things and does as it were draw them up into its beams SECT XVI An Answer to that Objection which concerns the Will of God shewing that Liberty in the Power or Principle is no where a Perfection where there is not an Indifferency in the things or actions about which it is conversant TO the second part of the Objection the strength whereof is that * to tye up God in his actions to the reason of things destroys his Liberty Absoluteness and Independency I answer it is no imperfection for God to be determined to Good It is no bondage slavery or contraction to be bound up to the eternal Laws of Right and Justice It is the greatest impotency and weakness in the world to have a power to evil and there is nothing so diametrically opposite to the very being and nature of God Stat pro ratione voluntas unless it be as a redargution and check to impudent and daring Inquirers is an account no where justifiable The more any Being partakes of reason and understanding the worse is the imputation of acting arbitrariously pro imperio We can pardon it in Women and Children as those from whom we do not expect that they should act upon any higher principle but for a man of reason and understanding that hath the Laws of goodness and rectitude which are as the Laws of the Medes and Persians that cannot be altered engraven upon his mind for him to cast off these golden reins and to set up arbitrarious Will for his Rule and Guide is a piece of intolerable rashness and presumption This is an infallible rule that liberty in the power or principle is no where a perfection where there is not an indifferency in the things or actions about which it is converâ—ant And therefore it is a piece of our weakness and imbecillity that we have nature so indetermined to what is good These things need no proof indeed cannot well be proved otherwise than they prove themselves for they are of immediate truth and prove themselves they will to a pure unprejudiced mind SECT XVII That the Discourse hitherto does not infer any dependency of God upon any thing without himself But only occasions are offered to him of acting according to his own intimate nature and essence 2. * OUR former Discourse doth not infer any dependency of God upon any thing without himself for God is not excited to his actions by any forreign or extrinsecal motives what he does proceeds from the eternal immutable respects and relations or reasons of things and where are these to be found but in the eternal and divine Wisdom For what can infinite Wisdom be but a steady and immoveable comprehension of all those natures and relations and therefore God in his actions does not look abroad but only consults if I may so speak the Idea's of his own mind What Creatures do is but the offering a particular case for the reducement of a general principle into a particular action or the presentment of an occasion for God to act according to the principles of his own nature when we say that God pardoneth Sin upon repentance God is not moved to an act of Grace from any thing without himself for this is a Principle in the divine Wisdom that pardon of Sin to repenting Sinners is a thing very suitable to infinite goodness and this Principle is a piece of the Divine Nature Therefore when God upon a particular act of repentance puts forth a particular act of grace it is but as it were a particular instance to the general rule which is a portion of Divine Perfection when 't is said to him that hath shall be given and he shall have abundance the meaning is He that walks up unto that light and improves that strength that God hath already communicated unto him shall have more abundant Incomes of light and strength from God It doth not follow that God is moved from without to impart his Grace For this is a branch of Divine Wisdom it is agreeable to the infinite goodness of God to take notice of and reward the sincere though weak endeavours of his Creatures after him so that what is from abroad is but a particular occasion to those Divine Principles to exert and put forth themselves SECT XVIII The second part of the Discourse which briefly treats of Truth in the Subject what it is What in God and what in the Creature And that in both it is A Representation or Conception in the mind conformable to the unchangeable Natures and mutual Respects of things THus have we spoken concerning the truth of things or Truth in the Object It follows that we speak Concerning Truth in the power or faculty which we called Truth in the Subject which we shall dispatch in a few words * Truth in the power or faculty is nothing else but a conformity of its conceptions or Idea's unto the natures and relations of things which in God we may call an actual steady immoveable eternal Omniformity as Plotinus calls the Divine Intellect 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 which you have largely described by him And this the Platonists truly call the Intellectual World for here are the natures of all things pure and unmix'd purged from all those dregs refined from all that dross and alloy which cleave unto them in their particular instances All inferiour and sublunary things not excluding Man himself have their excrescences and defects Exorbitances or privations are moulded up in their very frames and constitutions There is somewhat extraneous heterogeneous and preternatural in all things here below as they exist amongst us but in that other world like the most purely fined gold they shine in their native and proper glory Here is the first goodness the benign Parent of the whole Creation with his numerous off-spring the infinite throng of Created Beings Here is the fountain of Eternal Love with all its streams and rivulets Here is the Sun of uncreated glory surrounded with all his rayes and beams Here are the eternal and indispensible Laws of right and Justice the immediate and indemonstrable principles of Truth and goodness Here are steady and immoveable rules for all cases and actions however circumstantiated from which the Will of God though never so absolute and independent from everlasting to everlasting shall never depart one Tittle * Now all that Truth that is in any Created Being is by participation and derivation from this first understanding and fountain of intellectual light And that truth in the power of faculty is nothing but the conformity or its conceptions or Ideas with the natures and relations of things is clear and evident in it self and necessarily follows from what hath been formerly proved concerning the truth of things themselves * antecedently to any understanding or will * for things are what they are and cannot be otherwise without a contradiction and their mutual respects and dependences Eternal and unchangeable as hath been already shew'd so that the
I noted above the most true and perfective libertie that can be conceived in any Being is that without any check or tug or lubricity and unsteadiness it act according to its own life and nature And what greater Absoluteness than this For that which acts according to its own nature acts also according to its own will or appetite And what greater Independencie than to have a power upon which there is no restraint nor any modification of the exercise thereof but what is taken from that which has this power For the eternal and immutable reasons of things are originally and Paradigmatically in the Divine Understanding of which those in the Creatures are but the Types and transitorie Shadows The Author in this Section has spoke so well to this present Point that it is needless to superadd any thing more Sect. 17. pag. 191. In this seventeenth Section the Author more fully answers that Objection As if Gods acting according to the reasons of things inferred a dependency of him upon something without himself Which he does with that clearness and satisfaction that it is enough to commend it to the perusal of the Reader Sect. 18. pag. 193. Truth in the power or faculty is nothing else but a Conformity of its conceptions or Idea's unto the natures and relations of things which in God we may call c. The Description which follows is though the Author nowhere takes notice of that distinction a Description of the Divine Understanding quatenus Exhibitive not Conceptive or Speculative The Truth of which latter does indeed consist in the Conformity of its Conception unto the natures and relations of things but not of things ad extra but unto the natures habitudes and respects of things as they are necessarily eternally and immutably represented in the Divine Understanding Exhibitive which is the Intellectual World which the Author here describes and 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the vast Champion or boundless field of Truth So that in those words unto the natures and relations of things which in God we call an actual steady immoveable eternal omniformity c. Which is to be referred to the Natures and Relations of things as is evident to any that well considers the place And with this sense that which follows the description is very coherent Pag. 194. Now all that Truth that is in any created Being is by participation and derivation from this first Vnderstanding that is from the Divine Understanding quatenus Exhibitive and Fountain of Intellectual Light That is according to the Platonick Dialect of those steady unalterable and eternal Idea's 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 of the natures and respects of things represented there in the Divine Understanding Exhibitive in their Objective Existence In conformity to which the Truth in all created things and Understandings doth necessarily consist Pag. 195. Antecedently to any Vnderstanding or Will c. That is Antecedently to any Understanding Conceptive Observative or Speculative whatsoever or to any Will but not antecedently to the Divine Understanding Exhibitive For that is antecedent to all created things and contains the steady fixt eternal and unalterable natures and respects or habitudes before they had or could have any Being I say it contains the Truth and measure of them nor can they be said to be truly what they are any further than they are found conformable to these eternal immutable Idea's Patterns and Paradigms which necessarily and eternally are exerted and immutably in the Divine Understanding Exhibitive And of these Paradigmatical things there what follows is most truly affirmed Pag. 195. For things are what they are and cannot be otherwise without a Contradiction c. This was true before any external or created things did exist True of every Form in that eternal Omniformity which the Platonists call the Intellectual World as the Author has observed above in this Section A Circle is a Circle and a Triangle a Triangle there nor can be otherwise without a Contradiction And so of a Globe Cylinder Horse Eagle Whale Fire Water Earth their Ideal fixt and determinate natures habitudes aptitudes and respects necessarily and immutably there exhibited are such as they are nor can be otherwise without a contradiction And because it is thus in the Divine Nature or Essence which is the root and fountain of the exteriour Creation the same is true in the created Beings themselves Things are there also what they are nor can they be a Globe suppose or a Cylinder and yet not be a Globe or a Cylinder at once or be both a Globe and Cylinder at once and so of the rest As this is a contradiction in the Intellectual World so is it in the Exteriour or Material World and so because it is so in the Intellectual For the steadiness and immutableness of the nature of all things and of their respects and habitudes arise from the necessity immutability and unchangeableness of the Divine Essence and Life which is that serene unclouded undisturbed and unalterable Eternity where all things with their respects and aptitudes their order and series are necessarily steadily and immutably exhibited at once P. 195. As they conform agree with the things themselves c. The more Platonical sense and more conformable to that we have given of other passages of this learned and ingenious Author is if we understand the things themselves at least primarily to be the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 of Plato which is the term which he bestows upon his Idea's which are the Patterns or Paradigms according to which every thing is made and is truly such so far forth as it is found to agree with the Patterns or Originals in which all Archetypal Truth is immutably lodged All created things are but the Copies of these these the Original the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or Writing it self from whence Plato calls them 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 as if those Archetypal Forms were the forms or things themselves but the numerous created Beings here below only the Copies or Imitations of them Wherefore no Conception or Idea's that we frame or any Intellect else as Conceptive merely and Speculative can be true but so far as they agree with these 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 in that sense we have declared or with creâ—ted things so far as they are answerable to the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or Archetypal things themselves And from hence is sufficiently understood the nature of Truth in the Subject These few cursory Notes I thought worth the while to make upon these two learned and ingenious Writers the Subjects they have written on being of no mean importance and use and the things written in such a time of their age as if men be born under an auspicious Planet best fits their minds for the relishing and ruminating upon such noble Theories For I dare say when they wrote these Discourses or Treatises they had neither of them reached so much as half the age of man as it is ordinarily computed
were of this opinion Wherefore I think we owe so much at least to the Memory of those grave Sages as to examine this Doctrine of theirs and if neither of the later Hypotheses can ease our anxious minds or free themselves from absurdities and this Grey Dogma fairly clear all doubts and be obnoxious to no such contradictions I see no reason but we may give it a favourable admittance till something else appear more concinnous and rational Therefore let us take some account of what the two first opinions alledge one against another and how they are proved by their promoters and defendants Now if they be found unable to withstand the shock of one anothers opposition we may reasonably cast our eyes upon the third to see what force it brings to vouch its interest and how it will behave it self in the encounter CHAP. II. Daily creation of Souls is inconsistent with the Divine Attributes THe first of these opinions that offers it self to Tryal is that God daily creates humane souls which immediately are united unto the bodies that Generation hath prepared for them Of this side are our later Divines and the generality of the Schoolmen But not to be born down by Authorities Let us consider what reason stands against it Therefore 1 If our Souls came immediately out of the hands of God when we came first into these bodies Whence then are those enormously brutish inclinations that strong natural proclivity to vice and impiety that are exstant in the children of men All the works of God bear his image and are perfect in their kind Purity is his nature and what comes from him proportionably to its capacity partakes of his perfections Every thing in the natural world bears the superscription of his wisdom and goodness and the same fountain cannot send forth sweet waters and bitter Therefore 't is a part of our allegiance to our Maker to believe * that he made us pure and innocent and if we were but just then framed by him when we were united with these terrestrial bodies whence should we contract such degenerate propensions Some tell us that this impurity was immediately derived from the bodies we are united to But how is it possible that purely passive insensible Matter should transfuse habits or inclinations into a Nature that is quite of another Make and Quality How can such a cause produce an effect so disproportionate * Matter can do nothing but by motion and what relation hath that to a moral contagion How can a Body that is neither capable of sense nor sin infect a soul as soon as 't is united to it with such vitious debauched dispositions But others think to evade by saying That we have not these depravities in our natures but contract them by Custome education and evil usages How then comes it about that those that have had the same care and industry used upon them and have been nurtured under the same discipline and severe oversight do so vastly and even to wonder differ in their inclinations * How is it that those that are under continual temptations to vice are yet kept within the bounds of vertue and sobriety And yet that others that have strong motives and allurements to the contrary should violently break out into all kinds of extravagance and impiety Sure there is somewhat more in the matter than those general causes which may be common to both and which many times have quite contrary effects 2. This Hypothesis that God continually Creates humane souls in these bodies consists not with the honour of the Divine Attributes For 1. How stands it with the goodness and benignity of that God who is Love to put pure and immaculate spirits who were capable of living to him and with him into such bodies as will presently defile them deface his image pervert all their powers and faculties incline them to hate what he most loves and love what his Soul hateth and that without any knowledge or concurrence of theirs will quite marre them as soon as he hath made them and of dear Children render them rebels or enemies and in a moment from being like Angels transform them into the perfect resemblance of the first Apostates Devils Is this an effect of those tender mercies that are over all his works And 2. Hath that Wisdom that hath made all things to operate according to their natures and provided them with whatever is necessary to that end made myriads of noble Spirits capable of as noble operations and presently plunged them into such a condition wherein they cannot act at all according to their first and proper dispositions but shall be necessitated to the quite contrary and have other noxious and depraved inclinations fatally imposed upon their pure natures Doth that wisdom that hath made all things in number weight and measure and disposed them in such exact harmony and proportions use to act so ineptly And that in the best and noblest pieces of his Creation Doth it use to make and presently destroy To frame one thing and give it such or such a nature and then undo what he had done and make it another And if there be no such irregular methods used in the framing of inferiour Creatures what reason have we to suspect that the Divine Wisdom did so vary from its self in its noblest composures And 3 Is it not a great affront to the Divine Jâ—stice to suppose as we are commonly taught that asâ—oon as we are born yea and in the Womb we are obnoxious to eternal wrath and torments if our Souls are then immediately created out of nothing For To be just is to give every one his due and how can endless unsupportable punishments be due to innocent Spirits who but the last moment came righteous pure and immaculate out of their Creators hands and have not done or thought any thing since contrary to his will or Laws nor were in any the least capacity of sinning I but the first of our order our General head and Representative sinned and we in him thus we contract guilt as soon as we have a Being and are lyable to the punishment of his disobedience This is thought to solve all and to clear God from any shadow of unrighteousness But whatever truth there is in the thing it self I think it cannot stand upon the Hypothesis of the Souls immediate Creation nor yet justifie God in his proceedings For 1. If I was then newly Created when first in this body what was Adam to me who sinned above 5000 years before I came out of nothing If he represented me it must be as I was in his Loins that is in him as an effect in a cause But so I was not according to this Doctrine for my soul owns no Father but God its immediate progenitour And what am I concern'd then in his sins which had never my will or consent more than in the sins of Mahomâ—t or Julius Caesar Nay than in the sins of Beelzebub or
and supposeth a conflict Therefore we say that God is good and holy but not vertuous Take away a possibility of evil and in the Creature there is no moral goodness And then no Reward no Pleasure no Happiness Therefore in sum 5ly The divine Goodness is manifested in making all Creatures sutably to those Idea's of their natures which he hath in his All-comprehensive Wisdom And their good and happiness consists in acting according to those natures and in being furnisht with all things necessary for such actions Now the divine Wisdom is no arbitrary thing that can change or alter those setled immutable Idea's of things that are there represented It lopps not off essential Attributes of some Beings to inâ—culate them upon others But distinctly comprehending all things assigns each Being its proper nature and qualities And the Divine goodness according to the wise direction of the eternal Intellect in like distinct and orderly manner produceth all things viz. according to all the variety of their respective Idea's in the divine wisdom * Wherefore as the goodness of God obligeth him not to make every Planet a fixt Star or every Star a Sun So neither doth it oblige him to make every degree of Life a rational Soul or every Soul an impeccable Angel * For this were to tye him to contradictions Since therefore such an order of Beings as rational and happy though free and therefore mutable creatures were distinctly comprehended in the Divine Wisdom It was an effect of God's Goodness to bring them into being even in such a condition and in such manner as in their eternal Idea's they were represented Thus then we see it is not contrary to the infinite plenitude of the Divine Goodness * that we should have been made peccable and lyable to defection And being thus in our very essential constitutions lapsible 't was no defect in the goodness of our Maker that he did not interpose by his absolute omnipotence to prevent our actual praevarication and apostasie Since his goodness obligeth him not to secure us upon any terms whatever but upon such as may most promote the general good and advantage And questionless 't was much better that such as would wilfully depart from the laws of their blessed natures and break through all restraints of the divine commands should feel the smart of their disobedience than that providence should disorder the constitution of nature to prevent the punishment which they drew upon themselves Since those apostate spirits remain instances to those that stand of the divine justice and severity against sinners and so may contribute not a little to their security And for that long night of silence in which multitudes ofsouls are buried before they descend into terrestrial matter it is but the due reward of their former disobedience for which considering the happy circumstances in which they were made they deserv'd to be nothing for ever And their re-instating in a condition of life and self-injoyment after so highly culpable delinquencies is a great instance of the over-flowing fulness of the divine compassion and benignity Thus then we see That Gods making us lapsible and permitting us to fall is no prejudice in the least to the infinite fecundity of his goodness and his making all things best So that mine Argument for Praeexistence bottom'd on this Foundation stands yet firm and immoveable notwithstanding the rude assault of this objection From which I pass to a fourth CHAP. IX A 4th Objection against the Argument from God's goodness viz. That it will conclude as well that the World is infinite and eternal Answered The conclusion of the second Argument for Praeexistence THerefore fourthly it will be excepted If we may argue from the divine goodness which always doth what is best for the Praeexistence of Souls then we may as reasonably thence conclude that the world is both infinite and eternal since an infinite communication of goodness is better than a finite To this because I doubt I have distrest the Readers patience already I answer briefly 1 Every one that believes the infiniteness of Gods goodness is as much obliged to answer this objection as I am For it will be said infinite goodness doth good infinitely and consequently the effects to which it doth communicate are infinite For if they are not so it might have communicated to more and thereby have done more good than now 't is supposed to do and by consequence now is not infinite And to affirm that goodness is infinite where what it doth and intends to do is but finite will be said to be a contradiction since goodness is a relative term and in God always respects somewhat ad extra For he cannot be said to be good to himself he being a nature that can receive no additional perfection Wherefore this Objection makes no more against mine Argument than it doth against the Infinity of the Divine Goodness and therefore I am no more concern'd in iâ— than others Yea 2 ly the Scripture affirms that which is the very strength of mine Argument viz. That God made all things best Very Good saith our Translation but the Original 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 and 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 is a particle of the Superlative And therefore every one that owns its sacred Authority is interested against this Objection For it urgeth it had been far more splendid glorious and magnificent for God to have made the universe commensurate to his own immensity and to have produced effects of his power and greatness where ever he himself is viz. in infinite space and duration than to have confined his omnipotence to work only in one little spot of an infinite inane capacity and to begin to act but tâ—other day Thus then the late creation and finiteness of the World seem to conflict with the undoubted oracle of truth as well as with mine Argument and therefore the Objection drawn thence is of no validity 3 Those that have most strenuously defended the orthodox doctrine against the old opinion of the eternity and infinity of the world * have asserted it to be impossible in the nature of the thing And sure the divine benignity obligeth him not to do contradictions or such things as in the very notion of them are impossible But in the case of Praeexistence no such thing can be reasonably pretended as above hath been declared and therefore there is no escaping by this Evasion neither Nor can there any thing else be urged to this purpose but what whoever believes the infinity of the divine bounty will be concern'd to answer And therefore 't will make no more against me than against a truth on all hands confessed Let me only add this That 't is more becoming us to inlarge our apprehensions of things so as that they may suit the Divine Beneficence than to draw it down to a complyance with our little schemes and narrow models Thus then I have done with the Argument for Praeexistence drawn from the
