Selected quad for the lemma: mercy_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
mercy_n	goodness_n	great_a	sin_n	6,173	5	4.6117	4	true

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A52293	A conference with a theist part I / by William Nicholls.	Nicholls, William, 1664-1712.	1698 (1698)	Wing N1093; ESTC R25508	121,669	301

rather than own a God who would permit any thing to cross their humour Now you make use of the Inverse of that Argument and would prove that because there is a good God therefore he would never suffer such a wicked action of the Devil But that which is the ground of both these Arguments is an unreasonable mistake viz. the opinion that a Just and Wise God cannot permit Evil. Now it is true that there are some part of natural Evils which God could not permit such as might happen to the inanimate parts of the Creation as any blundered irregular formation of their parts any defect in their nature or constitution For all such Evil as this must then needs proceed from God who gave them this irregular nature in which they could have no hand themselves Therefore we freely own that God cannot permit Evil of this kind because such permission were tantamount to the doing it All the question is whether he cannot permit moral Evil among free Agents and such natural Evils which are the punishments of them Now unless we grant that he could it is impossible there should be any such thing as a free Agent which is to act on either part For if God could not permit Evil then Man could do nothing but Good then his actions would all be determined on one side and so could be no more said to be free than a Stone is such which necessarily falls downwards Nor does this permission 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 reflect upon God's goodness for God only gives this Free-Will and Power to his Creatures which is an act of goodness but it is owing to their ill use of it that they commit Evil. But you 'll say it is not the Difficulty how to reconcile God's Holiness with the permission of Evil but how to think he should permit an Evil of so vast a consequence Now to this I answer This would have destroy'd Free-Will 1st It must be granted that Adam and Eve who together with the Devil committed this Evil were free Agents and therefore all the restraints God could lay upon them to resist the Devil's Temptations must be such as were consonant to their Free-Will For God to have given them such powerful Influxes of his Spirit as to have made it impossible for them to Sin would have been in effect to have altered their natures and to have changed them from free to necessary Agents For that would have been to have over-ruled them by as absolute an Impulse as he does Stones and Trees All that we can suppose reasonable for God to do is to dispense to them such abundantly sufficient measures of his Grace as might enable them to encounter with the strongest Temptation but yet in such a way as might be consistent with their Reason and Free-Will Now if such an Angelical Guard as you would have had to keep them from Sinning had been so continually about them as to hinder the Devil from proposing any Temptation or our first Parents from hearkning to any if they had supernaturally over-ruled the Organs of their Bodies or the Inclinations of their Minds upon the least Tendency to Evil God then would not have dealt with them as with Men but as with Brutes Besides God had then put them upon a state of Probation but to have over-ruled their actions and determined them only on one side would have been to have run counter to his own Design it would have been to have put them upon a Trial and at the same time to have rendered them impossible to be cried So ●hat let the Miscarriage be of never so great consequence we cannot suppose that God should act contrary to his Wisdom and Eternal Reason for the prevention of it Man had sufficient assistance 2ly There is no reason God should have interposed his Omnipotence to have hindered this Sin because they had Power of their own superabundantly sufficient to avoid it We alas in this lapsed condition of ours find a great deal of difficulty to encounter with our Temptations we feel a great blindness in our Understandings and a Crookedness in our Wills we experience often an inclination to do Evil even before the Temptation comes But our first Parents in their primitive rectitude of nature stood possessed of every thing as advantageous the other way they had an understanding nuturally large and capacious and fully illuminated by the Divine Spirit their Will was naturally inclined to the supreme good and could not without Violence to its nature make choice of any other Now when God had made such ample provision for Mankind to secure them from Sin we can never suppose it necessary for God to employ his Almighty Power besides for this would be in a manner actum agere to do that for them again which he had sufficiently done for them before But if notwithstanding all these mighty advantages towards a state of Impeccancy they would resolutely break through them all their unparallell'd Stubbornness and Disobedience is to be blamed and not the insufficiency of God's Grace or the defect of his Almighty assistance 3ly This Miscarriage was repared by God's mercy afterwards What God did not by his absolute Power hinder before he did by his Mercy sufficiently repair afterwards For presently after the Fall God the Father agreed to the Mediatorship propounded by God the Son and then Eternal Life through the blood of our Saviour was given upon our sincere though not unsinning Obedience after Death as it was without Death before And by this wonderfull mercy after so great a provocation the Goodness of God is more abundantly manifested than by hindring the Sin at first as men are more sensibly affected with a Pardon graciously offered after the conviction of a Disobedience than they are by a Dispensation for it or a Connivence at it Phil. As for this matter Credentius of the Mediatorship we shall talk more hereafter but let us go through the Garden first And the first thing we meet withal is the two Trees of singular qualities indeed such as silence all the strange relations in the Plinies and Theophrastus's I mean the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life Now what tolerable sense can be put upon the relation of these two Trees The Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil Why can ever any one thing that Morality grew upon Trees This I 'll warrant you is such a kind of an Ethical Tree as Porphyry's is in Logick It is very strange Credentius that we should take so much pains for a little Science when our first Parents could get to be so knowing only by eating of Apples And I am as much perplexed too about your other Tree The Tree of Life Now I can never beat it into my dull Brains how Eternity should grow upon the Tops of Trees for my part I should as soon believe that Lobsters and Red-Herrings grew there Nor if it be asserted O.R. p. 42. that this