we must consider what it is that bringeth us to this excellent State to be happy in the other World of Eternity and Immutability It is agreed on all hands to be God's Grace and Favour to us But all do not agree by what steps his Grace produceth this effect Herein I shall not trouble your Lordship with a long Discourse how that Grace worketh in us which yet I will in a word touch anon that you may conceive what I understand Grace to be but will suppose it to have wrought its effect in us in this life and from thence examine what hinges they are that turn us over to Beatitude and Glory in the next Some consider God as a Judge that rewardeth or punisheth men according as they co-operated with or repugned to the Grace he gave That according as their actions please or displease him he is well affected towards them or angry with them and accordingly maketh them to the purpose and very home feel the effects of his kindness or indignation Others that fly a higher pitch and are so happy Vt rerum poterint cognoscere causas do conceive that Beatitude and misery in the other life are effects that necessarily and orderly flow out of the Nature of those Causes that begot them in this life without engaging God Almighty to give a sentence and act the part of a Judge according to the state of our Cause as it shall appear upon the Accusations and pleadings at his great Bar. Much of which manner of expression is Metaphorical and rather adapted to contain vulgar minds in their Duties that are awed with the thought of a severe Judge sifting every minute-action of theirs than such as we must conceive every circumstance to pass so in reality as the literal sound of the words seems to infer in ordinary construction and yet all that is true too in its genuine sence But my Lord these more penetrating men and that I conceive are vertuous upon higher and stronger Motives for they truely and solidly know why they are so do consider that what impressions are once made in the spiritual Substance of a Soul and what affections it hath once contracted do ever remain in it till a contrary and diametrically contradicting judgement and affection do obliterate it and expel it thence This is the reason why Contrition Sorrow and Hatred for Sins past is encharged us If then the Soul do go out of the Body with impressions and affections to the Objects and pleasures of this life it continually lingreth after them and as Virgil learnedly as well as wittily saith Quae gratia currum Armorumque fuit vivis quae cura nitentes Pascere equos eadem sequitur tellure repostos But that being a State wherein those Objects neither are nor can be enjoyed it must needs follow that such a Soul must be in an exceeding anguish sorrow and affliction for being deprived of them and for want of that it so much prizeth will neglect all other contentments it might have as not having a relish or taste moulded and prepared to the savouring of them but like feavorish tongues that when they are even scorched with heat take no delight in the pleasingest liquors but the sweetest drinks seem bitter to them by reason of their overflowing Gall So they even hate whatsoever good is in their power and thus pine away a long Eternity In which the sharpness and activity of their pain anguish and sad condition is to be measured by the sensibleness of their Natures which being then spiritual is in a manner infinitely more than any torment that in this life can be inflicted upon a dull gross body To this add the vexation it must be to them to see how inestimable and infinite a good they have lost and lost meerly by their own fault and for momentary trifles and childrens play and that it was so easie for them to have gained it had they remained but in their right senses and governed themselves according unto Reason And then judge in what a tortured condition they must be of remorse and execrating themselves for their most resupine and sensless madness But if on the other side a Soul be released out of this Prison of clay and flesh with affections setled upon Intellectual goods as Truth knowledge and the like and that it be grown to an irksome dislike of the flat pleasures of this World and look upon carnal and sensual Objects with a disdainful eye as discerning the contemptible Inanity in them that is set off only by their painted outside and above all that it hath a longing desire to be in the Society of that supereminent Cause of Causes in which they know are heaped up the Treasurers of all Beauty Knowledge Truth Delight and good whatsoever and therefore are impatient at the Delay and reckon all their Absence from him as a tedious Banishment and in that regard hate their Life and Body as Cause of this Divorce such a Soul I say must necessarily by reason of the temper it is wrought into enjoy immediately at the instant of the Bodies dissolution and its liberty more Contentment more Joy more true Happiness than it is possible for a heart of flesh to have scarce any scantling of much less to comprehend For immense Knowledge is natural to it as I have touched before Truth which is the adequated and satisfying Object of the Understanding is there displayed in her own Colours or rather without any And that which is the Crown of all and in respect of which all the rest is nothing that infinite