infinite fulness is to be communicating and overflowing And the most congruous apprehension that we can entertain of the Infinite and eternal Deity is * to conceive him as an immense and all glorious Sun that is continually communicating and sending abroad its beams and brightness which conception of our Maker if 't were deeply imprinted on us would I am confident set our apprehensions right in many Theories and chase away those black and dismal notions which too many have given harbour to But I come to erect the Second Pillar 2 Then There is an exact Geometrical Justice that runs through the Vniverse and is interwoven in the contexture of things THis is a result of that wise and Almighty Goodness that praesides over all things For this Justice is but the distributing to every thing according to the requirements of its nature And that benign wisdom that contrived and framed the natures of all Beings doubtless so provided that they should be suitably furnisht with all things proper for their respective conditions And that this Nemesis should be twisted into the very natural constitutions of things themselves is methinks very reasonable since questionless Almighty Wisdom could so perfectly have formed his works at first as that all things that he saw were regular just and for the good of the Vniverse should have been brought about by those stated Laws which we call nature without an ordinary engagement of absolute power to effect theâ— And it seems to me to be very becoming the wise Author of all things so to have made them in the beginning as that by their own internal spring and wheels they should orderly bring about whatever he intended them for without his often immediate interposal For this looks like a more magnificent apprehension of the Divine power and Prescience since it supposeth him from everlasting ages to have foreseen all future occurrences and so wonderfully to have seen and constituted the great machina of the world that the infinite variety of motions therein should effect nothing but what in his eternal wisdom he had concluded fit and decorous But as for that which was so it should as certainly be compast by the Laws he appointed long ago as if his omnipotence were at work every moment On the contrary to engage Gods absolute and extraordinary power in all events and occurrences of things is mâ—sâ—â—ms to think meanly of his wisdom as if he had made the world so as that it should need omnipotence every now and then to mend it or to bring about those his destinations which by a shorter way he could have effected by his instrument Nature Can any one say that our supposition derogates from the Divine concourse or Providence For on these depend continually both the being and operations of all things since without them they would cease to act and return to their old nothing And doubtless God hath not given the ordering of things out of his own hands but holds the power to alter innovate or change the course of nature as he pleaseth And to act by extraordinary means by absolute omnipotence when he thinks fit to do so The sum of what I intend is that Gods works are perfect and as his Goodness is discover'd in them so is his Justice wrought into their very essential constitutions so that we need not suppose him to be immediately engaged in every event and all distributions of things in the world or upon all occasions to exercise his power in extraordinary actions but that he leaves such managements to the Oeconomy of second causes And now next to this for they are of kâ—n I raise The third Pillar 3 Things are carried to their proper place and state by the congruity of their natures where this fails we may suppose some arbitrary managements THE Congruity of things is their suitableness to such or such a state or condition And 't is a great Law in the Divine and first constitutions that things should incline and move to what is suitable to their natures This in sensibles is evident in the motions of consent and sympathy And the ascent of light and descent of heavy bodies must I doubt when all is done * be resolv'd into a principle that is not meerly corporeal Yea supposing all such things to be done by the Laws of Mechanicks why may we not conceive that the other rank of Beings Spirits which are not subject to corporeal motions are also dispos'd of by a Law proper to their natures which since we have no other name to express it by we may call congruity We read in the sacred History that Judas went to his own place And 't is very probable that Spirits are conveyed to their proper states and residence * as naturally as the fire mounts or a stone descends The Platonists would have the Soul of the world to be the great Instrument of all such distributions as also of the Phaenomena that are beyond the powers of matter And 't is no unlikely Hypothesis But I have no need to ingage further about this nor yet to speak more of this first part of my Principle since it so nearly depends on what was said in behalf of the former Maxim Yet of the latter we need a word or two When therefore we cannot give account of things either by the Laws of Mechanicks or conceivable Congruities * as likely some things relating to the States of Spirits and immaterial Beings can be resolv'd by neither I say then we may have recourse to the Arbitrary managements of those invisible Ministers of Equity and Justice which without doubt the world is plentifully stored with For it cannot be conceived that those active Spirits are idle or unimployed in the momentous concerns of the Vniverse Yea the sacred volume gives evidence of their interposals in our affairs I shall need mention but that remarkable instance in Daniel of the indeavours of the Prince of Persia and of Grecia to hinder Michael and the other Angel that were ingaged for the affairs of Judea Or if any would evade this what think they of all the apparitions of Angels in the old Testament of their pitching their Tents about us and being Ministring Spirits for our good To name no more such passages Now if those noble Spirits will ingage themselves in our trifling concernments doubtless they are very sedulous in those affairs that tâ—nd to the good and perfection of the Vniverse But to be brief I advance The Fourth Pillar 4 * The Souls of men are capable of living in other bodies besides Terrestrial And never act but in some body or other FOr 1. when I consider how deeply in this state we are immersed in the body I can methinks scarce imagin that presently upon the quitting on 't we shall be stript of all corporeity for this would be such a jump as is seldom or never made in nature since by almost all instances that come under our observation 't is manifest that she useth
to act by due and orderly gradations and takes no precipitous leaps from one extream to another 'T is very probable therefore that in our immediately next state we shall have another vehicle And then 2. considering that our Souls are immediately united to a more tenuious and subtile body here than this gross outside 'T is methinks a good presumption that we shall not be stript and divested of our inward stole also when we leave this dull Earth behind us Especially 3 if we take notice how the highest and noblest faculties and operations of the Soul are help'd on by somewhat that is corporeal and that it imployeth the bodily Spirits in its sublimest exercises we might then be perswaded that it always useth some body or other and never acts without one And 4 since we cannot conceive a Soul to live or act that is insensible and since we know not how there can be sense where there is no union with matter we should me seems be induc'd to think that when 't is disjunct from all body 't is inert and silent * For in all sensations there is corporeal motion as all Philosophy and Experience testifies And these motions become sensible representations by virtue of the union between the Soul and its confederate matter so that when it is loose and dis-united from any body whatsoever it will be unconcern'd in all corporeal motions being a penetrable substance and no sense or perception will be conveyed by them Nor will it make any thing at all against this Argument to urge that there are Nâ—â— and purely unembodied Spirits in the Vniverse which live and act without relation to any body and yet these are not insensible For what they know and how they know we are very incompetent Judges of they being a sort of Spirits specifically distinct from our order and therefore their faculties and operations are of a very diverse consideration from ours So that for us to deny what we may reasonably argue from the contemplation of our own natures because we cannot comprehend the natures of a species of creatures that are far above us is a great mistake in the way of reasoning Now how strange soever this Principle may seem to those whom customary opinions have seasoned with another belief yet considering the Reasons I have alledged I cannot forbear concluding it very probable and if it prove hereafter serviceable for the helping us in some concerning Theories I think the most wary and timerous may admit it till upon good grounds they can disprove it The Fifth Pillar 5 The Soul in every state hath such a body as is fittest for those faculties and operations that it is most inclined to exercise 'T Is a known Maxim That every thing that is is for its operation and the Contriver and Maker of the World hath been so bountiful to all Beings as to furnish them with all suitable and necessary requisites for their respective actions for there are no propensities and dispositions in nature but some way or other are brought into actual exercise otherwise they were meer nullities and impertinent appendices Now for the imployment of all kinds of faculties and the exerting all manner of operations all kinds of instruments will not suffice but only such as are proportion'd and adapted to the exercises they are to be used in and the Agents that imploy them 'T is clear therefore that the Soul of Man a noble and vigorous Agent must be fitted with a suitable body according to the Laws of that exact distributive Justice that runs through the Vniverse and such a one is most suitable as is fittest for those exercises it propends to for the body is the Souls instrument and a necessary requisite of action Whereas should it be otherwise God would then have provided worse for his worthiest Creatures than he hath for those that are of a much inferiour rank and order For if we look about us upon all the Creatures of God that are exposed to our Observation we may seal this Truth with an infallible Induction That there is nothing but what is sitted with all suitable requisites to act according to its nature The Bird hath wings to waft it aloft in the thin and subtile aire the Fish is furnisht with fins to move in her liquid element and all other Animals have Instruments that are proper for their peculiar inclinations So that should it be otherwise in the case of Souls it would be a great blot to the wise managements of Providence and contrary to its usual methods and thus we should be dis-furnisht of the best and most convictive Argument that we have to prove that a Prinoiple of exactest wisdom hath made and ordered all things The Sixth Pillar 6 The Powers and Faculties of the Soul are either 1 Spiritual and Intellectual 2 Sensitive Or 3 Plastick NOw 1 by the intellectual powers I mean all those that relate to the soul in its naked and abstracted conception as it is a spirit and are exercised about immaterial Objects as vertue knowledge and divine love This is the Platonical Nâ—â— and that which we call the mind The two other more immediately relate to its espoused matter For 2 the sensitive are exercised about all the objects of sense and are concerned in all such things as either gratifie or disgust the body And 3 the Plastick are those faculties of the soul whereby it moves and forms the body and are without sense or Animadversion The exercise of the former I call the Higher life and the operations of the latter the lower and the life of the body Now that there are such faculties belonging to our natures and that they are exercised upon such and such objects respectively plain experience avoucheth and therefore I may be excused from going about to prove so universally acknowledged a truth Wherefore I pass to The Seventh Pillar 7 By the same degrees that the higher powers are invigorated the lower are consopited and abated as to their proper exercises è contra 1 THat those Powers should each of them have a tendency to action and in their turns be exercised is but rational to conceive since otherwise they had been supersâ—uous And 2 that they should be inconsistent in the supremest exercise and inactuation is to me as probable For the Soul is a finite and limited Being and therefore cannot operate diverse ways with equal intention at once That is cannot at the same time imploy all her faculties in the highest degree of exercise that each of them is capable of For doubtless did it ingage but one of those alone the operations thereof would be more strong and vigorous than when they are conjunctly exercis'd their Acts and Objects being very divers So that I say that these faculties should act together in the highest way they are capable of seems to be contrary to the nature of the Soul And I am sure it comports not with experience for those that are endowed with an high
not because there is an indispensible relation of Harmony and Proportion betwixt the Terms themselves then it is a thing meerly casual and at the pleasure of God to change his former apprehensions and Idea's of those Truths and to make their contradictories as Evident Radical and Fundamental as themselves but even now were and so Divine Wisdom and Knowledge will be a various sickle and mutable thing a meer tumult and confusion All these consequences infallibly flow from this certain Principle That upon a changeable and uncertain Cause Effects must needs have a changeable and uncertain Dependence And there is nothing imaginable in it self more changeable and uncertain than Will not regulated by the dictates of Reason and Understanding SECT VI. The avoidance of the foregoing ill consequences by making God immutable with an Answer thereto IF any deny these Consequences and Deductions * because they suppose that God is mutable and changeable I answer by bringing this as another absurdity that if there be no indispensible and eternal respects of things it will rob God of his Immutability and unchangeableness for if there be no necessary dependence betwixt Vnchangeablness and Perfection what should hinder but that if God please to think it so it will be his perfection to be changeable and if Will as such be the only principle of his Actions it is infallibly his Perfection to be so For 't is the Perfection of every Being to act according to the principle of its Nature and it is the nature of an arbitrarious Principle to act or not to do or undo upon no account but its own will and pleasure to be determined and tied up either by it self or from abroad is violent and contranatural SECT VII An hideous but genuine Inference of a Pamphleteer from this principle that absolute and Sovereign Will is the Spring and Fountain of all Gods actions AND therefore from this principle that absolute and Soveraign Will is the Spring and Fountain of all Gods Actions it was rightly inferr'd by a late Pamphleteer that God will one day damn all Mankind Good and Bad Believers and Unbelievers notwithstanding all his Promises Pretensions or Engagements to the contrary because this damning all mankind in despight of his Faithfulness Justice Mercy and Goodness will be the greatest advancement of his Soveraignty Will and Prerogative imaginable His words are God hath stored up Destruction both for the perfect and the wicked and this does wonderfully set forth his Soveraignty his exercising whereof is so perfect that when he hath tied himself up fast as may be by never so many promises yet it should still have its scope and be able to do what it will when it will as it will Here you have this principle improved to the height And however you may look upon this Author as some new Light or Ignis fatuus of the times yet I assure you in some pieces by him set forth he is very sober and rational SECT VIII That the Denial of the mutual Respects and Relations of things unto one another to be eternal and unchangeable despoils God of that universal Rectitude of his Nature IN the next place to deny the mutual respects and rationes rerum to be immutable and indispensible * will spoil God of that universal rectitude which is the greatest Perfection of his Nature For then Justice Faithfulness Mercy Goodness c. will be but contingent and arbitrarious Issues of the Divine Will This is a clear and undeniable Consequence For if you say these be indispensible perfections in God for instance if Justice be so then there is an eternal relation of Right and Equity betwixt every Being and the giving of it that which is its propriety if Faithfulness then there is an indispensible agreement betwixt a promise and the performance of it if Mercy then there is an immutable and unalterable suitableness and harmony between an indigent Creature and pity and commiseration if Goodness then there is an everlasting Proportiâ—n and symmetry between fulness and its overflowing and dispreading of it self which yet is the thing denyed * For to say they are indispensibly so because God understands them so seems to me extream incogitancy for that is against the nature of all understanding which is but the Idea and Representation of things and is then a true and perfect Image when it is exactly conformed to its Object And therefore if things have not mutual respects and relations eternal and indispensible then all those perfections do solely and purely depend upon absolute and independent Will as Will And consequently it was and is indifferent in it self that the contrary to these as Injustice Vnfaithfulness Cruelty Malice Hatred Spite Revenge Fury and whatever goes to the constitution of Hell it self should have been made the top and highest perfections of the Divine Nature which is such Blasphemy as cannot well be named without horror and trembling For instead of being a God such a nature as this is joyned with Omnipotency would be a worse Devil than any is in Hell And yet this is a necessary and infallible consequence from the denial of these mutual respects and relations of things unto one another to be eternal and unchangeable SECT IX That the Denial of the unchangeableness of the said mutual Respects and Relations of things to one another takes away all Knowledge of God and of our own Happiness and lays a Foundation of the most incurable Scepticism imaginable AND as by the denial of these the Nature of God is wholly destroyed so in the second place the mind of Man would have no certainty of Knowledge or assurance of Happiness He can never come to know there is a God and consequently not the Will and Mind of God which if there be no intrinsecal and indispensible respects and relations of things must be the ground and foundation of all Knowledge for what means or arguments should we use to find out or prove a Divine Nature It were folly and madness to sit down and consider the admirable contrivement and artifice of this great Fabrick of the Universe how that all natural things seem to act for some end though themselves take no Cognizance of it How the Sun by its motion and situation or which is all one by being a Centre of the Earths Motion provides Light and Heat and Life for this inferiour World how living Creatures bring forth a most apt composure and structure of parts and members and with that a being endued with admirable Faculties and yet themselves have no insight into nor consultation about this incomparable Workmanship how they are furnished with Powers and Inclinations for the preservation of this Body when it is once brought into the World how without praevious deliberation they naturally take in that Food which without their intention or animadversion is concocted in their Ventricle turned into Chyle that Chyle into Bloud that Bloud diffused through the Veins and Arteries and therewith the several
and ill nature that has made some men abuse this Text to the proving that God acts out of either an humourous or selfish principle as if he did things merely to please himself as self not as he is that soveraign unself-inreressed Goodness and perfect Rectitude which ought to be the measure of all things But the Text implies no such matter For if you make 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 a Compound of a Preposition and Pronoun that so it may signifie for himself which is no more than propter se it then will import that he made all things to satisfie his own Will and Pleasure whose Will and Pleasure results from the richness of his eternal Goodness and Benignity of Nature which is infinite and ineffable provided always that it be moderated by Wisdom Justice and Decorum For from hence his Goodness is so stinted or modified that though he has made all things for his own Will and Pleasure who is infinite Goodness and Benignity yet there is a day of Evil for the Wicked as it follows in the Text because they have not walked answerably to the Goodness that God has offered them and therefore their punishment is in behalf of abused Goodness And Bayns expresly interprets this Text thus Vniversa propter seipsum fecit Dominus that is says he Propter bonitatem suam juxta illud Augustini DE DOCTRINA CHRISTIANA Quia bonus est Deus sumus in quantum sumus boni sumus But 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 may be a Compound of a Participle and a Pronoun and then it may signifie for them that answer him that is walk anserably to his Goodness which he affords them or for them that obey him either way it is very good sence And then in opposition to these it is declared that the Wicked that is the Disobedient or Despisers of his Goodness he has not made them wicked but they having made themselves so appointed them for the day of Evil. For some such Verb is to be supplied as is agreeable to the matter as in that passage in the Psalms The Sun shall not burn thee by day neither the Moon by night Where burn cannot be repeated but some other more suitable Verb is to be supplied Chap. 8. pag. 63. Since all other things are inferiour to the good of Being This I suppose is to be understood in such a sence as that saying in Job Skin for skin and all that a man has will he give for his life Otherwise the condition of Being may be such as it were better not to be at all whatever any dry-fancied Metaphysicians may dispute to the contrary Pag. 67. Indeed they may be morally immutable and illapsable but this is Grace not Nature c. Not unless the Divine Wisdom has essentially interwoven it into the natural constitution of our Souls that as after such a time of the exercise of their Plaistick on these Terrestrial Bodies they according to the course of Nature emerge into a plain use of their Reason when for a time they little differed from Brutes so after certain periods of time well improved to the perfecting their Nature in the sense and adherence to Divine things there may be awakened in them such a Divine Plaistick faculty as I may so speak as may eternally fix them to their Celestial or Angelical Vehicles that they shall never relapse again Which Faculty may be also awakened by the free Grace of the Omnipotent more maturely Which if it be Grace and Nature conspire together to make a Soul everlastingly happy Which actual Immutability does no more change the species of a Soul than the actual exercise of Reason does after the time of her stupour in Infancy and in the Womb. Pag. 67. I doubt not but that it is much better for rational Creatures c. Namely such as we experience our humane Souls to be But for such kind of Intellectual Creatures as have nothing to do with matter they best understand the priviledges of their own state and we can say nothing of them But for us under the conduct of our faithâ—ul and victorious Captain the Soul of the promised Messias through many Conflicts and Tryals to emerge out of this lapsed state and regain again the possession of true Holyness and Vertue and therewith the Kingdom of Heaven with all its Beauty and Glories will be such a gratification to us that we had never been capable of such an excess thereof had we not experienced the evils of this life and the vain pleasures of it and had the remembrance of the endearing sufferings of our blessed Saviour of his Aids and Supports and of our sincere and conscientious adhering to him of our Conflicts and Victories to be enrolled in the eternal Records of the other World Pag. 69. Wherefore as the Goodness of God obligeth him not to make every Planet a fixt Star or every Star a Sun c. In all likelihood as Galilaeus had first observed every fixed Star is a Sun But the comparison is framed according to the conceit of the Vulgar A thing neither unusual with nor misbecoming Philosophers Pag. 69. For this were to tye him to Contradictions viz. to turn one specifical form or essence into another Matter indeed may receive several modifications but is still real Matter nor can be turned into a Spirit and so Spirits specifically different are untransmutable one into another according to the distinct Idea's in the eternal Intellect of God For else it would imply that their essential properties were not essential properties but loose adventitious Accidents and such as the essence and substance of such a Spirit could subsist as well without as with them or as well with any others as with these Pag. 69. That we should have been made peâ—cable and liable to defection And this may the more easily be allowed because this defection is rather the affecting of a less good than any pursuing of what is really and absolutely evil To cavil against Providence for creating a Creature of such a double capacity seems as unreasonable as to blame her for makiâ—g Zoophiton's or rather Amphibion's And they are both to be permitted to live according to the nature which is given them For to make a Creature fit for either capacity and to tye him up to one is for God to do repugnantly to the Workmanship of his own hands And how little hurt there is done by experiencing the things of either Element to Souls that are reclaimable has been hinted above But those that are wilfully obstinate and do despite to the Divine Goodness it is not at all inconsistent with this Goodness that they bear the smart of their obstinacy as the ingenious Author argues very well Chap. 9. pag. 73. Have asserted it to be impossible in the nature of the thing c. And this is the most solid and unexceptionable Answer to this Objection That it is a Repugnancy in Nature that this visible World that consists in the
