into its natural extract or that such a substance can covet something future and as it were contrary to its own annihilation and yet become certainly annihilate This Desire I suppose all men will agree to be no ways incident to Beasts and therefore I beseech men for God's sake that if at any time there arise a desire in them or they wish or would that others should speak well of them rather than evil after their death then at that time they would seriously consider whether those motions are not from some Spirit to continue a Spirit after it leaves its earthly habitation rather than from an earthly Spirit a Vapour which cannot act or imagine or desire or fear things beyond its continuance For if the desire or fear of Posthume Glory or Posthume shame or punishment be congenial and connatural to all noble minds it is a pregnant and I think undeniable hint of their possible at least sempiternal existence after death Now a probability of our Souls being and existence and a possibility of its Eternal being after death being as much as native reason can suggest or inform any man for I do not think that any man from reason ever thought himself to be a God and of Eternal existence à parte ante as men say but had a beginning and by consequence if he had a beginning his duration support and conservation must necessarily depend on the same Eternal power that gave it beginning and that from the withdrawing that conserving power all things created have an end this probability and possibility from reason methinks should create some prudence and watchfulness in man and cause him whensoever he feels some inbred light glowing in him and yet after it has stirred burns so dimly in him that he knows not well which way to move to implore the aid of the Author of our own and all other beings and feeling something native to seek after somewhat of Tradition too to help it And that if there may be collected from reason some such thing in man as a capacity of Eternal life to make a quaere like him in the Gospel what shall I do to know it and inherit it that is enjoy it or live it with joy for fear at least otherwise we may so live as that we would desire to die and be extinct and find cause when nothing will help us to call on inanimate creatures even the Hills to cover us from his presence with whom there might have been fulness of joy All men living agree the Creator of the Universe to be good and gracious and loving to his creatures therefore let us search into that which the whole Christian World have always acknowledged to have been his Word and if we find not from thence assurance of Eternal life and by his Grace comfort from it conclude it is not to be found but not conclude before we have sought PART II. SECT I. Of the several faculties or operations of the Soul and therein first of Involuntary and Voluntary motion I Am now about to take the best view I can or my Soul is capable to do of its several faculties or operations distinct and apart one from the other and which together working in the Body we call the Soul of man What I have elsewhere said is an intricate maze full of little windings and turnings not to be traced out or fully discovered to it self I may here further say it is a brightness issued or darted from that glorious light so shining as somewhat to be seen and admired not at present wholly comprehended I never thought nor hoped to set down all that it is but only somewhat that it is we are not able to dissect the very case of it so as to find out the hundredth entry or passage for this Soul into the Body whereby that Lump is moved Some little kind of knowledge or notice we have got of its larger Rooms but for its smaller Inlets they have puzzled the most curious and quickest sight in the search and if my information be not false the most learned have acknowledged and confessed that upon the narrowest scrutiny they could possibly make in a dissection they could never yet find out by which ways or means Milk was made or conveyed from other parts of the Body to the Paps or Dugs The Soul must needs be of a more subtle nature than the Bloud from which some would have it to arise in Man as well as Beast and if that were granted we could scarce discover all the motions of the one without a perfect knowledge of the other which it seems is yet wanting and I am not desirous to lose my self in finding All that I desire to find is the cause and occasion of the Souls billows rage and tempestuousness and what helps there may be towards the allaying them to see whether our madness and folly does not with the raging of the Sea necessarily require one and the same stiller and quieter But from my search into the Soul I am not altogether ignorant that first from it there is a motion which we term for distinction sake Involuntary motion continuing without interruption during the whole time of the Souls residence with the Body as is the course or circulation of the Bloud the pulse breathing concoction nutrition excretion c. And also another kind of motion not always but admitting intermission and this arising from an introduction by some sense viz. the pressure of an external object upon each peculiar Organ of the Body proper and by the mediation of Nerves or Fibres conveyed inward to the chief domicils of the Soul from whence in its primary motion we are said to see hear feel tast or smell and so receives some counterpressure