Entity which above all things this Soul thirsteth to be united unto cannot for his own Goodness sake deny his Embraces to so affectionate a Creature and to such an enflamed Love If he should then were that Soul for being the best and for loving him most condemned to be the unhappiest For what Joy could she have in any thing were she barrred from what she so infinitely loveth But since the Nature of superiour and excellent things is to shower down their propitious Influences wheresoever there is a Capacity of receiving them and no Obstacle to keep them out like the Sun that illuminateth the whole Air if no Cloud or solid opacous Body intervene it followeth clearly that this infinite Sun of Justice this immense Ocean of Goodness cannot chuse but inviron with his Beams and replenish even beyond satiety with his delightsome Waters a soul so prepared and tempered to receive them No my Lord to make use of this Discourse and apply it to what begot it be pleased to determine which way will deliver us evenest and smoothest to this happy end of our Journey To be vertuous for hope of a Reward and through fear of Punishment or to be so out of a natural and inward affection to Vertue for Vertues and Reasons sake Surely one in this latter condition not onely doth those things which will bring him to Beatitude but he is so secured in a
my belief of that untractible temper as not to bow at their obstacles or connive at matters wherein there are not manifest impieties The leaven therefore and ferment of all not only Civil but Religious actions is Wisdom without which to commit our selves to the flames is Homicide and I fear but to pass through one fire into another Sect. 27 That Miracles are ceased I can neither prove nor absolutely deny much less define the time and period of their cessation that they survived Christ is manifest upon the Record of Scripture that they out-lived the Apostles also and were revived at the Conversion of Nations many years after we cannot deny if we shall not question those Writers whose testimonies we do not controvert in points that make for our own opinions therefore that may have some truth in it that is reported by the Jesuites of their Miracles in the Indies I could wish it were true or had any other testimony than their own Pens They may easily believe those Miracles abroad who daily conceive a greater at home the transmutation of those visible elements into the body and blood of our Saviour for the conversion of Water into Wine which he wrought in Cana or what the Devil would have had him done in the Wilderness of Stones into Bread compared to this will scarce deserve the name of a Miracle Though indeed to speak properly there is not one Miracle greater than another they being the extraordinary effects of the Hand of God to which all things are of an equal facility and to create the World as easie as one single Creature For this is also a Miracle not onely to produce effects against or above Nature but before Nature and to create Nature as great a Miracle as to contradict or transcend her We do too narrowly define the Power of God restraining it to our capacities * I hold that God can do all things how he should work contradictions I do not understand yet dare not therefore deny ‖ I cannot see why the Angel of God should question Esdras to recal the time past if it were beyond his own power or that God should pose mortality in that which he was not able to perform himself I will not say God cannot but he will not perform many things which we plainly affirm he cannot this I am sure is the mannerliest proposition wherein notwithstanding I hold no Paradox For strictly his power is the same with his will and they both with all the rest do make but one God Sect. 28 Therefore that Miracles have been I do believe that they may yet be wrought by the living I do not deny but have no confidence in those which are fathered on the dead and this hath ever made me suspect the efficacy of reliques to examine the bones question the habits and appurtenances of Saints and even of Christ himself I cannot conceive why the Cross that Helena found and whereon Christ himself dyed should have power to restore others unto life * I excuse not Constantine from a fall off his Horse or a mischief from his enemies upon the wearing those nails on his bridle which our Saviour bore upon the Cross in his hands I compute among Piae fraudes nor many degrees before consecrated Swords and Roses that which Baldwyn King of Jerusalem return'd the Genovese for their cost and pains in his War to wit the ashes of John the Baptist Those that hold the sanctity of their souls doth leave behind a tincture and sacred faculty on their bodies speak naturally of Miracles and do not salve the doubt Now one reason I tender so little Devotion unto Reliques is I think the slender and doubtful respect I have always held unto Antiquities for that indeed which I admire is far before Antiquity that is Eternity and that is God himself who though he be styled the ancient of days cannot receive the adjunct of Antiquity who was before the World and shall be after it yet is not older than it for in his years there is no Climacter his duration is Eternity and far more venerable than Antiquity Sect. 29 * But above all things I wonder how the