and course to pass through all these dispensations provided she keep her self sincere towards her Maker is not properly any lapse or sin but an harmless experiencing all the capacities of enjoying themselves that God has bestowed upon them Which will open a door to a further Answer touching the rest of the Planets being inhabited namely That they may be inhabited by such kind of â—ouls as these who therefore want not the Knowledge and assistance of a Redeemer And so the earth may be the onely Nosocomium of sinfully lapsed souls This may be an answer to such far-fetched Objections till they can prove the contrarie Pag. 118. Adam cannot withstand the inordinate appetite c. Namely after his own remissness and heedlessness in ordering himself he had brought himself to such a wretched weakness Pag. 121. The Plastick faculties begin now fully to awaken c. There are three Vital Congruities belonging to the Plastick of the Soul and they are to awake orderly that is to operate one after another downward and upward that is to say In the lapse the Aereal follows the Aethereal the Terrestrial the Aereal But in their Recovery or Emergency out of the lapse The Aereal follows the Terrestrial and the Aethereal the Aereal But however a more gross turgency to Plastick operation may haply arise at the latter end of the Aereal Period which may be as it were the disease of the soul in that state and which may help to turn her out of it into the state of Silence and is it self for the present silenced therewith For where there is no union with bodie there is no operation of the Soul Pag. 121. For it hath an aptness and propensity to act in a Terrestrial body c. This aptness and fitness it has in the state of Silence according to that essential order of things interwoven into its own nature and into the nature of the Spirit of the World or great Archeus of the Universe according to the eternal counsel of the Divine Wisdom By which Law and appoyntment the soul will as certainly have a fitness and propensity at its leaving the Terrestrial body to actuate an Aereal one Pag. 122. Either by mere natural Congruity the disposition of the soul of the world or some more spontaneous agent c. Natural Congruity and the disposal of the Plastick soul of the world which others call the Spirit of Nature may be joyned well together in this Feat the Spirit of Nature attracting such a soul as is most congruous to the predelineated Matter which it has prepared for her But as for the spontaneous Agent I suppose he may understand his ministry in some supernatural Birth Unless he thinks that some Angels or Genii may be imployed in putting souls into bodies as Gardiners are in setting Pease and Beans in the beds of Gardens But certainly they must be no good Genii then that have any hand in assisting or setting souls in such wombs as have had to do with Adulterie Incest and Buggery Pag. 123. But some apish shews and imitations of Reason Vertue and Religion c. The Reason of the unregenerate in Divine things is little better than thus and Vertue and Religion which is not from that Principle which revives in us in real Regeneration are though much better than scandalous vice and profaness mere pictures and shadows of what they pretend to Pag. 123. To its old celestial abode c. For we are Pilgrims and strangers here on the earth as the holy Patriarchs of old declared And they that speak such things saith the Apostle plainly shew 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 that they seek their native country for so 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 properly signifies And truly if they had been mindful of that earthly country out of which they came they might saith he have had opportunity of returning But now they desire a better to wit an heavenly Hebr. 11. Pag. 124. But that they step forth again into Airy Vehicles This is their natural course as I noted above But the examples of Enoch and Elias and much more of our ever Blessed Saviour are extraordinary and supernatural Pag. 125. Those therefore that pass out of these bodies before their Terrestrial Congruity be spoyled weakened or orderly unwound according to the tenour of this Hypothesis c. By the favour of this ingenious Writer this Hypothesis does not need any such obnoxious Appendage as this viz. That souls that are outed these Terrestrial bodies before their Terrestrial Congruity be spoiled weakned or orderly unwound return into the state of Inactivity But this is far more consonant both to Reason and Experience or Storie that though the Terrestrial Congruity be still vigorous as not having run out it may be the half part no not the tenth part of its Period the soul immediately upon the quitting of this body is invested with a bodie of Air and is in the state of Activity not of Silence in no sense For some being murdered have in all likelyhood in their own persons complained of their murderers as it is in that story of Anne Walker and there are many others of the same nature And besides it is far more reasonable there being such numerous multitudes of silent souls that their least continuance in these Terrestrial bodies should at their departure be as it were a Magical Kue or Tessera forthwith to the Aereal Congruity of life to begin to act its part upon the ceasing of the other that more souls may be rid out of the state of Silence Which makes it more probable that every soul that is once besmeared with the unctuous moisture of the Womb should as it were by a Magick Oyntment be carried into the Air though it be of a still-born Infant than that any should return into the state of Silence or Inactivity upon the pretence of the remaining vigour of the Terrestrial Congruity of life For these Laws are not by any consequential necessity but by the free counsel of the Eternal Wisdom of God consulting for the best And therefore this being so apparently for the best this Law is interwoven into the Spirit of the World and every particular soul that upon the ceasing of her Terrestrial Union her Aereal Congruity of life should immediately operate and the Spirit of Nature assisting she should be drest in Aereal robes and be found among the Inhabitants of those Regions If souls should be remanded back into the state of Silence that depart before the Terrestrial Period of Vital Congruity be orderly unwound so very few reach the end of that Period that they must in a manner all be turned into the state of Inactivity Which would be to weave Penelope's Web to do and undo because the day is long enough as the Proverb is when as it rather seems too short by reason of the numerosity of Silent souls that expect their turn of Recovery into Life Pag. 125. But onely follow the clew of this Hypothesis The Hypothesis
no wonder that those men that are sober and in their wits find it so impossible in themselves but to conceive that such and such natures are steadily such and no other and betwixt such and such natures there are steadily and immutably such habitudes and respects and no others Forasmuch as the Intellect of man is as it were a small compendious Transcript of the Divine Intellect and we feel in a manner in our own Intellects the firmness and immutability of the Divine and of the eternal and immutable Truths exhibited there So that those that have their minds so crackt and shatter'd as to be able to fancy that if God would he could change the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or common notions into their Contradictories as The whole is less than its Part c. must have very crazy Intellectuals and have taken their lodging at least in the suburbs of downright dotage or Phrensie as I noted above Pag. 184. If any one should affirm that the Terms of common notions have an eternal and indispensable relation to one another c. That this priviledge is not confined to the common notions they are abundantly convinced of that have bestowed any competent study upon Mathematicks where the connection of every link of the demonstration is discerned to be as firmly and indiflolubly knit as the Terms of a common notion are the one with the other And it is our Impatience Carelesness or Prejudices that we have not more conclusions of such certitude than we have in other studies also Sect. 13. pag. 184. For if there be Truth antecedently to the Divine Vnderstanding c. This Objection of the Adversaries is framed something perversly and invidiously as if the other party held That there were Truth antecedently to the Divine Understanding and as if from thence the Divine Understanding would be a mere passive Principle actuated by something without as the Eye by the Sun But it is a plain case out of what has been declared that the Divine Understanding though there be such eternal Natures and unchangeable respects and habitudes of them represented in the Idea's that are in the Exhibitive Intellect of the Deity that it is I say before any external Object whatever and yet always had exhibited to it self the eternal and unalterable natures and respects of things in their Idea's And it was noted moreover that the Truth of the external Objects when brought into act is measured by their Conformity to these Idea's Besides the Divine Understanding being before all things how could there be any Truth before it there being neither Understanding nor Things in which this Truth might reside Or the Divine Understanding be a mere passive Principle actuated by something without as the eye by the Sun whenas questionless the Divine Intellect quatenus Exhibitive is the most active Principle conceivable nay indeed Actus purissimus the most pure Act as Aristotle has defined God It is an eternal necessary and immutable Energy whose very Essence is a true and fixt Ideal Representation of the natures of all things with their respects and habitudes resulting eternally from the Divine foecundity at once How then can this which is so pure and pregnant an Energy be a mere passive Principle or be actuated by any external Object when it was before any thing was But a further Answer is to be found of the Authour himself in the Fifteenth Section Pag. 185. Which is to take away his independency and self sufficiency Namely If there be mutual and unalterable Congruities and Incongruities of things as if they would determine God in his actions by something without himself Which is a mere mistake For the pregnant fulness of the Divine Essence and perfection eternally and necessarily exerting itself into an Ideal display of all the natures properties respects and habitudes of things whether Congruities or Incogruities and these fixt immutable necessary and unchangeable in their Ideal or Objective Existence And in time producing things according to these Paradigms or Patterns into actual Existence by his Omnipotence and ever sustaining supporting and governing them by his unfailing Power and steady and unchangeable Wisdom and Counsel I say when all things are thus from God sustained by God and regulated according to the natures he has given them which answer the Patterns and Paradigms in him how can any such determination of his Will any way clash with his Self-sufficiency or Independency whenas we see thus that all things are from God and depend of him and his actions guided by the immutable Idea's in his own nature according to which all external things are what they are and their Truth measured by their Conformity with them But there is a fuller answer of the Author's to this Objection in the sixteenth and seventeenth Sections Sect. 14. pag. 187. And to fetter and imprison Freedom and Liberty it self in the fatal and immutable chains and respects of things c. This is a misconceit that savours something of a more refined Anthropomorphitism that is to say Though they do not make the Essence of God finite and of an Humane figure or shape yet they imagine him to have two different Principles in him an extravagant and undetermined lust or appetite as it is in man and an Intellectual or rational Principle whose Laws are to correct the luxuriancies and impetuosities of the other and to bridle and regulate them But this is a gross mistake For there is no such blind and impetuous will in God upon which any Intellectual Laws were to lay a restraint but his whole nature being pure and Intellectual and he acting according to his own nature which contains those Idea's and immutable respects Congruities and Incongruities of things there eternally and unalterably represented he acts with all freedom imaginable nor has any chains of restraint laid upon him but is at perfect liberty to do as his own nature requires and suggests Which is the most absolute liberty that has any sound or shew of Perfection with it that can be conceived in any Being Sect. 15. pag. 189. And does as it were draw them up into its own beams This is something a sublime and elevate expression But I suppose the meaning thereof is That the natures and respects of the things of this lower Creation the Divine Understanding applies to the bright shining Idea's found in his own exalted nature and observes their Conformity therewith and acknowledges them true and right as they answer to their eternal Patterns Sect. 16. pag. 189. To tie up God in his actions to the reason of things destroys his Liberty Absoluteness and Independency This is said but it is a very vain and weak allegation as may appear out of what has been suggested above For reasons of things and their habitudes and references represented in the eternal Idea's in their Objective Existence which is the Pattern of their natures when they exist actually is the very life and nature of the Divine Understanding And as
with the Divine Attributes pag. 3 Chap. 3. 2 Traduction of Souls is impossible the reason for it weak and frivolous The proposal of Praeexistence pag. 16 Chap. 4. 1 Praeexistence cannot be disproved Scripture saith nothing against it It 's silence is no prejudice to this Doctrine but rather an Argument for it as the case standeth Praeexistence was the common opinion of our Saviour's times How probably it came to be lost in the Christian Church pag. 27 Chap. 5. Reasons against Praeexistence answered Our forgetting the former state is no argument to disprove it Nor are the other Reasons that can be produc'd more conclusive The proof of the possibility of Praeexistence were enough all other Hypotheses being absurd and contradictious But it is prov'd also by positive Arguments pag. 45 Chap. 6. A second Argument for Praeexistence drawn from the consideration of the Divine Goodness which alwayes doth what is best pag. 51 Chap. 7. The first Evasion that God acts freely and his meer will is reason enough for his doing or forbearing any thing overthrown by four Considerations Some incident Evasions viz. that Gods Wisdom or his glory may be contrary to this display of his goodness in our being made of old clearly taken off pag. 55 Chap. 8. A second general Evasion viz. that our Reasons cannot tell what God should do or what is best overthrown by several considerations As is also a third viz. that by the same Argument God would have been obliged to have made us impeccable and not liable to Misery pag. 61 Chap. 9. A fourth Objection against the Argument from Gods goodness viz. That it will conclude as well that the World is infinite and eternal Answered The conclusion of the second Argument for Praeexistence pag. 71 Chap. 10. A third Argument for Praeexistence from the great variety of mens speculative inclinations and also the diversity of our Genius's copiously urged If these Arguments make Praeexistence but probable 't is enough to gain it the Victory pag. 74 Chap. 11. Great caution to be used in alledging Scripture for our speculative opinion The countenance that Praeexistence hath from the sacred writings both of the Old and New Testament Reasons of the seeming uncouthness of these allegations Praeexistence stood in no need of Scripture-proof pag. 82 Chap. 12. Why the Author thinks himself obliged to descend to some more particular Account of Praeexistence The presumption positively to determine how it was with us of old The Authors design in the Hypothesis that follows pag. 90 Chap. 13. Seven Pillars on which the particular Hypothesis stands 94 Pillar 1. All the Divine designs and actions are laid and carried on by pure and infinite Goodness pag. 95 Pillar 2. There is an exact Geometrical Justice that runs through the Vniverse and is interwoven in the contexture of things pag. 97 Pillar 3. Things are carried to their proper place and state by the congruity of their natures where this fails we may suppose some arbitrary managements pag. 100 Pillar 4. The Souls of men are capable of living in other bodies besides Terrestrial And never act but in some body or other pag. 102 Pillar 5. The Soul in every state hath such a body as is fittest for those faculties and operations that she is most inclined to exercise pag. 105 Pillar 6. The powers and faculties of the Soul are either 1 Spiritual and intellectual or 2 Sensitive or 3 Plastick pag. 107 Pillar 7. By the same degrees that the higher powers are invigorated the lower are consopited and abated as to their proper exercises and è contra pag. 108 Chap. 14. A Philosophical Hypothesis of the Souls Praeexistence 113 Her Aethereal State The Aereal State pag. 102 The Terrestrial State pag. 122 The next step of Descent or After-state pag. 126 The Conflagration of the Earth pag. 137 The General Restitution pag. 142 THE ERRATA Correct thus In Lux Orientalis For Read PAg. 9. lin 6. For * For. pa. 61. l. 3. Reasons Reason p. 78. l. 1. his this p. 126. l. 6. course coarse In the Annotations pag. 34. l. 28. promptus promptos p. 38. l. 27. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 p. 45. l. 12. tye lye p. 51. l. 5. Plaistick Plastick p. 53. l. 7. Zoophiton's Zoophyton's p. 54. l. 29. Unluckly Unlucky p. 56. l. 8. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 p. 62. l. 19. other the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 over the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 p. 74. l. 8. property properly p. 80. l. 2. doors for doors for ibid. l. 21. properly property p. 84. l. 2. fitted sited ibid. l. 21. restore resolve p. 94. l. 15. vigorous rigorous p. 95. l. 8. this humane his humane p. 101. l. 30. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 p. 104. l. 28. corporeal incorporeal p. 106. l. 13. alledged alledge p. 113. l. 20. Psychopanychites Psychopannychites ibid. l. 31. to two p. 119. l. 7. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 p. 144. l. 23. ante Interiisse ante â—â—â—â—â—â—sse p. 184. l. 26. Nymphs Nymph p. 209. l. 16. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 p. 238. l. 26. slawes flawes p. 255. l. 11. sesquealtera sesquialtera p. 265. l. 3. the steady their steady p. 268. l. 10. to those so those p. 275. l. 2. Heaven's Haven's LUX ORIENTALIS CHAP. I. The opinions proposed concerning the original of Souls IT hath always been found a matter of discouraging difficulty among those that have busied themselves in such Inquiries To determine the Soul 's original Insomuch that after all the contests and disputes that have been about it many of the wisest Inquisitors have concluded it undeterminable or if they have sate down in either of the two opinions viz. of it's immediate Creation or Traduction which of later ages have been the only competitors they have been driven to it rather from the absurdities of the opposite opinion which they have left than drawn by any rational alliciency in that which they have taken to And indeed if we do but impartially consider the grand inconveniences which each party urgeth against the others Conclusion it would even tempt one to think that both are right in their opposition and neither in their assertion And since each side so strongly oppugns the other and so weakly defends it self 't is a shrewd suspicion that they are both mistaken Wherefore if there be a third that can lay any probable claim to the truth it deserves to be heard to plead its cause and if it be not chargeable with the contradictions or absurdities either of the one or other to be admitted Now though these later ages have concluded the matter to lie between immediate Creation and seminal Traduction yet I find that the more antient times have pitcht upon Praeexistence as more likely than either For the Platonists Pythagoreans the Chaldaean wise men the Jewish Rabbins and some of the most learned and antient Fathers
Lucifer And for my body 't is most likely that never an Atom of his ever came at me or if any did he was no cause on 't Besides that of it self is neither capable of sense sin guilt nor punishment or 2. Admitting that we become thus obnoxious assoon as in the body upon the account of his default How doth it comport with the divine Justice in one moment to make such excellent Creatures and in the next to render them so miserable by thrusting them into a condition so fatally obnoxious especially since they were capable of living and acting in bodies more perfect and more accommodate to their new undefiled natures Certainly could they have been put to their choice whether they would have come into being upon such termes they would rather have been nothing for ever And God doth not use to make his Creatures so as that without their own fault they shall have cause to unwish themselves Hitherto in this second general Argument I have dealt against those that believe and assâ—rt the original depravity of our natures which those that deny may think themselves not pinâ—â—'t by or concern'd in Since they think they do no such dishonour to the divine Attributes while they assert that we were not made in so deplorable and depraved a condition but have so made our selves by our voluntary aberrations But neither is this a fit Plaister for the sore supposing our souls to be immediately created and so sent into these bodies For still it seems to be a diminutive and disparaging apprehenâ—ion of the infinite and immense Goodness of God that he should detrude such excellent creatures as our souls into a state so hazardous * wherein he seeth it to be ten thousand to one but that they will corrupt and defile themselves and so make themselves miserable here and to eternity hereafter And certainly be we as indifferent naturally to good and evil as can be supposed yet great are the disadvantages to virtue that all men unavoidably meet with in this state of imperfection For considering that our infant and growing age is an age of sense in which our appetites and passions are very strong and our reasons weak and scarce any thing but a chain of imaginations 't is I say great odds but that we should be carried to inordinacy and exceed the bounds the divine laws have set us So that our lower powers of sense and passions using to have the head will grow strong and impetuous and thus 't is an hundred to one but we shall be rooted in vice before we come to the maturity of our reasons or are capable of the exercise of virtue And woful experience teacheth us that most men run so far before they consider whither they are a-going that the care and diligence of all their lives after will scarce reclaim them Besides the far greatest part of the world are led into wickedness and all kinds of debauchery by corrupt and vitious education And 't is not difficult to observe what an enormous strength bad education hath to deprave and pervert well dispos'd inclinations Which things consider'd this way also methinks reflects a Disparagement on the Divine Attributes Since by creating souls daily and putting them into such bodies and such parts of the world as his infinite Wisdom sees will debauch them and pervert them from the ways of righteousness and happiness into those of vice and misery he deals with them less mercifully than a parent among us would with his Off-spring And to suppose God to have less goodness than his degenerate creatures is to have very narrow apprehensions of his perfections and to rob him of the honour due to his Attributes 3 It hath been urged with good probability by great and wise Sages that 't is an unbecoming apprehension of the Majesty on high * to suppose him assistant to unlawful and unclean coitions by creating a soul to animate the impure foetus And to think It is in the power of brutish lust to determine Omvipotence to create a Soul whensoever a couple of unclean Adulterers shall think fit to join in their bestial pleasures is methinks to have a very mean apprehension of the divine Majesty and Purity This is to make him the worst of Servants by supposing him to serve his creature's vices to wait upon the vilest actions and to engage the same infinite Power that made the world for the perfecting what was begun by dissolute Wantons This Argument was used of old by pious and learned Origen and hath been imployed in the same service since by his modern defendents But I foresee an evasion or two that possibly with some may stand for an answer the removal of which will clear the business It may be pretended that God's attending to create souls for the supply of such generations is but an act of his justice for the detection and consequently punishment of such lawless offenders which therefore will be no more matter of disparagement than the waiting of an Officer of justice to discover and apprehend a Malefactour But this Subterfuge cannot elude the force of the Argument for it hath no place at all in most Adulteries yea great injustice and injury is done many times by such illegitimate births the Child of a Stranger being by this means admitted to carry away the inheritance from the lawful off-spring Besides God useth not ordinarily to put forth his Almighty power to discover secret miscarriages except sometimes for very remarkable and momentous ends but leaves hidden iniquities to be the objects of his own castigations And if discovery of the fault be the main end of such creations * methinks that might be done at a cheaper rate that should not have brought so much inconvenience with it or have exposed his own innocent and harmless off-spring to undeserv'd Reproach and Infamy But further it may be suggested that it is no more indecent for God to create souls to furnish those unlawful Generations than it is that a man should be nourisht by meat that he hath unlawfully come by or that the Cattle which he hath stoln should ingender with his own But the difference of these instances from the case in hand is easily discernable in that the nourishment and productions spoken of proceed in a set orderly way of natural causes which work fatally and necessarily without respect to moral circumstances and there is no reason it should be in the power of a sinful creature to engage his Maker to pervert or stop the course of nature when he pleaseth But in the case of creating souls God is supposed to act by explicite and immediate Will the suspending of which in such a case as this is far different in point of credit and decorum from his altering the setled Laws he hath set in the Creation and turning the world upside down I might further add 4ly That * it seems very incongruous and unhandsome to suppose that God should create two souls for the supply
