esteem and Thoughts of those who pay it and not in the Thing or Person whom it is paid to Thus for example Thieving or Robbing was accounted amongst the Spartans a gallant worthy and a creditable Thing and consequently according to the Principle which we have mentioned Thievery amongst the Spartans was a practice Morally Good and Honest. Thus also both with the Grecians and the Romans it was held a magnanimous and highly laudable Act for a man under any great or insuperable misery or distress to put an end to his own Life and accordingly with those