curiosity of wiser heads coulds pass that great and indisputable Miracle the cessation of Oracles and in what swoun their Reasons lay to content themselves and sit down with such a far-fetch'd and ridiculous reason as Plutarch alleadgeth for it The Jews that can believe the supernatural Solstice of the Sun in the days of Joshua have yet the impudence to deny the Eclipse which every Pagan confessed at his death but for this it is evident beyond all contradiction the Devil himself confessed it Certainly it is not a warrantable curiosity to examine the verity of Scripture by the concordance of humane history or seek to confirm the Chronicle of Hester or Daniel by the authority of Magasthenes or Herodotus I confess I have had an unhappy curiosity this way * till I laughed my self out of it with a piece of Justine where he delivers that the Children of Israel for being scabbed were banished out of Egypt And truely since I have understood the occurrences of the World and know in what counterfeit shapes and deceitful vizards times present represent on the stage things past I do believe them little more then things to come Some have been of my opinion and endeavoured to write the History of their own lives wherein Moses hath out-gone them all and left not onely the story of his life but as some will have it of his death also Sect. 30 It is a riddle to me how this story of Oracles hath not worm'd out of the World that doubtful conceit of Spirits and Witches how so many learned heads should so far forget their Metaphysicks and destroy the ladder and scale of creatures as to question the existence of Spirits for my part * I have ever believed and do now know that there are Witches they that doubt of these do not onely deny them but spirits and are obliquely and upon consequence a sort not of Infidels but Atheists Those that to confute their incredulity desire to see apparitions shall questionless never behold any ‖ nor have the power to be so much as Witches the Devil hath them already in a heresie as capital as Witchcraft and to appear to them were but to convert them Of all the delusions wherewith he deceives mortality there is not any that puzleth me more than the Legerdemain of Changelings I do not credit those transformations of reasonable creatures into beasts or that the Devil hath a power to transpeciate a man into a Horse who tempted Christ as a trial of his Divinity to convert but stones into bread I could believe that Spirits use with man the act of carnality and that in both sexes I conceive they may assume steal or contrive a body wherein there may be action enough to content decrepit lust or passion to satisfie more active veneries yet in both without
action that it is a lesson to be good and we are forced to be virtuous by the book Again the Practice of men holds not an equal pace yea and often runs counter to their Theory we naturally know what is good but naturally pursue what is evil the Rhetorick wherewith I perswade another cannot perswade my self there is a depraved appetite in us that will with patience hear the learned instructions of Reason but yet perform no farther than agrees to its own irregular humour In brief we all are monsters that is a composition of Man and Beast wherein we must endeavour to be as the Poets fancy that wise man Chiron that is to have the Region of Man above that of Beast and Sense to sit but at the feet of Reason Lastly I do desire with God that all but yet affirm with men that few shall know Salvation that the bridge is narrow the passage straight unto life yet those who do confine the Church of God either to particular Nations Churches or Families have made it far narrower then our Saviour ever meant it Sect. 56 * The vulgarity of those judgements that wrap the Church of God in Strabo's cloak and restrain it unto Europe seem to me as bad Geographers as Alexander who thought he had Conquer'd all the World when he had not subdued the half of any part thereof For we cannot deny the Church of God both in Asia and Africa if we do not forget the Peregrinations of the Apostles the deaths of the Martyrs the Sessions of many and even in our reformed judgement lawful Councils held in those parts in the minority and nonage of ours Nor must a few differences more remarkable in the eyes of man than perhaps in the judgement of God excommunicate from Heaven one another much less those Christians who are in a manner all Martyrs maintaining their Faith in the noble way of perfecution and serving God in the Fire whereas we honour him in the Sunshine 'T is true we all hold there is a number of Elect and many to be saved yet take our Opinions together and from the confusion thereof there will be no such thing as salvation nor shall any one be saved For first the Church of Rome condemneth us we likewise them the Sub-reformists and Sectaries sentence the Doctrine of our Church as damnable the Atomist or Familist reprobates all these and all these them again Thus whilst the Mercies of God do promise us Heaven our conceits and opinions exclude us from that place There must be therefore more than one St. Peter particular Churches and Sects usurp the gates of Heaven and turn the key against each other and thus we go to Heaven against each others wills conceits and opinions and with as