Praeexistence drawn from the consideration of the Divine Goodness which always doth what is best 2 THen whoever conceives rightly of God apprehends him to be infinite and immense Goodness who is alwayes shedding abroad of his own exuberant â—ulness There is no straitness in the Deity no bounds to the ocean of Love Now the divine Goodness referrs not to himself as ours extends not unto him He acts nothing for any self-accomplishment being essentially and absolutely compleat and perfect But the object and term of his goodness is his creatures good and happiness in their respective capacities He is that infinite fountain that is continually overflowing and can no more cease to shed his influences upon his indigent dependents than the sun to shine at noon * Now as the infinite Goodness of the deity obligeth him always to do good so by the same reason to do that which is best since to omit any degrees of good would argue a defect in goodness supposing wisdom to order and power to execute He therefore that supposeth God not always to do what is best and best for his Creatures for he cannot act for his own Good apprehends him to be less good than can be conceived and consequently not infinitely so For what is infinite is beyond measure and apprehension Therefore to direct this to our purpose God being infinitely good and that to his Creatures and therefore doing always what is best for them methinks it roundly follows that our souls lived and ' njoy'd themselves of old before they came into these bodies For since they were capable of living and that in a much better and happier state long before they descended into this region of death and misery and since that condition of life and self-enjoyment would have been better than absolute not-being may we not safely conclude from a due consideration of the divine goodness that it was so What was it that gave us our being but the immense goodness of our Maker And why were we drawn out of our nothings but because it was better for us to be than not to be Why were our souls put into these bodies and not into some more squalid and ugly but because we are capable of such and 't is better for us to live in these than in those that are less sutable to our natures And had it not been better for us to have injoy'd our selves and the bounty and favours of our Maker of old as did the other order of intellectual creatures than to have layn in the comfortless night of nothing till t'other day Had we not been better on 't to have lived and acted in the joyful regions of light and blessedness with those Spirits that at first had being than just now to jump into this sad plight and state of sin and wretchedness Insinite Power could as well have made us all at once as the Angels and with as good congruity to our natures we might have liv'd and been happy without these bodies as we shall be in the state of separation since therefore it was best for us and as easie for our Creator so to have effected it where was the defect if it was not so Is not this to â—lurr his goodness and to strait-lace the divine beneficence And doth not the contrary Hypothesis to what I am pleading for represent the God of Love as less good and bountiful than a charitable Mortal who would neglect no opportunity within his reach of doing what good he could to those that want his help and assistance I confess the world generally have such Narrow and unbecoming apprehensions of God and draw his picture in their imaginations so like themselves that few I doubt will feel the force of this Argument and mine own observation makes me enter the same suspicion of its success that some others have who have used it 'T is only a very deep sense of the divine goodness can give it any perswasive energy And this noble sentiment there are very few that are possest of However to lend it what strength I can I shall endeavour to remove some prejudices that hinder it's force and efficacy And when those spots and scum are wiped away that mistake and inadvertency have fastned on it 't will be illustrious by its own brightness CHAP. VII This first Evasion that God acts freely and his meer will is reason enough for his doing or forbearing any thing overthrown by four Considerations Some incident Evasions viz. that Gods Wisdom or his glory may be contrary to this display of the divine goodness in our being made of old clearly taken off 1. THerefore will some say God worketh freely nor can he be obliged to act but when he pleaseth And this will and pleasure of his is the reason of our beings and of the determinate time of our beginning Therefore if God would not that we should have been made sooner and in a better state of life his will is reason enough and we need look no further To this evasion I thus Reply 1. 'T is true indeed God is the most Free Agent because none can compel him to act none can hinder him from acting Nor can his Creatures oblige him to any thing But then 2. The divine liberty and freedom consists not in his acting by meer arbitrarious will as disjunct from his other Attributes For he is said to act according to the Counsel of his own will So that his wisdom and goodness are as it were the Rules whereby his will is directed Therefore though he cannot be obliged to act by any thing without himself yet he may be the Laws of his own essential rectitude and perfection Wherefore I conceive he is said not to be able to do those things which he might well enough by absolute power that consist not with his ever blessed Attributes Nor by the same reason can he omit that which the eternal Law of his most persect nature obligeth him to The summ is * God never acts by meer will or groundless humour that is a weakness in his impersect Creatures but according to the immutable Rules of his ever blessed essence And therefore 3 'T is a derogation from his infinite Majesty to assert any thing contrary to his Goodness upon pretence of his will and pleasure For whatever is most sutable to this most blessed Attribute and contradicts no other that be sure he willeth Wherefore 4 If it be better and more agreeable to the divine goodness that we should have been in an happier state before we came into these bodies Gods will cannot then be pretended to the contrary especially it having been proved already that he hath no way revealed any such will of his but rather it is demonstratively clear that his will was it should be so Since as God never acts in the absence of his wisdom and goodness so neither doth he abstain from acting when those great Attributes require it Now if it be excepted again 2 That 't is trâ—e
that this Hypothesis is most sutable to the divine goodness and the consideration of that alone would inferr it But how know we but his Wisdom contradicts it I return briefly That if it be confest to be so correspondent to and inferrible from one Attribute and cannot be prov'd inconsistent with another my business is determined Therefore let those that pretend an inconsistence prove it 2 The Wisdom of God is that Attribute and essential perfection whereby the divine actions are directed to their end which is always good and best Therefore to do that which is best cannot thwart the divine wisdom but always includes and supposeth it Whence it follows that what so comports with goodness cannot stand opposite to Wisdom Wisdom in God being indeed nothing else but goodness contriving and directing for the Creature 's good and happiness For we must remember what was said above that what is infinitely full and perfect can have no ends for any self-advantage and therefore the ends of the divine wisdom are something without himself and consequently the good and perfection of his Creatures So that unless it can be proved to have been contrary to ours or any other Creatures good that we should have been extant as soon as the Light it cannot be concluded to have any contradiction to the divine wisdom But it will be said again 3 Gods glory is his great end for the promoting of which his wisdom directs all his Actions and consequently that which may be best for the Creature may not be so conducive to the divine Glory and therefore not agreeable with his wisdom Now though I think the world hath a very mistaken apprehension of Gods glory yet I shall not here ingage in more controversies than I must needs 'T is enough for my present purpose to intimate That Gods glory is no by-end or self-accumulation nor an addition of anything to Him which he was not eternally possest of nor yet is it any thing that stands in opposition to the good of his Creation But the display and communication of his excellencies among the which his goodness is not the least considerable if it be not that most divine and fundamental Attribute which gives perfection to all the rest So that we may assure our selves that when ever his goodness obligeth him to action his glory never stands in opposition For even this is his glory to communicate to his creatures sutably to his own absolute fulness and to act according to the direction of his essential perfections yea though we should state his glory to consist alone in the honour and renown of his Attributes yet even then the Hypothesis of our having been made in the beginning will accumulate to his praises and represent him to his creatures as more illustrious since it is a more magnificent apprehension of his goodness and clears his other Attributes from those stains of dis-repute that all other suppositions cast upon them And though his glory should consist as too many fondly imagine in being praised and admired by his creatures even on this account also it would have obliged him to have made us all of old rather than opposed it since then his excellencies had been sung forth by a more numerous Quire in continual Hallelujahs Now if it should be urged * that God made all things for himself and therefore is not obliged to consult the good of his creatures in all his Actions I rejoyn that God's making all things for himself can argue no more than his making all things for his own ends viz. the ends of goodness Besides the best Criticks make that place to speak no more but this That God orders all things according to himself that is according to the rules of his own nature and perfections Thus then we see that for God to do that which is best for his Creatures is neither contrary to his will and pleasure his wisdom nor his glory but most consonant to all of them And therefore since the Praeexistence of Souls is so agreeable to the divine goodness and since nothing else in the Deity opposeth but rather sweetly conspires with it methinks this argument were enough to conclude it But yet there are other Evasions which would elude this Demonstration I shall name the most considerable and leave it to the judicious to determine whether they can disable it CHAP. VIII A second general Evasion viz. that our Reasons cannot tell what God should do or what is best overthrown by several considerations As is also a third viz. that by the same Argument God would have been obliged to have made us impeccable and not liable to Misery WHerefore the second general evasion is That our Reasons cannot conclude what God should do there being vast fetches in the divine wisdom which we comprehend not nor can our natural light determine what is best I answer 1 Our Saviour himself who was the best Judge in the case teacheth us that the Reason of a man may in some things conclude what God will do in that saying of his If ye being evil know how to give good things to your Children much more shall your Father which is in Heaven give his Spirit to them that ask him Plainly intimating that we may securely argue from any thing that is a perfection in our selves to the same in God And if we who are imperfectly good will yet do as much good as we can for those we love and tender with greater confidence may we conclude that God who is infinitely so will confer upon his creatures whatever good they are capable of Thus we see our Saviour owns the capacity of reason in a case that is very near the same that we are dealing in And God himself appeals to the reasons of men to judge of the righteousness and equity of his ways Ye men of Israel and inhabitants of Jerusalem judge between me and my vineyard which place I bring to shew that meer natural reason is able to judge in some cases what is fit for God to do and what is sutable to his essence and perfections And if in any Methinks 2 its capacity in the case before us should be own'd as soon as in any For if reason cannot determine and assure us that a blessed and happy Being is better than None at all and consequently that it was best for our souls to have been before they were in this state of wretchedness and thence conclude that it was very congruous to the divine goodness to have made us in a former and better condition I think then 1 That it cannot give us the assurance of any thing since there is not any principle in Metaphyâ—icks or Geometry more clear than this viz. That an happy Being is better than absolute Notâ—eing And if our reasons can securely determine this 't is as much as we need at present Or â—f this be not certain how vain are those Learned men that dispute whether a state of the extremest misery
place of light and blessedness by Principle 3d. But particularly to describe and point at this paradisaical residence can be done only by those that live in those serene regions of lightsome glory Some Philosophers indeed have adventured * to pronounce the place to be the Sun that vast Orb of splendor and brightness though it may be 't is more probable that those immense tracts of pure and quiet aether that are above Saturn are the joyous place of our ancient celestial abode But there is no determination in matters of such lubricous uncertainty where ever it is 't is doubtless a place and state of wonderful bliss and happiness and the highest that our natures had fitted us to In this state we may be supposed to have lived in the blissful exercise of vertue divine love and contemplation through very long tracts of duration But though we were thus unconceivably happy * yet were we not immutably so for our highest perfections and noblest faculties being but finite may after long and vigorous exercise somewhat abate and remit in their sublimest operations and Adam may fall asleep In which time of remission of the higher powers the lower may advance and more livelily display themselves than they could before by Axiom 7 for the soul being a little slackt in its pursuits of immaterial objects the lower powers which before were almost wholly taken up and imployed in those high services are somewhat more releast to follow a little the tendencies of their proper natures And now they begin to convert towards the body and warmly to resent the delights and pleasures thereof Thus is Eve brought forth while Adam sleepeth The lower life that of the body is now considerably awakened and the operations of the higher proportionably abated However there is yet no anomy or disobedience for all this is but an innocent exercise of those faculties which God hath given us to imploy and as far as is consistent with the divine laws to gratifie For it was no fault of ours that we did not uncessantly keep our spiritual powers upon the most intense exercises that they were capable of exerting * we were made on set purpose defatigable that so all degrees of life might have their exercise and our Maker designed that we should feel and taste the joys of our congenite bodies as well as the pleasures of those seraphick aspires and injoyments And me thinks it adds to the felicity of that state that our happiness was not one uniform piece or continual repetition of the same but consisted in a most grateful variety viz. in the pleasure of all our faculties the lower as well as the higher for those are as much gratified by suitable exercises and enjoyments as these and consequently according to their proportion capable of as great an happiness Nor is it any more derogation from the divine goodness that the noblest and highest life was not always exercised to the height of its capacity than that we were not made all Angels all the Planets so many Suns and all the variety of the Creatures formed into one Species Yea as was intimated above 't is an instance of the divine benignity that he produced things into being according to the vast plenitude of Forms that were in his all-knowing mind and gave them operations suitable to their respective natures so that it had rather seemed a defect in the divine dispensations if we had not had the pleasure of the proper exercise of the lower faculties as well as of the higher * Yea me thinks 't is but a reasonable reward to the body that it should have its delights and gratifications also whereby it will be fitted for further serviceableness For doubtless it would be in time spent and exhausted were it continually imployed in those high and less proportioned operations Wherefore God himself having so order'd the matter that the inferiour life should have its turn of invigoration it can be no evil in us * that that is executed which he hath so determined as long as we pass not the bounds that he hath set us Adam therefore was yet innocent though he joyed in his beloved Spouse yea and was permitted to feed upon all the fruits of this Paradise the various results of corporeal pleasure as long as he followed not his own will and appetites contrarily to the divine commands and appointments But at length unhappily the delights of the body betray us through our over indulgence to them and lead us captive to anomy and disobedience The sense of what is grateful and pleasant by insensible degrees gâ—ts head over the apprehension of what is just and good the Serpent and Eve prove successful tempters * Adam cannot withstand the inordinate appetite but feeds on the forbidden fruit viz. the dictates of his debauched will and sensual pleasure And thus now the body is gotten uppermost the lower faculties have greater exercise and command than the higher those being very vigorously awakened and these proportionably shrunk up and consopited wherefore by Axiom 3. and 5. the soul contracts a less pure body which may be more accommodate to sensitive operations and thus we fall from the highest Paradise the blissful regions of life and glory and become Inhabitants of the Air. Not that we are presently quite divested of our Aethereal state as soon as we descend into this less perfect condition of life for retaining still considerable exercises of the higher life though not so ruling and vigorous ones as before the soul must retain part of its former vehicle to serve it as its instrument in those its operations For the aethereal body contracts crasness and impurity by the same degrees as the immaterial faculties abate in their exercise so that we are not immediately upon the expiring of the highest congruity wholly stript of all remains of our celestial bodies but still hold some portion of them within the grosser vehicle while the spirit or higher life is in any degree of actuation Nor are we to suppose that every slip or indulgence to the body can detrude us from our aethereal happiness but such a change must be wrought in the soul as may spoil its congruity to a celestial body which in time by degrees is effected Thus we may probably be supposed to have fallen from our supream felicity But others of our order have made better use of their injoyments and the indulgences of their Maker and though they have had their Perigae's as well as their Apogae's I mean their Verges towards the body and its joys as well as their Aspires to nobler and sublimer objects yet they kept the station of their Natures and made their orderly returns without so remarkable a defection And though possibly some of them may sometimes have had their slips and have waded further into the pleasures of the body than they ought to have done yet partly by their own timely care and consideration and partly by the divine assistance they recover themselves
the solid earth to reach but to a certain and that not very great distance from the surface and 't is obvious this way to give an account of the Phaenomenon * For according to this Hypothesis the gravity of those bodies is less because the quantity of the earth that draws them is so whereas were it of the same nature and solidity to the center this diminution of its bulk and consequently vertue would not be at all considerable nor in the least sensible Now though there are other causes pretended for this effect yet there is none so likely and easie a solution as this though I know it also is obnoxious to exceptions which I cannot now stand to meddle with all that I would have is that 't is a probability * and the mention of the fountains of the great deep in the sacred History as also the flaming Vulcano's and smoaking mountains that all relations speak of are others * Now I intend not that after a certain distance all is fluid matter to the center For the Cartesian Hypothesis distributes the subterranean space into distinct regions of divers matter which are divided from each other by as solid walls as is the open air from the inferiour Atmosphere Therefore I suppose only that under this thick outside there is next a vast and large region of fluid matter * which for the most part very likely is a gross and fetid kind of air as also considerable proportions of fire and water under all which there may be other solid floors that may incompass and cover more vaults and vast hollows the contents of which 't were vanity to go about to determine only 't is very likely that as the admirable Philosophy of Des Cartes supposeth * the lowest and central Regions may be filled with flame and aether which suppositions though they may seem to some to be but the groundless excursions of busie imaginations yet those that know the French Philosophy and see there the Reasons of them will be more candid in their censures and not so severe to those not ill-framed conjectures Now then being thus provided I return again to prosecute my main intendment Wherefore 't is very probable that the wicked and degenerate part of mankind * are after death committed to those squalid subterraneous habitations in which dark prisons they do severe penance for their past impieties and have their senses which upon earth they did so fondly indulge and took such care to gratifie now persecuted with darkness stench and horror Thus doth the divine justice triumph in punishing those vile Apostates suitably to their delinquencies Now if those vicious souls are not carried down to the infernal caverns by the meer congruity of their natures as is not so easie to imagine we may then reasonably conceive * that they are driven into those dungeons by the invisible Ministers of Justice that manage the affairs of the world by Axiom 3. For those pure Spirits doubtless have a deep sense of what is just and for the good of the universe and therefore will not let those inexcusable wretches to escape their deserved castigations or permit them to reside among the good lest they should infect and poyson the better world by their examples Wherefore I say they are disposed of into those black under-Abysses where they are suited with company like themselves and match't unto bodies as impure as are their depraved inclinations Not that they are all in the same place and under the like torments but are variously distributed according to the merits of their natures and actions some only into the upper prisons * others to the Dungeon And some to the most intolerable Hell the Abyss of fire Thus doth a just Nemesis visit all the quarters of the Vniverse Now those miserable prisoners cannot escape from the places of their confinement for 't is very likely that those watchful spirits that were instrumental in committing them * have a strict and careful eye upon them to keep them within the confines of their goal that they rove not out into the regions of light and liberty yea 't is probable that the bodies they have contracted in those squalid mansions may by a kind of fatal magnetisme be chained down to this their proper element Or they having now a congruity only to such fetid vehicles may be no more able to abide the clear and lightsome Air than the Bat or Owl are able to bear the Suns noon-day beams or the fish to live in these thinner Regions This may be the reason of the unfrequency of their appearance and that they most commonly get them away at the approach of light Besides all this some there are who suppose that there is a kind of polity among themselves which may * under severe penalties prohibit all unlicensed excursions into the upper world though I confess this seems nor so probable and we stand in no need of the supposition For though the laws of their natures should not detain them within their proper residences yet the care and oversight of those watchful Spirits who first committed them will do it effectually And very oft when they do appear they signifie that they are under restraint and come not abroad but by permission as by several credible Stories I could make good But for brevity I omit them Now though I intend not this Hypothesis either for a discovery of infallible truth or declarement of mine own opinions yet I cannot forbear to note the strange coincidence that there is between Scripture expressions in this matter some main stroaks of the Orthodox Doctrine and this Philosophical conjecture of the state and place of the wicked 'T is represented in the Divine Oracles as a deep pit a prison a place of darkness fire and brimstone and the going thither is named a descent All which most appositely agree with the representation we have made And the usual Periphrasis of Hell torments fire and brimstone is wonderfully applicable to the place we have been describing since it abounds with fuliginous flames and sulphureous stench and vapours And as we have conjectur'd the lowest cavity is nothing else but a vault of â—â—re For the other expressions mentioned every one can make the application So that when a man considers this he will almost be tempted to think that the inspired writers had some such thing in their fancies And we are not to run to tropes and figures for the interpretation of plain and literal descriptions except some weighty reason force us to such a Refuge Moreover Hell is believed among the Orthodox to have degrees of torments to be a place of uncomfortable horror and to stand at the greatest distance from the seat and habitation of the blessed All which and more that I could reckon up cannot more clearly be made out and explained than they are in this Hypothesis Thus then we see the irreclaimably wicked lodg'd in a place and condition very wretched and calamitous If any of
it from further corruptions However I dare not advise any thing in it but this that you take the judgment of that Reverend Doctor you mention the deceased Authors Friend and mine and act according as he shall direct I am Your real Friend Jos Glanvil A DISCOURSE OF TRUTH SECT I. That Truth is twofold In the Object and in the Subject That in the Object what it is And that it is antecedent to and independent of any Will or Vnderstanding whatever TRUTH is of aequivocal signification and therefore cannot be defined before it be distinguish't It is twofold Truth in things which you may call Truth in the Object and Truth in the Vnderstanding which is Truth in the Subject By the first I mean nothing else but that Things necessarily are what they are And that there are necessary mutual respects and relations of Things one unto another Now that things are what they are and that there are mutual Respects and Relations eternal and immutable and in order of Nature * antecedent to any Understanding either created or uncreated is a thing very plain and evident For it 's clearer than the Meridian Light that such Propositions as these Homo est animal rationale Triangulum est quod habet tres angulos are not arbitrarious dependencies upon the Will Decree or Understanding of God but are necessary and eternal Truths and wherein 't is as impossible to divide the Subject and what is spoken of it as it is for a thing not to be what it is which is no less than a Contradiction And as indispensible are the mutual respects and relations of things both in Speculatives and Morals SECT II. The necessity of there being certain Arguments Means and Objects for certain Conclusions Ends and Faculties and that every thing will not suit every thing FOR can it be imagin'd that every Argument can be made a proportioned Medium to prove every Conclusion * that any thing may be a suitable means to any end that any Object may be conformable to any Faculty Can Omnipotence it self make these Propositions That twice two are four or that Parallels cannot intersect clear and convincing Arguments to prove these grand Truths That Christ came into the World to dye for Sinners and is now exalted as a Prince and a Saviour at the Right Hand of God * Is it possible that there should be such a kind of Geometry wherein any problemes should be demonstrated by any Principles quidlibet ex quolibet as that a Quadrangle is that which is comprehended of four right Lines * Therefore the three Angles of a Triangle are equal to two right ones SECT III. An Instance or two of gross and horrid Absurdities consequent to the denying the mutual respects and relations of things to be eternal and indispensible CAN the infinite Wisdom it self make the damning of all the Innocent and the unspotted Angels in Heaven a proportionate means to declare and manifest the unmeasureableness of his Grace and Love and goodness towards them Can Lying Swearing Envy Malice nay Hatred of God and Goodness it self be made the most acceptable Service of God and the readiest way to a mans Happiness And yet all these must be true and infinitely more such contradiction◠than we can possibly imagin if the mutual respects and relations of things be not eternal and indispensible which that they are I shall endeavour to prove SECT IV. The Entrance into the first part of the Discourse which is of Truth in the Object That the Divine Understanding does not make the Respects and Relations of its Objects but finds them or observes them First we must premise that * Divine Vnderstanding cannot be the Fountain of the Truth of things * nor the Foundation of the references of one to another For it is against the nature of all Understanding to make its Objects * It is the nature of Understanding ut moveatur illuminetur formetur c. Of its Object ut moveat illuminet formet Intellectus in actu primo hath it self unto its object as the Eye unto the Sun it is irradiated inlightned and actuated by it And Intellectus in actu secundo hath it self unto its Object as the Image to that it represents and the perfection of Understanding consists in being actuated by and in an adaequate Conformity to its object according to the nature of all Idea's Images or Representations of things The Sum is this * No Idea's or Representations are or make the things they represent all Understanding is such therefore no Understanding doth make the Natures Respects and Relations of its Objects SECT V. That the Divine Will does not determine the References and Dependencies of things because that would subvert his other Attributes * IT remains then that absolute arbitrarious and independent Will must be the Fountain of all Truth and must determine the References and Dependencies of things * which assertion would in the First place destroy the nature of God * and rob him of all his Attributes For then it 's impossible that there should be such a thing as Divine Wisdom and Knowledge which is nothing else but an apprehension of common notions and the natures and mutual respects and relations of things For if the Nature of God be such that his arbitrarious imagination that such and such things have such and such natures and Dependencies doth make those things to have those Natures or Dependencies he may as easily Unimagine that Imagination and then they that before had a mutual Harmony Sympathy and Agreement with one another shall now stand at as great a distance and opposition And thus the Divine Understanding will be a mere Protaean Chimaera a Casual Conflux of intellectual Atomes Contradictions are true if God will understand them so and then the foundation of all Knowledge is taken away and God may as truly be said to know nothing as every thing nay * any Angel or Man may as truly be said to know all things as God himself for then every thing will be alike certain and every apprehension equally conformable to Truth These are infallible consequences and a thousand more as absurd as these if contradictory Propositions may be both true and whether they be so or no it 's a meer casual Dependence upon the Arbitrarious pleasure of God if there be not a necessary immutability and eternal opposition betwixt the being and the not being of the same thing at the same time and in the same respect Likewise all those Truths we call Common Notions the Systeme and Comprehensions of which is the very Essence of Divine Wisdom as the conclusions issuing from them not by any operose dèduction but a clear intuitive light are the very Nature of Divine Knowledge * if we distinguish those two Attributes in God I say all these propositions of immediate and indemonstrable Truth if these be only so because so understood by God and so understood by God because he pleased so to have them and
conceptions and Ideas of these natures and their relations can be only so far true * as they conform and agree with the things themselves and the harmony which they have one to another FINIS THE CONTENTS OF THE DISCOURSE of TRUTH Sect. 1. THAT Truth is twofold In the Object and in the Subject That in the Object what it is And that it is antecedent to and independent of any Will or Vnderstanding whatever p. 165 Sect. 2. The necessity of there being certain Arguments Means and Objects for certain Conclusions Ends and Faculties And that every thing will not suit every thing p. 166 Sect. 3. An Instance or two of the gross and horrid Absurdities consequent to the denying the mutual respects and relations of things to be eternal and indispensible p. 167 Sect. 4. The Entrance into the first part of the Discourse which is of Truth in the Object That the Divine Understanding does not make the Respects and Relations of its Objects but finds them or observes them p. 168 Sect. 5. That the Divine Will does not determine the References and Dependences of things because that would subvert his other Attributes p. 169 Sect. 6. The avoidance of the foregoing ill consequences by making God immutable with an Answer thereto p. 172 Sect. 7. An hideous but genuine Inference of a Pamphleteer from this principle That absolute and Sovereign Will is the Spring and Fountain of all Gods actions p. 173 Sect. 8. That the Denial of the mutual Respects and Relations of things unto one another to be eternal and unchangeable despoils God of that universal Rectitude of his Nature p. 174 Sect. 9. That the Denial of the unchangeableness of the said mutual Respects and Relations of things to one another takes away the Knowledge of God and of our own Happiness and lays a foundation of the most incurable Scepticism imaginable p. 176 Sect. 10. That the denying the Eternal and Immutable Respects of things frustrates all the noble Essays of the mind or understanding of man p. 180 Sect. 11. That in the abovesaid Denial are laid the Foundations of Rantism Debauchery and of all Dissoluteness of Life p. 181 Sect. 12. That our Assurance of future Happiness is quite â—ut off by the denying of the Eternal and Immutable Respects of Things p. 182 Sect. 13. Several Objections propounded against the scope of this Discourse hitherto from the Independency of the Divine Understanding and Will. p. 184 Sect. 14. A main Objection more fully insisted upon namely How well the Advancement of Gods Justice in the Damnation of the greatest part of Mankind consists with the scope of this Discourse especially it being so stated as is here set down p. 186 Sect. 15. An Answer to that Objection that concerns the Understanding of God shewing hat the Divine Vnderstanding does not depend upon the natures and mutual Respects of things though they be its Objects p. 187 Sect. 16. An Answer to that Objection which concerns the Will of God shewing That Liberty in the Power or Principle is no where a Perfection where there is not an Indifferency in the things or actions about which it is conversant p. 189 Sect. 17. That the Discourse hitherto does not infer any Dependency of God upon any thing without himself But only occasions are offered to him of acting according to his own intimate Nature and Essence p. 191 Sect. 18. The second part of the Discourse which briefly treats of Truth in the Subject What it is What in God and what in the Creature And that in both it is A representation or conception in the mind conformable to the unchangeable natures and mutual Respects of things p. 193 Annotations UPON THE Two foregoing TREATISES LVX ORIENTALIS OR An Enquiry into the OPINION OF THE EASTERN SAGES Concerning the Prae-existence of Souls AND THE Discourse of TRUTH Written for the more fully clearing and further confirming the main DOCTRINES in each TREATISE By one not unexercized in these kinds of SPECULATION LONDON Printed for J. Collins and S. Lounds over against Exeter-Change in the Strand 1682. Annotations UPON LVX ORIENTALIS THese two Books Lux Orientalis and the Discourse of Truth are luckily put together by the Publisher there being that suitableness between them and mutual support of one another And the Arguments they treat of being of the greatest importance that the Mind of man can entertain herself with the consideration thereof has excited so sluggish a Genius as mine to bestow some few Annotations thereon not very anxious or operose but such as the places easily suggest and may serve either to rectifie what may seem any how oblique or illustrate what may seem less clear or make a supply or adde strength where there may seem any further need In which I would not be so understood as that I had such an anxiety and fondness for the Opinions they maintain as if all were gone if they should fail but that the Dogmata being more fully clearly and precisely propounded men may more safely and considerately give their Judgments thereon but with that modesty as to admit nothing that is contrary to the Judgment of the truly Catholick and Apostolick Church Chap. 2. p. 4. That he made us pure and innocent c. This is plainly signified in the general Mosaick History of the Creation that all that God made he saw it was good and it is particularly declared of Adam and Eve that they were created or made in a state of Innocency Pag. 4. Matter can do nothing but by motion and what relation hath that to a moral Contagion We must either grant that the figures of the particles of Matter and their motion have a power to affect the Soul united with the Body and I remember Josephus somewhere speaking of Wine says it does 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 regenerate as it were the Soul into another life and sense of things or else we must acknowledge that the parts of Matter are alterable into qualifications that cannot be resolved into mere mechanical motion and figure whether they be thus altered by the vital power of the Spirit of Nature or however it comes to pass But that Matter has a considerable influence upon a Soul united thereto the Author himself does copiously acknowledge in his fourth Chapter of this Book where he tells us that according to the disposition of the Body our Wits are either more quick free and sparkling or more obtuse weak and sluggish and our Mind more chearful and contented or else more morose melancholick or dogged c. Wherefore that he may appear the more consistent with himself it is likely he understands by this Moral Contagion the very venome and malignity of vitious Inclinations how that can be derived from Matter especially its power consisting in mere motion and figuration of parts The Psalmist's description is very apposite to this purpose Psal 58. The ungodly are froward even from their mothers womb as soon as they are born they go astray and
speak lyes They are as venomous as the poyson of a serpent even like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear That there should be such a difference in the Nativity of some from that of others and haply begot also of the same Parents is no slight intimation that their difference is not from their Bodies but their Souls in which there is so sudden Eruptions of vitious Inclinations which they had contracted in their former state not repressed nor extinct in this by reason of Adam's lapse and his losing the Paradisiacal body in which he was created and which should if it had not been for his Fall been transmitted to his Posterity but that being lost the several measures of the pristine Vitiosity of humane Souls discover themselves in this life according to the just Laws of the Divine Nemesis essentially interwoven into the nature of things Pag. 5. How is it that those that are under continual temptations to Vice are yet kept within the bounds of Vertue c. That those that are continually under temptations to Vice from their Childhood should keep within the bounds of Vertue and those that have perpetual outward advantages from their Childhood to be vertuous should prove vitious notwithstanding is not rationally resolved into their free will for in this they are both of them equal and if they had been equal also in their external advantages or disadvantages the different event might well be imputed to the freedom of their Will But now that one notwithstanding all the disadvantages to Vertue should prove vertuous and the other notwithstanding all the advantages to Vertue should prove vitious the reason of this certainly to the considerate will seem to lie deeper than the meer liberty of Will in man But it can be attributed to nothing with a more due and tender regard to the Divine Attributes than to the pre-existent state of humane Souls according to the Scope of the Author Pag. 9. For still it sâ—â—ms to be a diminutive and disparaging apprehension of the infinite and immense goodness of God that he should detrude such excellent Creatures c. To enervate this reason there is framed by an ingenious hand this Hypothesis to vie with that of Pre-existence That Mankind is an Order of Beings placed in a middle state between Angels and Brutes made up of contrary Principles viz. Matter and Spirit indued with contrary faculties viz. Animal and Rational and encompassed with contrary Objects proportioned to their respective faculties that so they may be in a capacity to exercise the Vertues proper and peculiar to their compounded and heterogeneal nature And therefore though humane Souls be capable of subsisting by themselves yet God has placed them in Bodies full of brutish and unreasonable Propensions that they may be capable of exercising many choice and excellent Vertues which otherwise could never have been at all such as Temperance Sobriety Chastity Patience Meekness Equanimity and all other Vertues that consist in the Empire of Reason over Passion and Appetite And therefore he conceives that the creating of humane Souls though pure and immaculate and uniting them with such brutish Bodies is but the constituting and continuing such a Species of Being which is an Order betwixt Brutes and Angels into which latter Order if men use their faculties of the Spiritual Principle in them well they may ascend Forasmuch as God has given them in their Spiritual Principle containing Free Will and Reason to discern what is best a power and faculty of overcoming all their inordinate Appetites This is his Hypothesis mostwhat in his own words and all to his own sence as near as I could with brevity express it And it seems so reasonable to himself that he professes himself apt to be positive and dogmatical therein And it might very well seem so to him if there were a sufficient faculty in the Souls of men in this World to command and keep in order the Passions and Appetites of their Body and to be and do what their Reason and Conscience tells them they should be and do and blames them for not being and doing So that they know more by far than they find an ability in themselves to perform Extreamly few there are if any but this is their condition Whence all Philosophers that had any sense of Vertue and Holiness as well as Jews and Christians have looked upon Man as in a lapsed state not blaming God but deploring the sad condition they found themselves in by some foregoing lapse or fault in Mankind And it is strange that our own Consciences should flie in our faces for what we could never have helped It is witty indeed which is alleadged in the behalf of this Hypothesis viz. That the Rational part of man is able to command the lower Appetites because if the superiour part be not strong enough to govern the inferiour it destroys the very being of moral Good and Evil Forasmuch as those acts that proceed out of necessity cannot be moral nor can the superiour Faculties be obliged to govern the inferiour if they are not able because nothing is obliged to impossibilities But I answer if inabilities come upon us by our own fault the defects of action then are upon the former account moral or rather immoral And our Consciences rightly charge us with the Vitiosities of our Inclinations and Actions even before we can mend them here because they are the consequences of our former Guilt Wherefore it is no wonder that there is found a flaw in a subtilty that would conclude against the universal Experience of men who all of them more or less that have any sense of Morality left in them complain that the inferiour powers of the Soul at least for a time were too hard for the superiour And the whole mass of Mankind is so generally corrupt and abominable that it would argue the wise and just God a very unequal Matcher of innocent Souls with brutish Bodies they being universally so hugely foiled or overcome in the conflict if he indeed were the immediate Matcher of them For how can that be the effect of an equilibrious or sufficient Free Will and Power that is in a manner perpetual and constant But there would be near as many Examples one way as the other if the Souls of men in this state were not by some precedent lapse become unable to govern as they ought all in them or about them that is to be subjected to their Reason No fine Fetches of Wit can demolish the steady and weighty structure of sound and general Experience Pag. 9. Wherein he seeth it ten thousand to one but that they will corrupt c. The Expression ten thousand to one is figurative and signifies how hugely more like it is that the Souls would be corrupted by their Incorporation in these Animal or Brutish Bodies than escape Corruption And the effect makes good the Assertion for David of old to say nothing of the days of Noah and Paul