much uncharity as ignorance do err I fear in points not only of our own but one anothers salvation Sect. 57 I believe many are saved who to man seem reprobated and many are reprobated who in the opinion and sentence of man stand elected there will appear at the Last day strange and unexpected examples both of his Justice and his Mercy and therefore to define either is folly in man and insolency even in the Devils those acute and subtil spirits in all their sagacity can hardly divine who shall be saved which if they could Prognostick their labour were at an end nor need they compass the earth seeking whom they may devour * Those who upon a rigid application of the Law sentence Solomon unto damnation condemn not onely him but themselves and the whole World for by the Letter and written Word of God we are without exception in the state of Death but there is a prerogative of God and an arbitrary pleasure above the Letter of his own Law by which alone we can pretend unto Salvation and through which Solomon might be as easily saved as those who condemn him Sect. 58 The number of those who pretend unto Salvation and those infinite swarms who think to pass through the eye of this Needle have much amazed me That name and compellation of little Flock doth not comfort but deject my Devotion especially when I reflect upon mine own unworthiness wherein according to my humble apprehensions I am below them all I believe there shall never be an Anarchy in Heaven but as there are Hierarchies amongst the Angels so shall there be degrees of priority amongst the Saints Yet is it I protest beyond my ambition to aspire unto the first ranks my desires onely are and I shall be happy therein to be but the last man and bring up the Rere in Heaven Sect. 59 Again I am confident and fully perswaded yet dare not take my oath of my Salvation I am as it were sure and do believe without all doubt that there is such a City as Constantinople yet for me to take my Oath thereon were a kind of Perjury because I hold no infallible warrant from my own sense to confirm me in the certainty thereof And truly though many pretend an absolute certainty of their Salvation yet when an humble Soul shall contemplate our own unworthiness she shall meet with many doubts and suddenly find how little we stand in need of the Precept of St. Paul Work out your salvation with fear and trembling That which is the cause of my Election I hold to be the cause of my Salvation which was the mercy and beneplacit of God before I was or the foundation of the World Before Abraham was I am is the saying of Christ yet is it true in some sense if I say it of my self for I was not onely before my self but Adam that is in the Idea of God and the decree of that Synod held from all Eternity And in this sense I say the World was before the Creation and at an end before it had a beginning and thus was I dead before I was alive though my grave be England my dying place was Paradise and Eve miscarried of me before she conceiv'd of Cain Sect. 60 Insolent zeals that do decry good Works and rely onely upon Faith take not away merit for depending upon the efficacy of their Faith they enforce the condition of God and in a more sophistical way do seem to challenge Heaven It was decreed by God that only those that lapt in the water like Dogs should have the honour to destroy the Midianites yet could none of those justly challenge or imagine he deserved that honour thereupon I do not deny but that true Faith and such as God requires is not onely a mark or token but also a means of our Salvation but where to find this is as obscure to me as my last end And if our Saviour could object unto his own Disciples and Favourites a Faith that to the quantity of a grain of Mustard-seed is able to remove Mountains surely that which we boast of is not any thing or at the most but a remove from nothing This is the Tenor of my belief
course of Nature and of Reason it is a mighty great blessing were it but in this regard that it giveth time leave to vent and boyl away the unquietnesses and turbulencies that follow our passions and to wean our selves gently from carnal affections and at the last to drop with ease and willingness like ripe fruit from the Tree as I remember Plotinus finely discourseth in one of his Eneads For when before the Season it is plucked off with violent hands or shaken down by rude and boysterous winds it carrieth along with it an indigested raw tast of the Wood and hath an unpleasant aigerness it its juyce that maketh it unfit for use till long time hath mellowed it And peradventure it may be so backward as in stead of ripening it may grow rotten in the very Center In like manner Souls that go out of their Bodies with affection to those Objects they leave behind them which usually is as long as they can relish them do retain still even in their Separation a by as and a languishing towards them which is the Reason why such terrene Souls appear oftenest in Coemeteries and Charnel-houses and not that moral one which our Author giveth For Life which is union with the body being that which carnal souls have straightest affection to and that they are loathest to be separated from their unquiet Spirit which can never naturally lose the impressions it had wrought in it at the time of its