after him declare of Mankind in general that they are altogether become abominable there is none that doth good no not one Wherefore we see what efficacy these Bodies have if innocent Souls be put into them by the immediate hand of God as also the force of Custom and corrupt Education to debauch them and therefore how unlikely it is that God should create innocent Souls to thrust them into such ill circumstances Pag. 10. To suppose him assistent to unlawful and unclean Coitions by creating a Soul to animate the impure Foetus c. This seemed ever to those that had any sense of the Divine Purity and Sanctity or were themselves endued with any due sensibleness and discernment of things to be an Argument of no small weight But how one of the more rude and unhewen Opposers of Pre-existence swaggers it out of countenance I think it not amiss to set down for a pleasant Entertainment of the Reader Admit says he that Gods watchful Providence waits upon dissolute Voluptuaries in their unmeet Conjunctions and sends down fresh created Spirits to actuate their obscene Emissions what is here done which is not very high and becoming God and most congruous and proportionable to his immense Grandeur and Majesty viz. To bear a part amongst Pimps and Bawds and pocky Whores and Woremasters to rise out of his Seat for them and by a free Act of Creation of a Soul to set his Seal of Connivance to their Villanies who yet is said to be of more pure Eyes than to endure to behold Wickedness So that if he does as his Phrase is pop in a Soul in these unclean Coitions certainly he does it winking But he goes on For in the first place says he his condescension is hereby made signal and eximious he is gloriously humble beyond a parallel and by his own Example lessons us to perform the meanest works if fit and profitable and to be content even to drudge for the common bénefit of the World Good God! what a Rapture has this impure Scene of Venerie put this young Theologer into that it should thus drive him out of his little Wits and Senses and make him speak inconsistences with such an affected Grace and lofty Eloquence If the act of Gods freely creating Souls and so of assisting wretched Sinners in their foul acts of Adultery and Whoredom be a glorious action how is it an Abasement of him how is it his Humiliation and if it be an humbling and debasing of him how is it glorious The joyning of two such 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 are indeed without parallel The creating of an humane Soul immortal and immaculate and such as bears the Image of God in it as all immaculate Souls do is one of the most glorious actions that God can perform such a Creature is it as the Schools have judged more of value than the frame of the whole visible World But to joyn such a Creature as this to such impure corporeal matter is furthermore a most transcendent Specimen of both his Skill and Soveraignty so that this is an act of further Super-exaltation of himself not of Humiliation What remains then to be his Humiliation but the condescending to assist and countenance the unclean endeavours of Adulterers and Adulteresses Which therefore can be no Lessons to us for Humility but a Cordial for the faint-hearted in Debauchery and degeneracy of Life wherein they may plead so instructed by this rural Theolog that they are content to drudge for the common profit of the World But he proceeds And secondly says he hereby he elicits Good out of Evil causing famous and heroick persons to take their Origine from base occasions and so converts the Lusts of sensual Varlets to nobler ends than they designed them As if an heroick Off-spring were the genuine effect of Adultery or Fornication and the most likely way to People the World with worthy Personages How this raw Philosopher will make this comply with his Profession of Divinity I know not whenas it teaches us that Marriage is honourable but Whoremongers and Adulterers God will judge and that he punishes the Iniquities of the Parents on their Children But this bold Sophist makes God adjudge the noblest Off-spring to the defiled Bed and not to punish but reward the Adultery or Whoredom of debauched persons by giving them the best and bravest Children Which the more true it could be found in experience it would be the stronger Argument for Pre-existence it being incredible that God if he created Souls on purpose should crown Adultery and Whoredom with the choicest Off-spring And then thirdly and lastly says he hereby he often detects the lewdness of Sinners which otherwise would be smothered c. As if the All-wise God could find no better nor juster means than this to discover this Villany If he be thus immediately and in an extraordinary way assistant in these Coitions were it not as easie for him and infinitely more decorous to charge the Womb with some Mola or Ephemerous Monster than to plunge an immaculato humane Soul into it This would as effectually discover the Villany committed and besides prevent the charge Parishes are put to in maintaining Bastards And now that we have thus seen what a mere nothing it is that this Strutter has pronounced with such sonorous Rhetorick yet he is not ashamed to conclude with this Appeal to I know not what blind Judges Now says he are not all these Actions and Concerns very graceful and agreeable to God Which words in these circumstances no man could utter were he not of a crass insensible and injudicious Constitution or else made no Conscience of speaking against his Judgment But if he speak according to his Conscience it is manifest he puts Sophisms upon himself in arguing so weakly As he does a little before in the same place where that he may make the coming of a Soul into a base begotten Body in such a series of time and order of things as the Pre-existentiaries suppose and Gods putting it immediately upon his creating it into such a Body to be equally passable he uses this slight Illustration Imagine saith he God should create one Soul and so soon as he had done instantly pop it into a base begotten Body and then create another the matter of an hours space before its precipitation into such a Receptacle which of these Actions would be the most diminâ—tive of the Creators honour would not the difference be insensible and the scandal if any the same in both Yet thus lies the case just betwixt the Pre-existentiaries and us Let the Reader consider how senseless this Author is in saying the case betwixt the Pre-existentiaries and him is just thus when they are just nothing akin for his two Souls are both unlapsed but one of the Pre-existentiaries lapsed and so subjected to the Laws of Nature In his case God acts freely raising himself as it were out of his Seat to create an immaculate Soul
such a sense as Gods Wisdom and Justice are which can do nothing but what is wise and just the asserting I say that it cannot but do that which is the best does neither directly nor indirectly supplant or destroy any Rights of his Power or Dominion forasmuch as he does fully and plenarily act according to his own inclinations and will touching those that are under his Dominion But that his Will is always inclined or determined to what is best it is the Prerogative of the Divine Nature to have no other Wills nor Inclinations but such And as for that in the third place That this notion of Gods Goodness is inconsistent with all his other moral Perfections I say that it is so far from being inconsistent with them that they cannot subsist without it as they respect the dealings of God with his Creatures For what a kind of Wisdom or Justice would that be that tended to no good But I suspect his meaning is by moral Perfections Perfections that imply such a power of doing or not doing as is in humane actions which if it be not allowed in God his Perfections are not moral And what great matter is it if they be not provided they be as they are and ought to be Divine But to fancy moral actions in God is to admit a second kind of Anthropomorphitism and to have unworthy conceits of the Divine Nature When it was just and wise for God to do so or so and the contrary to do otherwise had he a freedom to decline the doing so Then he had a freedom to do unjustly and unwisely And yet in the fourth place he contends for the highest kind of liberty in the Divine Will such as imports a freedom not onely from forreign Violence but also from inward Necessity as if the Divine Will could be no otherwise determined than by its own intrinsick Energie as if it willed so because it willed so which is a sad principle And yet I believe this learned Writer will not stick to say that God cannot tye cannot condemn myriads of innocent Souls to eternal Torments And what difference betwixt Impossibility and Necessity For Impossibility it self is onely a Necessity of not doing which is here internal arising from the excellency and absolute perfection of the Divine Nature Which is nothing like Mechanism for all that Forasmuch as it is from a clear understanding of what is best and an unbyassed Will which will most certainly follow it nor is determined by its own intrinsick Energy That it is otherwise with us is our imperfection And lastly That Beneficence does not oblige the Receiver of it to either Praise or Thanksgiving when it is received from one that is so essentially good and constantly acts according to that principle when due occasion is offered as if it were as absurd as to give thanks to the Sun for shining when he can do no otherwise I say the case is not alike because the Sun is an inanimate Being and has neither Understanding nor Will to approve his own action in the exerting of it And he being but a Creature if his shining depended upon his Will it is a greater perfection than we can be assured would belong to him that he would unfailingly administer Light to the World with such a steadiness of Will as God sustains the Creation Undoubtedly all Thanks and Praise is due to God from us although he be so necessarily good that he could not but create us and provide for us forasmuch as he has done this for our sakes merely he wanting nothing not for his own Suppose a rich Christian so inured to the works of Charity that the Poor were as certain of getting an Alms from him as a Traveller is to quench his thirst at a publick Spring near the Highway would those that received Alms from him think themselves not obliged to Thanks It may be you will say they will thank him that they may not forfeit his Favour another time Which Answer discovers the spring of this Misconceit which seems founded in self-love as if all Duty were to be resolved into that and as if there were nothing owing to another but what implied our own profit But though the Divine Goodness acts necessarily yet it does not blindly but according to the Laws of Decorum and Justice which those that are unthankful to the Deity may find the smart of But I cannot believe the ingenious Writer much in earnest in these points he so expresly declaring what methinks is not well consistent with them For his very words are these God can never act contrary to his necessary and essential properties as because he is essentially wise just and holy he can do nothing that is foolish unjust and wicked Here therefore I demand Are we not to thank him and praise him for his actions of Wisdom Justice and Holiness though they be necessary And if Justice Wisdom and Holiness be the essential properties of God according to which he does necessarily act and abstain from acting why is not his Goodness when it is expresly said by the Wisdom of God incarnate None is good save one that is God Which must needs be understood of his essential Goodness Which therefore being an essential property as well as the rest he must necessarily act according to it And when he acts in the Scheme of Anger and Severity it is in the behalf of Goodness and when he imparts his Goodness in lesser measures as well as in greater it is for the good of the Whole or of the Vniverse If all were Eye where were the Hearing c. as the Apostle argues So that his Wisdom moderates the prompt outflowings of his Goodness that it may not outflow so but that in the general it is for the best And therefore it will follow that if the Pre-existence of Souls comply with the Wisdom Justice and Holiness of God that none of these restrain his prompt and parturient Goodness that it must have caused humane Souls to pre-exist or exist so soon as the Spirits of Angels did And he must have a strange quick-sightedness that can discern any clashing of that act of Goodness with any of the abovesaid Attributes Chap. 7. pag. 56. God never acts by mere Will or groundless Humour c. We men have unaccountable inclinations in our irregular and depraved Composition have blind lusts or desires to do this or that and it is our present ease and pleasure to fulfil them and therefore we fancy it a priviledge to be able to execute these blind inclinations of which we can give no rational account but that we are pleased by fulfilling them But it is against the Purity Sanctity and Perfection of the Divine Nature to conceive any such thing in Him and therefore a weakness in our Judgments to fancy so of him like that of the Anthropomorphites that imagined God to be of Humane shape Pag. 59. That God made all things for himself It is ignorance
motion and succession of things should be either ab aeterno or infinite in extension This is made out clearly and amply in Dr. H. Moore 's Enchiridion Metaphysicum cap. 10. which is also more briefly toucht upon in his Advertisements upon Mr. Jos Glanvil's Letter written to him upon the occasion of the Stirs at Tedworth and is printed with the second Edition of his Saducismus Triumphatus We have now seen the most considerable Objections against this Argument from the Goodness of God for proving the Pre-existence of Souls produced and answered by our learned Author But because I find some others in an Impugner of the Opinion of Pre-existence urged with great confidence and clamour I think it not amiss to bring them into view also after I have taken notice of his acknowledgment of the peculiar strength of this Topick which he does not onely profess to be in truth the strongest that is made use of but seems not at all to envy it its strength while he writes thus That God is infinitely good is a Position as true as himself nor can he that is furnished with the Reason of a man offer to dispute it Goodness constitutes his very Deity making him to be himself for could he be arayed with all his other Attributes separate and abstract from this they would be so far from denominating him a God that he would be but a prodigious Fiend and plenipotentiary Devil This is something a rude and uncourtly Asseveration and unluckly divulsion of the Godhead into two parts and calling one part a Devil But it is not to be imputed to any impiety in the Author of No-Pre-existence but to the roughness and boarishness of his style the texture whereof is not onely Fustian but over-often hard and stiff Buckram He is not content to deny his assent to an Opinion but he must give it disgraceful Names As in his Epistle to the Reader this darling Opinion of the greatest and divinest Sages of the World visiting of late the Studies of some of more than ordinary Wit and learning he compares it to a Bug and sturdy Mendicant that pretends to be some Person of Quality but he like a skilful Beadle of Beggars lifting up the skirts of her Veil as his Phrase is shews her to be a Counterfeit How this busie Beadle would have behaved himself if he had had the opportunity of lifting up the skirts of Moses's Veil when he had descended the Mount I know not I dare not undertake for him but that according to the coarsness of his phancy he would have mistaken that lucid Spirit shining through the skin of Moses's face for some fiery Fiend as he has somewhere the Spirit of Nature for an Hobgobling But there is no pleasure in insisting upon the rudenesses of his style he is best where he is most unlike himself as he is here in the residue of his Description of the Divine Goodness 'T is Goodness says he that is the Head and Glory of Gods perfect Essence and therefore when Moses importuned him for a Vision of his Glory he engaged to display his Goodness to him Could a man think that one that had engaged thus far for the infiniteness of Gods Goodness for its Headship over the other Attributes for its Glory above the rest nay for its Constitutiveness of the very Deity as if this were the onely 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or God himself the rest of Him divided from this a prodigious Fiend or plenipotentiary Devil should prove the Author of No-Pre-existence a very contradiction to this Declaration For to be able to hold No-Pre-existence he must desert the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 of God and betake himself to the Devil-part of him as he has rudely called it to avoid this pregnant proof for Pre-existence taken from the infinite Goodness of God And indeed he has pickt out the very worst of that black part of God to serve his turn and that is Self-will in the worst sence Otherwise Goodness making God to be himself if it were his true and genuine Self-will it were the Will of his infinite Goodness and so would necessarily imply Pre-existence But to avoid the dint of this Argument he declares in the very same Section for the Supremacy of the Will over the Goodness of the Divine Nature Which is manifestly to contradict what he said before That Goodness is the Head and Glory of Gods perfect Essence For thus Will must have a Supremacy over the Head of the Deity So that there will be an Head over an Head to make the Godhead a Monster And what is most insufferable of all That he has chosen an Head out of the Devil-part of the Deity to use his own rude expression to controul and lord it over what is the onely God himself the rest a Fiend separate from this according to his own acknowledgment These things are so infinitely absurd that one would think that he could have no heart to go about to prove them and yet he adventures on it and we shall briefly propose and answer what he produceth And this Supremacy of the Will saith he over the Goodness of the Divine Nature may be made out both by Scripture and other forcible Evidences The Scriptures are three the first Psal 135. 6. Whatsoever the Lord pleased that did he in heaven and in the earth and in the seas and in all deep places Now if we remember but who this Lord is viz. he whom Goodness makes to be himself we may easily be assured what pleased him namely that which his Wisdom discerned to be the best to be done and therefore it is very right that whatsoever he pleased he should do throughout the whole Universe The second place is Mat. 20. 15. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own Yes I trow every one must acknowledge that God has an 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 for the word is 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 in the Original to dispose of what is his own and indeed all is his No one has either a right or power to controul him But this does not prove that he ever disposes of any thing otherwise than according to his Wisdom and Goodness If his Goodness be ever limited it is limited by his Wisdom but so then as discerning such a limitation to be for the best So that the measure of Wisdoms determination is still Goodness the only Head in the Divine Nature to which all the rest is subordinate For that there are different degrees of the Communication of the Divine Goodness in the Universe is for the good of the Whole It is sufficient to hint these things it would require a Volume to enlarge upon them And then for the last place Exod. 33. 19. I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious This onely implies that he does pro suo jure and without any motive from any one but himself communicate more of his Goodness to some Men or Nations than others
such Grammar as that there is no School-boy but would be ashamed of it nor is there for all his pretences any place in Scripture to countenance such an extravagant Exposition by way of Parallelism as it may appear to any one that will compare the places which he alleadges with this which I leave the Reader to do at his leisure Let us consider the Context Joh. 17. 4. I have glorified thee upon earth during this my Pilgrimage and absence from thee being sent hither by thee I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do and for the doing of which I was sent and am thus long absent And now O Father glorifie me 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 apud teipsum in thine own presence with the glorie which I had before the world was 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 apud te or in thy presence What can be more expressive of a Glorie which Christ had apud Patrem or at his Fathers home or in his presence before the world was and from which for such a time he had been absent Now for others that would salve the business by communication of Idioms I will set down the words of an ingenious Writer that goes that way Those Predicates says he that in a strict and vigorous acception agreed onely to his Divine Nature might by a communication of Idioms as they phrase it be attributed to his Humane or at least to the whole Person compounded of them both than which nothing is more ordinarie in things of a mixt and heterogeneous nature as the whole man is stiled immortal from the deathlessness of his Soul thus he And there is the same reason if he had said that man was stiled mortal which certainly is far the more ordinarie from the real death of his Bodie though his Soul be immortal This is wittily excogitated But now let us apply it to the Text expounding it according to his communication of Idioms affording to the Humane Nature what is onely proper to the Divine thus Father glorifie me my Humane Nature with the glorie that I my Divine Nature had before the world was Which indeed was to be the Eternal Infinite and Omnipotent brightness of the Glory of the Father 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 This is the Glory which his Divine Nature had before the World was But how can this Humane Nature be glorified with that Glory his Divine Nature had before the world was unless it should become the Divine Nature that it might be said to have pre-existed But that it cannot be For there is no confusion of the Humane and Divine Nature in the Hypostasis of Christ Or else because it is hypostatically united with the Divine Nature but if that be the Glory that he then had already and had it not according to the Opposers of Pre-existence before the world was So we see there is no sence to be made of this Text by communication of Idioms and therefore no sence to be made of it without the Pre-existence of the Humane Nature of Christ And if you paraphrase me thus My Hypostasis consisting of my Humane and Divine Nature it will be as untoward sence For if the Divine Nature be included in me then Christ prays for what he has aleady as I noted above For the Glory of the eternal Logos from everlasting to everlasting is the same as sure as he is the same with himself Pag. 86. By his expressions of coming from the Father descending from Heaven and returning thither again c. I suppose these Scriptures are alluded to John 3. 13. 6. 38. 16. 28. I came down from Heaven not to do my own will but the will of him that sent me I came forth from the Father and am come into the world again I leave the world and go to the Father Whereupon his Disciples said unto him Lo now speakest thou plainly and speakest no Parable But it were a very great Parable or Aenigm that one should say truly of himself that he came from Heaven when he never was there And as impossible a thing is it to conceive how God can properly be said to come down from Heaven who is alwaies present every where Wherefore that in Christ which was not God namely his Soul or Humane Nature was in Heaven before he appeared on Earth and consequently his Soul did pre-exist Nor is there any refuge here in the communication of Idioms For that cannot be attributed to the whole Hypostasis which is competent to neither part that constitutes it For it was neither true of the Humane Nature of Christ if you take away Pre-existence nor of the Divine that they descended from Heaven c. And yet John 3. 13 14. where Christ prophesying of his Crucifixion and Ascension saith No man hath ascended up to Heaven but he that came down from Heaven even the Son of man 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 who was in Heaven So Erasmus saith it may be rendred a Participle of the present tense having a capacity to signifie the time past if the sence require it as it seems to do here Qui erat in Coelo viz. antequam descenderat So Erasmus upon the place Wherefore these places of Scripture touching Christ being such inexpugnable Arguments of the Pre-existence of the Soul of the Messiah the Writer of No Pre-existence methinks is no where so civil or discreet as in this point Where he saies he will not squabble about this but readily yield that the Soul of Christ was long extant before it was incarnate But then he presently flings dirt upon the Pre-existentiaries as guilty of a shameful presumption and inconsequence to conclude the Pre-existence of all other Humane Souls from the Pre-existence of his Because he was a peculiar favourite of God was to undergo bitter sufferings for Mankind and therefore should enjoy an happy Pre-existence for an Anti-praemium And since he was to purchase a Church with his own most precious Bloud it was fit he should pre-exist from the beginning of the world that he might preside over his Church as Guide and Governour thereof which is a thing that cannot be said of any other soul beside This is a device which I believe the Pre-existentiaries good men never dreamt of but they took it for granted that the creation of all Humane Souls was alike and that the Soul of Christ was like ours in all things sin onely excepted as the Emperour Justinian in his Discourse to Menas Patriarch of Constantinople argues from this very Topick to prove the Non-pre-existence of our Souls from the Non-pre-existence of Christs he being like us in all things sin onely excepted And therefore as to Existence and Essence there was no difference Thus one would have verily thought to have been most safe and most natural to conclude as being so punctual according to the declaration of Scripture and order of things For it seems almost as harsh and repugnant to give Angelical Existence to a Species not Angelical as Angelical
〈◊〉 animarum And as our Saviour Christ passed it for an innocent Opinion so did the Primitive Church the Book of Wisdom being an allowable book with them and read in publick though it plainly declare for Pre-existence Chap. 8. 20. Chap. 12. p. 93. Therefore let the Reader if he please call it a Romantick Scheme or imaginary Hypothesis c. This is very discreetly and judiciously done of the Author to propose such things as are not necessary members or branches of Pre-existence and are but at the best conjectural as no part of that otherwise-useful Theory For by tacking too fast these unnecessary tufts or tassels to the main Truth it will but give occasion to wanton or wrathful whelps to worry her and tug her into the dirt by them And we may easily observe how greedily they catch at such occasions though it be not much that they can make out of them as we may observe in the next Chapter Chap. 13. pag. 96. Pill 1. To conceive him as an immense and all-glorious Sun that is continually communicating c. And this as certainly as the Sun does his light and as restrainedly For the Suns light is not equally imparted to all subjects but according to the measure of their capacity And as Nature limits here in natural things so does the Wisdom and Justice of God in free Creatures He imparts to them as they capacitate themselves by improving or abusing their Freedom Pag. 100. Pill 3. Be resolved into a Principle that is not meerly corporeal He suspects that the descent of heavy bodies when all is said and done must be resolved into such a Principle But I think he that without prejudice peruses the Eleventh and Thirteenth Chapters with their Scholia of Dr. Mores Enchiridion Metaphysicum will find it beyond suspition that the Descent of heavy bodies is to be resolved into some corporeal Principle and that the Spirit of Nature though you should call it with the Cabalists by that astartling name of Sandalphon is no such prodigious Hobgoblin as rudeness and presumptuous ignorance has made that Buckeram Writer in contempt and derision to call it Pag. 101. As naturally as the fire mounts and a stone descends And as these do not so though naturally meerly from their own intrinsick nature but in vertue of the Spirit of the Vniverse so the same reason there is in the disposal of Spirits The Spirit of Nature will range their Plasticks as certainly and orderly in the Regions of the World as it does the matter it self in all places Whence that of Plotinus may fitly be understood That a Soul enveigled in vitiousness both here and after death according to her nature 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 is thrust into the state and place she is 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 as if she were drawn thither by certain invisible or Magical strings of Natures own pulling Thus is he pleased to express this power or vertue of the Spirit of Nature in the Universe But I think that transposition she makes of them is rather 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 than either 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 a transvection of them rather than pulsion or traction But these are overnâ—ce Curiosities Pag. 101. As likely some things relating to the state of Spirits c. That is to say Spirits by the ministry of other Spirits may be carried into such regions as the Spirit of Nature would not have transmitted them to from the place where they were before whether for good or evil Of the latter kind whereof I shall have occasion to speak more particularly in my Notes on the next Chapter Pag. 102. Pill 4. The souls of men are capable of living in other bodies besides terrestrial c. For the Pre-existentiaries allow her successively to have lived first in an Ethereal body then in an Aereal and lastly after the state of Silence to live in a Terrestrial And here I think though it be something early it will not be amiss to take notice what the Anti-pre-existentiaries alledged against this Hypothesis for we shall have the less trouble afterwards First therefore they say That it does not become the Goodness of God to make Mans Soul with a triple Vital Congruity that will fit as well an Aereal and Terrestrial condition as an Aethereal For from hence it appears that their Will was not so much in fault that they sinned as the constitution of their Essence And they have the face to quote the account of Origen pag. 49. for to strengthen this their first Argument The words are these They being originally made with a capacity to joyn with this terrestrial matter it seems necessary according to the course of nature that they should sink into it so appear terrestrial men And therefore say they there being no descending into these earthly bodies without a lapse or previous sin their very constitution necessitated them to sin The second Argument is That this Hypothesis is inconsistent with the bodies Resurrection For the Aereal bodie immediately succeeding the Terrestrial and the Aethereal the Aereal the business is done there needs no resuscitation of the Terrestrial body to be glorified Nor is it the same numerical body or flesh still as it ought to be if the Resurrection-body be Aethereal The third is touching the Aereal Body That if the soul after death be tyed to an Aereal body and few or none attain to the Aethereal immediately after death the souls of very good men will be forced to have their abode amongst the very Devils For their Prince is the Prince of the Air as the Apostle calls him and where can his subjects be but where he is So that they will be enforced to endure the companie of these foul Fiends besides all the incommodious changes in the Air of Clouds of Vapours of Rain Hail Thunder tearing Tempests and Storms and what is an Image of Hell it self the darkness of Night will overwhelm them every four and twenty hours The fourth Argument is touching the Aethereal state of Pre-existence For if souls when they were in so Heavenly and happy an estate could lapse from it what assurance can we have when we are returned thither that we shall abide in it it being but the same Happiness we were in before and we having the same Plastick with its triple Vital Congruity as we had before Why therefore may we not lapse as before The fifth and last Argument is taken from the state of Silence Wherein the Soul is supposed devoid of perception And therefore their number being many and their attraction to the place of conception in the Womb being merely Magical and reaching many at a time there would be many attracted at once so that scarce a Foetus could be formed which would not be a multiform Monster or a cluster of Humane Foetus's not one single Foetus And these are thought such weighty Arguments that Pre-existence must sink and perish under their pressure But I believe
when we have weighed them in the balance of unprejudiced Reason we shall find them light enough And truly for the first It is not only weak and slight but wretchedly disingenuous The strength of it is nothing but a maimed and fraudulent Quotation which makes ashew as if the Author of the Account of Origen bluntly affirmed without any thing more to do that souls being originally made with a capacity to joyn with this terrestrial matter it seems necessary according to the course of nature that they should sink into it and so appear terrestrial men Whenas if we take the whole Paragraph as it lies before they cast themselves into this fatal necessity they are declared to have a freedom of will whereby they might have so managed their happy Estate they were created in that they need never have faln His words are these What then remains but that through the faulty and negligent use of themselves whilst they were in some better condition of life they rendred themselves less pure in the whole extent of their powers both Intellectual and Animal and so by degrees became disposed for the susception of such a degree of corporeal life as was less pure indeed than the former but exactly answerable to their present disposition of Spirit So that after certain Periods of time they might become far less fit to actuate any sort of body than the terrestrial and being originally made with a capacity to joyn with this too and in it to exercise the Powers and functions of life it seems necessary c. These are the very words of the Author of the Account of Origen wherein he plainly affirms that it was the fault of the Souls themselves that they did not order themselves then right when they might have done so that cast them into this terrestrial condition But what an Opposer of Pre-existence is this that will thus shamelesly falsifie and corrupt a Quotation of an ingenious Author rather than he will seem to want an Argument against his Opinion Wherefore briefly to answer to this Argument It does as much become the Goodness of God to create souls with a triple Vital Congruity as to have created Adam in Paradise with free Will and a capacity of sinning To the Second the Pre-existentiaries will answer That it is no more absurd to conceive nor so much that the soul after death hath an Airy body or it may be some an Ethereal one than to imagine them so highly happy after death without any body at all For if they can act so fully and beatifically without any body what need there be any Resurrection of the body at all And if it be most natural to the soul to act in some body in what a long unnatural estate has Adams soul been that so many thousand years has been without a body But for the soul to have a body of which she may be the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 certainly is most natural or else she will be in an unnatural state after the Resurrection to all Eternitie Whence it is manifest that it is most natural for the soul if she act at all to have a body to act in And therefore unless we will be so dull as to fall into the drouzie dream of the Pyschopannychites we are to allow the soul to have some kind of body or other till the very Resurrection But those now that are not Psychopannychites but allow good Souls the joys and glories of Paradise before the Resurrection of the Body let them be demanded to what end the soul should have a Resurrection-body and what they would answer for themselves the Pre-existentiaries will answer for their position that holds the Soul has an Aethereal body already or an Aereal one which may be changed into an Aethereal body If they will alledge any Concinnity in the business or the firm promise of more highly compleating our Happiness at the union of our terrestrial bodies with our souls at the Resurrection This I say may be done as well supposing them to have bodies in the mean time as if they had none For those bodies they have made use of in the interval betwixt their Death and Resurrection may be so thin and dilute that they may be no more considerable than an Interula is to a Royal Robe lined with rich Furrs and embroidered with Gold For suppose every mans bodie at the Resurrection framed again out of its own dust bones sinews and flesh by the miraculous Power of God were it not as easie for these subtile Spirits as it is in the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 to enter these bodies and by the Divine Power assisting so to inactuate them that that little of their Vehicle they brought in with them shall no more destroy the individuation of the Body than a draught of wine drunk in does the individuation of our body now though it were immediately upon the drinking actuated by the Soul And the soul at the same instant actuating the whole Aggregate it is exquisitely the same numerical bodie even to the utmost curiosity of the Schoolmen But the Divine Assistance working in this it is not to be thought that the soul will loose by resuming this Resurrection-body but that all will be turned into a more full and saturate Brightness and Glory and that the whole will become an heavenly spiritual and truly glorified Body immortal and incorruptible Nor does the being thus turned into an heavenly or spiritual Body hinder it from being still the same Numerical body forasmuch as one and the same Numerical matter let it be under what modifications it will is still the same numerical matter or body and it is gross ignorance in Philosophie that makes any conceive otherwise But a rude and ill-natured Opposer of Pre-existence is not content that it be the same numerical body but that this same numerical body be still flesh peevishly and invidiously thereby to expose the Author of the Account of Origen who pag. 120. writes thus That the bodie we now have is therefore corruptible and mortal because it is flesh and therefore if it put on incorruption and immortality it must put off it self first and cease to be flesh But questionless that ingenious Writer understood this of natural â—lesh and bloud of which the Apostle declares That flesh and bloud cannot inherit the Kingdom of God But as he says 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 There is a natural body and there is a spiritual body So if he had made application of the several kinds of Flesh he mentions of Men of Beasts of Fishes and Birds he would have presently subjoyned 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 There is a natural flesh and there is a spiritual flesh And 't is this spiritual Flesh to which belongs incorruption and immortality and which is capable of the Kingdom of Heaven But for the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the natural flesh it must put off it self and cease to be natural flesh before it can put on immortality and
requires no such thing but it rather clashes with the first and chiefest Pillar thereof viz. That all the Divine designs and actions are laid and carried on by Infinite Goodness And I have already intimated how much better it is to be this way that I am pleading for than that of this otherwise-ingenious Writer Pag. 125. Since by long and hard exercise in this body the Plastick Life is well tamed and debilitated c. But this is not at all necessary no not in those souls whose Plastick may be deemed the most rampant Dis-union from this Terrestrial body immediately tames it I mean the Terrestrial Congruity of Life and itâ— operation is stopt as surely as a string of a Lutâ— never so smartly vibrated is streightways silenced by a gentle touch of the finger and another single string may be immediately made to sound alone while the other is mute and silent For I say these are the free Laws of the Eternal Wisdom but fatally and vitally not intellectually implanted in the Spirit of Nature and in all Humane Souls or Spirits The whole Universe is as it were the Automatal Harp of that great and true Apollo and as for the general striking of the strings and stopping their vibrations they are done with as exquisite art as if a free intellectual Agent plaid upon them But the Plastick powers in the world are not such but onely Vital and Fatal as I said before Pag. 126. That an Aereal body was not enough for it to display its force upon c. It is far more safe and rational to say that the soul deserts her Aereal Estate by reason that the Period of the Vital Congruity is expired which according to those fatal Laws I spoke of before is determined by the Divine Wisdom But whether a soul may do any thing to abbreviate this Period and excite such symptoms in the Plastick as may shorten her continuance in that state let it be left to the more inquisitive to define Pag. 128. Where is then the difference betwixt the just and the wicked in state place and body Their difference in place I have sufficiently shewn in my Answer to the third Argument against the triple Congruity of Life in the Plastick of Humane Souls how fitly they may be disposed of in the Air. But to the rude Buffoonry of that crude Opposer of the Opinion of Pre-existence I made no Answer It being methinks sufficiently answered in the Scholia upon Sect. 12. Cap. 3. Lib. 3. of Dr. H. Mores Immortalitas Animae if the Reader think it worth his while to consult the place Now for State and Body the difference is obvious The Vehicle is of more pure Air and the Conscience more pure of the one than of the other Pag. 130. For according to this Hypothesis the gravity of those bodies is less because the quantity of the earth that draws them is so c. This is an ingenious invention both to salve that Phaenomenon why Bodies in Mines and other deep subterraneous places should seem not so heavy nor hard to lift there as they are in the superiour Air above the earth and also to prove that the crust of the earth is not of so considerable a thickness as men usually conceive it is I say it is ingenious but not so firm and sure The Quick-silver in a Torricellian Tube will sink deeper in an higher or clearer Air though there be the same Magnetism of the earth under it that was before But this is not altogether so fit an illustration there being another cause than I drive at conjoyned thereto But that which I drive at is sufficient of it self to salve this Phaenomenon A Bucket of water while it is in the water comes up with ease to him that draws it at the Well but so soon as it comes into the Air though there be the same earth under it that there was before it feels now exceeding more weighty Of which I conceive the genuine reason is because the Spirit of Nature which ranges all things in their due order acts proportionately strongly to reduce them thereto as they are more heterogeniously and disproportionately placed as to their consistencies And therefore by how much more crass and solid a body is above that in which it is placed by so much the stronger effort the Spirit of Nature uses to reduce it to its right place but the less it exceeds the crassness of the Element it is in the effort is the less or weaker Hence therefore it is that a stone or such like body in those subterraneous depths seems less heavy because the air there is so gross and thick and is not so much disproportionate to the grossness of the stone as our air above the earth here is nor do I make any doubt but if the earth were all cut away to the very bottom of any of these Mines so that the Air might be of the same consistency with ours the stone would then be as heavy as it is usually to us in this superioor surface of the earth So that this is no certain Argument for the proving that the crust of the earth is of such thinness as this Author would have it though I do not question but that it is thin enough Pag. 131. And the mention of the Fountains of the great Deep in the Sacred History c. This is a more considerable Argument for the thinness of the crust of the earth and I must confess I think it not improbable but that there is an Aqueous hollow Sphaericum which is the Basis of this habitable earth according to that of Psalm 24. 2. For he hath founded it upon the seas and established it upon the flouds Pag. 131. Now I intend not that after a certain distance all is fluid matter to the Centre That is to say After a certain distance of earthly Matter that the rest should be fluid Matter namely Water and Air to the Centre c. But here his intention is directed by that veneration he has for Des Cartes Otherwise I believe if he had freely examined the thing to the bottom he would have found it more reasonable to conclude all fluid betwixt the Concave of the Terrestrial Crust and the Centre of the Earth as we usually phrase it though nothing be properly Earth but that Crust Pag. 131. Which for the most part very likely is a gross and foetid kind of air c. On this side of the Concave of the Terrestrial Crust there may be several Hollows of foetid air and stagnant water which may be so many particular lodgings for lapsed and unruly Spirits But there is moreover a considerable Aqueous Sphaericum upon which the earth is founded and is most properly the Abyss but in a more comprehensive notion all from the Convex thereof to the Centre may be termed the Abyss or the Deepest place that touches our imagination Pag. 131. The lowest and central Regions may be filled with flame and
aether c. That there was the Reliques of a Sun after the Incrustation of the Earth and Aqueous Orb is according to this Hypothesis reasonable enough And a kind of Air and Aether betwixt this diminished Sun and the Concave of this Aqueous Orb but no crass and opake concamerations of hard Matter interposed betwixt Which is an Hypothesis the most kind to the ingenious Author of Telluris Theoria Sacra that he could wish For he holding that there was for almost two thousand years an opake earthy Crust over this Aqueous Orb unbroke till the Deluge which he ascribes to the breaking thereof it was necessary there should be no opake Orb betwixt the Central Fire and this Aqueous Orb for else the Fishes for so long a time had lived in utter darkness having eyes to no purpose nor ability to guide their way or hunt their prey Onely it is supposed which is easie to do that they then swam with their backs toward the Centre whenas as now they swim with their bellies thitherward they then plying near the Concave as now near the Convex of this watry Abyss Which being admitted the difference of their posture will necessarilly follow according to the Laws of Nature as were easie to make out but that I intend brevity in these Annotations Onely I cannot forbear by the way to advertise how probable it is that this Central Fire which shone clear enough to give light to the Fishes swimming near the Concave of this Watry Orb might in process of time grow dimmer and dimmer and exceeding much abate of its light by that time the Crust of the Earth broke and let in the light of the Sun of this great Vortex into this Watry Region within which viz. in the Air or Aether there there has been still a decay of light the Air or Aether growing more thick as well as that little Central Fire or Sun being more and more inveloped with fuliginous stuff about it So that the whole Concavity may seem most like a vast duskish Vault and this dwindling over-clouded Sun a Sepulchral Lamp such as if I remember right was found in the Monuments of Olybius and Tulliola An hideous dismal forlorn Place and fit Receptacle for the Methim and Rephaim And the Latin Translation Job 26. 5. excellently well accords with this sad Phaenomenon Ecce Gigantes gemunt sub Aquis qui habitant cum eis Here is that 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 as Symmachus translates the word And it follows in the verse Nudus est Infernus coram eo Hell is naked before God And Symmachus in other places of the Proverbs puts 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 and 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 together which therefore is the most proper and the nethermost Hell And it will be 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 in the highest sense whenever this lurid Light as it seems probable to me it sometime will be is quite extinct and this Central Fire turned into a Terrella as it may seem to have already happened in Saturn But we must remember as the Author sometimes reminds us that we are embellishing but a Romantick Hypothesis and be sure we admit no more than Reason Scripture and the Apostolick Faith will allow Pag. 132. Are after death committed to those squalid subterraneous Habitations c. He seems to suppose that all the wicked and degerate souls are committed hither that they may be less troublesom to better souls in this air above the earth But considering the Devil is call'd the Prince of the Air that he has his Clients and Subjects in the same place with him we may well allow the lower Regions of the Air to him and to some wicked or unregenerate souls promiscuously with him though there be subterraneous Receptacles for the worst and most rebellious of them and not send them all packing thither Pag. 132. That they are driven into those Dungeons by the invisible Ministers of Justice c. He speaks of such Dungeons as are in the broken Caverns of the Farth which may be so many vexatious Receptacles for rebellious Spirits which these invisible Ministers of Justice may drive them into and see them commited and being confined there upon far severer penalties if they submit not to that present punishment which they are sentenced to they will out of fear of greater Calamity be in as safe custody as if they were under lock and key But the most dismal penalty is to be carried into the Abyss the place of the Rephaim I above described This is a most astonishing commination to them and they extreamly dread that sentence Which makes the Devils Luke 8. 31. so earnestly beseech Christ that he would not command them 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 to pack away into the Abyss This punishment therefore of the Abyss where the Rephaim or 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 groan is door and lock that makes them whether they will or no submit to all other punishments and confinements on this side of it Michael Psellus takes special notice how the Daemons are frighted with the menaces 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 with the menaces of the sending them away packing into the Abyss and subterraneous places But these may signifie no more than Cavities that are in the ruptues of the earth and they may steal out again if they will adventure unless they were perpetually watched which is not so probable Wherefore they are imprisoned through fear of that great horrid Abyss above described and which as I said is an iron lock and door of brass upon them But then you will say What is the door and lock to this terrible place I answer The inviolable Adamantine Laws of the great Sandalphon or Spirit of the Vniverse When once a rebellious Spirit is carried down by a Minister of Justice into this Abyss he can no more return of himself than a man put into a Well fortie â—athoms deep is able of himself to ascend out of it The unlapsed Spirits it is their priviledge that their Vehicles are wholly obedient to the will of the Spirit that inactuates them and therefore they have free ingress and egress every where and being so little passive as they are and so quick and swift in their motions can perform any Ministries with little or no incommodation to themselves But the Vehicles of lapsed Spirits are more passive and they are the very chains whereby they are tyed to certain Regions by the iron Laws of the Spirit of the Universe or Hylarchick Principle that unfailingly ranges the Matter everie where according to certain orders Wherefore this Serjeant of Justice having once deposited his Prisoner within the Concave of the Aqueous Orb he will be as certainly kept there and never of himself get out again as the man in the bottom of the Well above-mentioned For the Laws of the same Spirit of Nature that keeps the man at the bottom of the Well that everie thing may be placed according to the measure