driving out lingereth perpetually after that dear Consort of his The impossibility cannot cure them of their impotent desires they would fain be alive again Iterumque ad tarda revierti Corpora Quae lucis miseris tam dira cupido And to this cause peradventure may be reduced the strange effect which is frequently seen in England When at the approach of the Murderer the slain body suddenly bleedeth afresh For certainly the Souls of them that are treacherously murdered by surprize use to leave their bodies with extream unwillingness and with vehement indignation against them that force them to so unprovided and abhorred a passage That Soul then to wreak its evil talent against the hated Murderer and to draw a just and desired revenge upon his head would do all it can to manifest the author of the fact To speak it cannot for in it self it wanteth Organs of voice and those it is parted from are now grown too heavy and are too benummed for it to give motion unto Yet some change it desireth to make in the body which it hath so vehement inclinations to and therefore is the aptest for it to work upon It must then endeavour to cause a motion in the subtilest and most fluid parts and consequently the most moveable ones of it This can be nothing but the Blood which then being violently moved must needs gush out at those places where it findeth issues Our Author cannot believe that the World will perish upon the ruines of its own principles But Mr. White hath demonstrated the end of it upon natural Reason And though the precise time for that general Destruction be inscrutable yet he learnedly sheweth an ingenious Rule whereby to measure in some sort the duration of it without being branded as our Author threatneth with convincible and Statute-madness or with impiety And whereas he will have the work of this last great Day the Summer up of all past days to imply annihilation and thereupon interesseth God only in it I must beg leave to contradict him namely in this Point and to affirm that the letting loose then of the activest Element to destroy this face of the World will but beget a change in it and that no annihilation can proceed from God Almighty For his Essence being as I said before self-existence it is more impossible that Not-being should flow from him than that cold should flow immediately from fire or darkness from the actual presence of light I must needs acknowledge that where he ballanceth Life and Death against one another and considereth that the latter is to be a Kind of nothing for a moment to become a pure Spirit within one instant and what followeth of this strong thought is extream handsomely said and argueth very gallant and generous Resolutions in him To exemplifie the Immortality of the Soul he needeth not have recourse to the Philosophers-stone His own store furnisheth him with a most pregnant one of reviving a Plant the same numerical Plant out of his own ashes But under his favour I believe his experiment will fail if under the notion of the same he comprehendeth all the Accidents that first accompanied that Plant for since in the ashes there remaineth onely the fixed Salt I am very confident that all the Colour and much of the Odour and Taste of it is flown away with the Volatile Salt What should I say of his making so particular a Narration of personal things and private thoughts of his own the knowledge whereof cannot much conduce to any mans betterment which I make account is the chief end of his writing this Discourse As where he speaketh of the soundness of his Body of the course of his Diet of the coolness of his Blood at the Summer-Solstice of his age of his neglect of an Epitaph how long he hath lived or may live what Popes Emperours Kings Grand-Seigniors he hath been Contemporary unto and the like Would it not be thought that he hath a special good opinion of himself and indeed he hath reason when he maketh such great Princes the Landmarks in the Chronology of himself Surely if he were to write by retale the particulars of his own Story and Life it would be a notable Romance since he telleth us in one total Sum it is a continued Miracle of thirty years Though he creepeth gently upon us at the first yet he groweth a Gyant an Atlas to use his own expression at the last But I will not censure him as he that made Notes upon Balsac's Letters and was angry with him for vexing his Readers with Stories of his Cholicks and voiding of Gravel I leave this kind of expressions without looking further into them In the next place my Lord I shall take occasion from our Author 's setting so main a difference between moral Honesty and Vertue or being vertuous to use his own phrase out of an inbred loyalty to Vertue and on the other side being vertuous for a rewards sake to discourse a little concerning Vertue in this life and the effects of it afterwards Truely my Lord however he seemeth to prefer this later I cannot but value the other much before it if we regard the nobleness and heroickness of the nature and mind from whence they both proceed And if we consider the Journeys end to which each of them carrieth us I am confident the first yieldeth nothing to the second but indeed both meet in the period of Beatitude To clear this point which is very well worth the wisest man's seriousest thought