of its consistencie will inhibit this Captive from ever returning to this Superiour Air again because his Vehicle is though foul enough yet much thinner than the Water and there will be the the same ranging of things on the Concave side of the Aqueous Orb as there is on the Convex So that if we could suppose the Ring about Saturn inhabited with any living creatures they would be born toward the Concave of the Ring as well as toward the Convex and walk as steadily as we and our Antipodes do with our feet on this and that side of the earth one against another This may serve for a brief intimation of the reason of the thing and the intelligent will easily make out the rest themselves and understand what an ineluctable fate and calamity it is to be carried into that duskish place of dread and horrour when once the Angel that has the Keys of the Abyss or bottomless pit has shut a rebellious Spirit up there chained him in that hideous Dungeon Pag. 133. Others to the Dungeon and some to the most intolerable Hell the Abyss of fire The Dungeon here if it werâ— understood with an Emphasis would most properly denote the Dungeon of the Rephaim of which those parts nearest the Centre may be called the Abyss of Fire more properly than any Vulcano's in the Crust of the earth Those souls therefore that have been of a more fierce and fiery nature and the Causers of Violence and Bloodshed and of furious Wars and cruel Persecutions of innocent and harmless men when they are committed to this Dungeon of the Rephaim by those inevitable Laws of the subâ—eraqueous Sandalphon or Demogorgon if you will they will be ranged nearest the Central Fire of this Hellish Vault For the Vehicles of â—ouls symbolizing with the temper of the mind those who are most haughty ambitious fierâ—e and fiery and therefore out of Pride and contempt of others in respect of themselves and their own Interest make nothing of shedding innocent bloud or cruelly handling those that are not for their turn but are faithful adherers to their Maker the Vehicles of these being more thin and fiery than theirs who have transgressed in the Concapâ—â—câ—ble they must needs surmount such in order of place and be most remote from the Concave of the Aqueous Orb under which the Rephaim groan and so be placed at least the nearest to that Abyss of Fire which our Author terms the most intolerable Hell Pag. 133. Have a strict and careful eye upon them to keep them within the confines of their Goal c. That this as it is a more tedious Province so a needless one I have intimated above by reason that the fear of being carried into the Abyss will effectually detain them in their confinements From whence if they be not released in time the very place they are in may so change their Vehicles that it may in a manner grow natural to them and make them as uncapable of the Superiour Air as Bats and Owls are as the ingenious Author notes to bear the Suns Noon-day-Beams or the Fish to live in these thinner Regions Pag. 134. Vnder severe penalties prohibit all unlicensed excursions into the upper World though I confess this seems not so probable c. The Author seems to reserve all the Air above the earth to good souls onely and that if any â—ad ones appear it must â—e by either stealth or license But why bad souls may not be in this lower Region of the Air as well as Devils I understand not Nor do I conceive but that the Kingdom of Darkness may make such Laws amongst themselves as may tend to the ease and safety of those of the Kingdom of Light Not out of any good-will to them but that themselves may not further smart for it if they give license to such and such exorbitancies For they are capable of pain and punishment and though they are permitted in the world yet they are absolutely under the power of the Almighty and of the Grand Minister of his Kingdom the glorious Soul of the Messiah Pag. 137. The internal Central Fire should have got such strength and irresistible vigour c. But how or from whence is very hard to conceiâ—e I should rather suspect as I noted above that the Fire will more and more decay till it turn at last to a kind of Terrella like that observed within the Ring of Saturn and the Dungeon become utter Darkness where there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth as well as in the furnace of Fire Pag. 141. And so following the Laws of its proper motion shall fly away out of this Vortex c. This looks like an â—eedless mistake of this ingenious Writer who though he speak the language of Cartesius seems here not to have recalled to mind his Principles For the Earth according to his Principles is never like to become a Sun again Nor if it had so become would it then become a Comet Forasmuch as Comets according to his Philosophie are incrâ—stated Suns and Planets or Earths in a manner and so to be deemed so soon as they settle in any Vortex and take their course about the Centre thereof Nor if the Earth become a Sun again is it like to leave our Vortex according to the Cartesian Principles but rather be swallowed down into the Sun of our Vortex and increase his magnitude the ranging of the Planets according to Des Cartes Mechanical Laws being from the difference of their solidities and the least solid next to the Sun Whither then can this Sol redivivus or the Earth turned wholly into the Materia subtilissima again be carried but into the Sun it self This seems most likely especially if we consider this Sol Redivious or the Earth turned all into the Materia subtilissima in itself But if we take into our consideration its particular Vortex which carries about the Moon the business may bear a further debate which will require more time than to be entred upon here But it seems plain at first sight that though this Sol Redivivus should by vertue of its particular Vortex be kept from being swallowed down into the Sun and Centre of the great Vortex yet it will never be able to get out of this great Vortex according to the frame of Des Cartes Philosophy So that there will be two Suns in one Vortex a Planetary one and a fixt one Which unexpected monstrositie in Nature will make any cautious Cartesian more wary how he admits of the Earths ever being turned into a Sun again but rather to be content to let its Central Fire to incrustrate it self into a Terrella there seeming to be an example of this in that little Globe in the midst of the Ring of Saturn but of an Earth turned into a Sun no example at all that I know of Pag. 142. So that the Central Fire remains unconcerned c. And so â—t well may it being
and changings and interpolations hard to prove to be his but have spared his name for that unspeakable good service he did the Church in his life-time See Dr. H. Mores Preface to his Collectio Philosophica Sect. 18. where Origens true Character is described out of Eusebius Wherefore whether this be to begin or carry on things in via Spiritus Sancti so that we may rely on the Authority of such a Council I leave to the impartial and judicious to consider Fourthly In reference to the fourth Head That true wisdom and moderation and the holy assistance of Gods Spirit did not guide the affairs of this Council seems to be indicated by the Divine Providence who to shew the effect of their unwise proceedings in the self-same year the Council sate sent a most terrible Earthquake for forty days together upon the City of Constantinople where the Council was held and upon other Regions of the East even upon Alexandria it self and other places so that many Cities were levelled to the ground Upon which Spondanus writes thus Haec verò praesagia fuisse malorum quae sunt praedictam Synodum consecuta nemo negare poterit quicunque ab eventis facta noverit judicare This also reminds me of a Prodigy as it was thought that happened at the sixth reputed General Council where nigh three hundred Fathers were gathered together to decide this nice and subtile Point namely whether an operation or volition of Christ were to be deemed Vna operatio sive volitio 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 according to that Axiom of some Metaphysicians that Actio est suppositi and so the Humane and Divine Nature of Christ being coalescent into one person his volition and operation be accounted one as his person is but one or because of the two Natures though but one person there are to be conceived two operations or two volitions This latter Dogma obtained and the other was condemned by this third Constantinopolitan Council whereupon as Paulus Diaconus writes abundance of Cobwebs or Spiders webs fell or rained as it were down upon the heads of the people to their very great astonishment Some interpret the Cobwebs of Heresies others haply more rightfully of troubling the Church of Christ with over-great niceties and curiosities of subtile Speculation which tend nothing to the corroborating her Faith and promoting a good Life and are so obscure subtile and lubricous that look on them one way they seem thus and another way thus To this sixth General Council there seemed two Operations and two Wills in Christ because of his two Natures To a Council called after by Philippicus the Emperour and John Patriarch of Constantinople considering Christ as one person there appeared Numerosissimo Orientalium Episcoporum collecto Conventui as Spondanus has it but as Binius Innumerae Orientalium Episcoporum multitudini congregatae but one will and one operation And certainly this numerous or innumerable company of Bishops must put as fair for a General Council as that of less than three hundred But that the Authority of both these Councils are lessened upon the account of the second Head in that the matter they consulted about tended nothing to the corroboration of our Faith or the promotion of a good Life I have already intimated These things I was tempted to note in reference to the tenth Head For it seems to mean undeniable Argument that our First Reformers which are the Risen Witnesses were either exquisitely well seen in Ecclesiastick History or the good Hand of God was upon them that they absolutely admitted onely the four first General Councils but after them they knew not where to be or what to call a General Council and therefore would not adventure of any so called for the adjudging any matters Heresie But if any pretended to be such their Authority should no further prevail than as they made out things by express and plain words of Canonical Scripture And for other Synods whether the Seventh which is the second of Nice or any other that the Church of Rome would have to be General in defence of their own exorbitant points of Faith or Practice they will be found of no validity if we have recourse to the sixth seventh eighth and ninth Heads Fifthly In reference to the fifth Head This fifth Council loseth its Authority in anathematizing what in Origen seems to be true according to that express Text of Scripture John 16. 28. especially compared with others See Notes on Chap. 11. I came forth from the Father and am come into the world again I leave the world and go to the Father He came forth from his Father which is in Heaven accordingly as he taught us to pray to him the Divine Shechina being in a peculiar manner there He leaves the world and goes to the Father which all understand of his Ascension into Heaven whence his coming from the Father must have the same sense or else the Antithesis will plainly fail Wherefore it is plain he came down from Heaven as he signifies also in other places as well as returns thither But he can neither be truly said to come from heaven nor return thither according to his Divine Nature For it never left Heaven nor removes from one place to another and therefore this Scripture does plainly imply the Pre existence of the Soul of the Messiah according to the Doctrine of the Jews before it was incarnate And this stricture of the old Cabala may give light to more places of St. Johns Writings than is fit to recite in this haste I will onely name one by the by 1 John 4. 2. Every Spirit that confesseth 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 that Jesus is the Christ come in the flesh that is to say is the Christ incarnate is of God For the Messiah did exist viz. his Soul before he came into the flesh according to the Doctrine of the Jews Which was so well known that upon the above-cited saying John 16. 28. of our Saviour they presently answered Lo now speakest thou plainly and speakest no Parable because he clearly discovers himself by this Character to be the expected Messias incarnate Nor is there any possible evasion out of the clearness of this Text â—rom the communication of Idioms because Christ cannot be said to come down from Heaven according to his Humane Nature before it was there therefore his Humane Nature was there before it was incarnate And lastly The Authority of the Decision of this Council if it did so decide is lessened in that contrary to the second Head as was hinted above it decides a point that Faith and Godliness is not at all concerned in For the Divinity of Christ which is the great point of Faith is as firmly held supposing the Soul of the Messias united with the Logos before his incarnation as in it So that the spight onely of Pelagius against Theodorus to multiply Anathematisms against Origen no use or necessity of the Church required any such thing
Whence again their Authority is lessened upon the account of the third Head These things may very well suspend a careful mind and loth to be imposed upon from relying much upon the Authority of this fifth Council But suppose its Authority entire yet the Acts against Origen are not to be found in the Council And the sixth Council in its Anathematisms though it mention Theodorets Writings the Epistle of Ibas and Theodarus Mopsuestenus who were concerned in the fifth Council yet I find not there a syllable touching Origen And therefore those that talk of his being condemned by that fifth Council have an eye I suppose to the Anathematisms at the end of that Discourse which Justinian the Emperour sent to Menas Patriarch of Constantinople according to which form they suppose the errours of Origen condemned Which if it were true yet simple Pre-existence will escape well enough Nor do I think that learned and intelligent Patriarch Photius would have called the simple Opinion of Pre-existence of souls 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 but for those Appendages that the injudiciousness and rashness of some had affixed to it Partly therefore reâ—lecting upon that first Anathematism in the Emperours Discourse that makes the pre-existent souls of men first to be 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 as if their highest felicity consisted in having no body to inactuate which plainly clashes with both sound Philosophy and Christianity as if the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 and Rephaim were all one and they were not 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 till they were 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 grown cold to the Divine Love and onely gathered body as they gathered corruption and were alienated from the Life of God which is point-blank against the Christian Faith which has promised us as the highest prize a glorified body And partly what himself adds that one soul goes into several bodies Which are impertinent Appendages of the Pre-existence of the soul false useless and unnecessary and therefore those that add these Appendages thereto violate the sincerity of the Divine Tradition to no good purpose But this simple Doctrine of Pre-existence is so unexceptionable and harmless that the third collection of Councils in Justellus which is called 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 though it reckon the other errours of Origen condemned in the fifth Council omits this of Pre-existence Certainly that Ecclesiastick that framed that Discourse for the Emperour if he did it not himself had not fully deliberately and impartially considered the Dogma of Pre-existence taken in its self nor does once offer to answer any Reasons out of Scripture or Philosophy that are produced for it Which if it had been done and this had been the onely errour to be alledged against Origen I cannot think it credible nay scarce possible though their spight had been never so much against some lovers of Origen that they could have got any General Council to have condemned so holy so able so victorious a Champion for the Christian Church in his life-time for an Heretick upon so tolerable a punctilio about three hundred years after his death What Father that wrote before the first four General Councils but might by the Malevolent for some odd passage or other be doomed an Heretick if such severity were admittable amongst Christians But I have gone out further than I was aware and it is time for me to bethink me what I intended Which was the justifying of my self in my seeming to prefer the Discretion of our own Church in leaving us free to hold the Incorporeity and Immortality of the soul by any of the three handles that best fitted every mans Genius before the Judgment of the fifth General Council that would abridge us of this liberty From which Charge I have endeavoured to free my self briefly by these two ways First by shewing how hard it is to prove the fifth Oecumenical Council so called to be a legitimate General or Oecumenical Council and such as whose Authority we may relie on And secondly if it was such by shewing that it did not condemn simply the Pre-existence of souls but Pre-existence with such and such Appendages So that there is no real clashing betwixt our Church and that Council in this But however this is from the eighth and ninth Heads it's plain enough that the Church of England is no favourer of the Conclusions of any General Council that are enjoyned as necessary to Salvation that be either repugnant to Holy Scripture or are not clearly to be made out from the same which Non-pre-existence of Souls certainly is not but rather the contrary But being the point is not sufficiently clear from Scripture either way to all and the Immortality of the Soul and subsistence after death is the main useful point that way which men can hold it with most firmness and ease her Candour and Prudence has left it free to them to make use of And as for General Councils though she does not in a fit of Zeal which Theodosius a Prior in Palestine is said to have done anathematize from the Pulpit all people that do not give as much belief to the four first General Councils as to the four Gospels themselves yet as you may see in the tenth Head she makes the Authority of the first four General Councils so great that nothing is to be adjudged Heresie but what may be proved to be so either from the Scripture or from these four Councils Which Encomium might be made with less skill and more confidence by that Prior there having been no more than four General Councils in his time But it was singular Learning and Judgment or else a kind of Divine Sagacity in our first Reformers that they laid so great stress on the first four General Councils and so little on any others pretended so to be But in all likelihood they being perswaded of the truth of the prediction of the Apostasie of the Church under Antichrist how universal in a manner it would be they had the most confidence in those General Councils which were the earliest and that were held within those times of the Church which some call Symmetral And without all question the two first General Councils that of Nice and that other of Constantinople were within those times viz. within four hundred years after Christ and the third and fourth within the time that the ten-horned Beast had his horns growing up according to Mr. Mede's computation But the Definitions of the third and fourth Councils that of Ephesus and that other of Chalcedon which are to establish the Divinity of Christ which is not to be conceived without the Union of both Natures into one person as also his Theanthropy which cannot consist with the confusion of both Natures into one were vertually contained in the Definitions of the first and second Councils So that in this regard they are all of equal Authority and that unexceptionable First because their Decisions were concerning points necessary to be decided one way or other
Principle in Philosophie That there is nothing in the whole Universe but what is either Substantia or Modus And when a Mode or several Modes put together are immediately and essentially inseparable from a Substance they are lookt upon as the Form or the onely knowable Specifick difference of that Substance So that Impenetrability and Discerpibility which are immediately essential to and inseparable from Body or Matter and Self-Inactivitie as Irrational is made the specifick difference of a Brute may be added also These I say are as truly the Form or Specifick difference of Body or Matter as any thing knowable is of any thing in the world And Self-Inactivity at least is contrary to the Virtus vitalis of a Spirit though Impenetrability and Discerpibility were not So that according to this oeconomy you see how plainly and exquisitely Body and Spirit are made opposite Species one to another And 't is these Modal differences of Substances which we only know but the Specifick Substance of any thing is utterly unknown to us however Mr. Baxter is pleased to swagger to the contrarie p. 44 62. Where he seems to mis-understand the Doctor as if by Essence he did not understand Substance as both 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 and Essentia usually signifie especially with the Ancients but any Being at large But of Substance it is most true we know it onely by its essential Modes but the Modes are not the Substance it self of which they are Modes otherwise the Substance would want Modes or every Substance would be more substances than one And Mr. Baxter himself saith pag. 62. To know an essential Attribute and to know ipsam essentiam scientiâ inadaequatâ is all one Which inadequate or partial knowledge say I is this the knowing of the Essential Mode of the Substance and not knowing the Substance it self Otherwise if both the Essential Modes were known and also the Specifick Substance to which the Modes belong more than that those Modes belong to that Substance the knowledge would be full and adequate and stretcht through the whole Object So that Mr. Baxters Scientia inadoequata and the Doctors denying the bare Substance it self to be known may very well consist together and be judged a mere 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Which is an exercise more grateful it 's likely to Mr. Baxter than to the Doctor To the third I say Any one that considers may find a necessarie reason why Quantitie or Trina Dimensio should be left out in the Form of Body or Matter especially why the Doctor should leave it out because he does professedly hold That whatever is has Metaphysical Quantitie or Metaphysical Trina Dimensio Which no man can denie that holds God is Essentially present every-where And no man I think that does not dote can denie that Wherefore allowing Matter to be Substance in that Generical nature Trina Dimensio is comprized and need not be again repeated in the Form But when in the Forma or Differentia Discerpible and Impenetrable is added this is that which makes the Trina Dimensio included in the Genus Substantia of a Corporeal kind and does constitute that Species of things which we call Corpora This is so plain a business that we need insist no longer upon it Now to the fourth I answer briefly That from what knowledge we have by the mediation of the Senses and inference of the Intellect we arrive not onely to the knowledge of like things but of unlike or rather contrary As in this very example we being competently well instructed indeed assured by our Senses that there is such a kind of thing as Body whose nature is to be Impenetrable and Discerpible and our Reason certainly informing us as was noted even now that whatever is has a kind of Amplitude more or less or else it would be nothing hence we are confirmed that not Extension or Trina Dimensio but Impenetrabilitie and Discerpibilitie is the determinate and adequate nature of what we call Body and if there be any opposite species to Body our Reason tells us it must have opposite Modes or Attributes which are Penetrability and Indiscerpibility This is a plain truth not to be groped after with our fingers in the dark but clearly to be discerned by the eye of our understanding in the light of Reason And thus we see and many examples more we might accumulate That by the help of our Senses and Inference of our Vnderstanding we are able to conclude not onely concerning like things but their contraries or opposites I must confess I look upon this allegation of Mr. Baxter as very weak and faint And as for his fifth I do a little marvel that so grave and grandaevous a person as he should please himself in such little â—â—irts of Wit and Sophistry as this of the Indiscerpibility of an Atom or Physical Monad As if Indiscerpibility could be none of the essential or specifical Modes or Attributes of a Spirit because a Physical Monad or Atom is Indiscerpible also which is no Spirit But those very Indiscerpibilities are Specifically different For that of a Spirit is an Indiscerpibility that arises from the positive perfection and Oneness of the Essence be it never so ample that of an Atom or Physical Monad from imperfection and privativeness from the mere littleness or smalness thereof so small that it is impossible to be smaller and thence onely is Indiscerpible The sixth also is a pretty juvenile Ferk of Wit for a grave ancient Divine to use That Penetrability can be no proper Character of a Spirit because Matter can penetrate Spirit as well as Spirit Matter they both possessing the same space Suppose the bodie A. of the same amplitude with the bodie B. and thrust the bodie A. against the bodie B. the bodie A. will not nor can penetrate into the same space that the bodie B. actually occupies But suppose the bodie A. a Spirit of that amplitude and according to its nature piercing into the same space which the bodie B. occupies how plain is it that that active piercing into the same space that the bodie B. occupies is to be attributed to the Spirit A. not to the bodie B For the bodie A. could not get in These are prettie forc'd distortions of Wit but no solid methods of due Reason And besides it is to be noted that the main Character of a Spirit is as to Penetrability that Spirit can penetrate Spirit but not Matter Matter And now the Seventh is as slight as the Fifth Diverse Accidents saith he penetrate their Subjects as Heat Cold c. Therefore Penetrabilitie is no proper Character of a Spirit But what a vast difference is there here The one pierce the matter or rather are in the matter merely as continued Modes thereof the other enters into the matter as a distinct Substance therefrom Penetration therefore is here understood in this Character of a Spirit of Penetratio Substantialis when a substance penetrates substance