or resistance by stirring some Limb and making some noise which because seeming to depend upon some precedent fancy in our mind and capable of intermission we call Voluntary motion These and the like motions of the Soul are not the things I hunt after nor trouble my self to decipher since they may be quicker or slower without any apparent disease or combustion in the Soul of man But in short the Affections the Understanding and the Will together with the result from some of them the thing we call Conscience are those actions of the Soul I would at present in order enumerate be acquainted with and make legible to my self SECT II. Of the Affections of the Soul AFfections we commonly call them some Affects some Passions they are many and various in the Soul of man and there is little need of enumerating them they are too obvious upon several occasions in the Souls march here and they are a Troop without a wise conduct readier for mutiny than for service And though what we term sometimes Affections seem not properly so but are rather propensions or habits budding forth from Affections and taken for Affections we will at present muster some of them together under the notion
2. By his merciful Providence or restraining Grace 3. By his bountiful Providence or common renewing grace 4. By his Spirit or special renewing Grace How God according to all these may be invocated The danger of applying the operation of the Spirit to every work in man And how fit it is to clear the mind of such Errour Of the use of solitude in some particular Seasons as the most ready and likely way to discover Truth page 13 EPIST. III. Wherein he sets down some further grounds and Reasons of his opinion of the Mortality or utter annihilation of the Souls of Brutes upon their death No durable Spirit in any visible Creature but man of Sympathies and Antipathies in Plants and Animals The soul of Beasts essential with the Body and so subject to the same fate The Intellect in them in its height at the first whereas that in man is gradual Acts peculiar to reasonable Creatures as desire of dissolution and voluntary abstinence The Spirit of Brutes determined by Sense No Creature besides man lays up more than is sufficient to maintain it self We attribute greater gifts and Sagacity to mere Animals than they have as in Ants. That there may be as much Intellect in Creatures we converse not with as those we do The opinion of the utter annihilation of the spirit of Brutes hath no tendency to Atheism page 39 EPIST. IV. Wherein the Author Treats of man's ignorance in his search into the most ordinary work of Nature and concludes how much more dim-sighted we are when we look into the frame and structure of man's Soul Solomon's knowledge of Nature not universal much in Nature found out accidentally No one work of it fully to be understood How Nature doth change in its operations Of change in Colours and that the variety in them is unaccountable That there is a transcendent Wisdom ruling and appearing in all far above our reach And so there is great Reason for caution in our enquiries or affirmations page 60 EPIST. V. Wherein he further illustrates the inherent or native Power and Predominancy of the Affections above the other faculties of the Soul but more particularly treats of the Imagination its deception in us our miseries thereby and the remedies against its delusion Imagination in Brutes ariseth only from Sense That in them receives its objects in their proper Nature they are seldom mistaken in the face of the Heavens c. they cannot revolve in their mind or recall Imagination Imagination in them changeth according to its objects Imagination in us sometimes supplies the place of Reason as in the case of Transubstantiation c. deceives the Affections Imagination and in Conjunction with them is the cause of Error as in malice c. The good man the only rational man The difference 'twixt Reason and ratiocination Reason deceives not and is the chief principle of governing the Thoughts The advantage of sorrow in curbing the Imagination The Imagination subject to infection from the humours of the Body When we are answerable for its transgressions Thoughts cannot arise from Sense page 68 EPIST. VI. Wherein he treats of the various impress of the Divine Power upon each particular created substance much more upon the Souls of men wherein there is great dissimilitude And further shews how prone we are from thence to mistake in judging of the temper of others and our own Thence he proceeds to discourse of the Nature grounds measure and ends of Friendship page 128 EPIST. VII Of the different pursuits of the Souls of men wherein we are ready to accuse each other of folly though not our selves and yet in a degree are all weak and foolish That no pursuit of the Soul here is praise-worthy or commendable further than it intentionally advanceth God's glory which is the mark set before us and which if we do not behold in all our travails our labour in the issue will prove of as little profit as comfort page 156 EPIST. VIII Compleat Happiness here is merely in speculation That natural endowments in the Soul do conduce to the ease peace and quiet of it and are therefore desirable though we attain not happiness thereby Learning and Knowledge Wisdom Prudence and subtilty considered That even Prudence the most likely conduct to Happiness was never yet the constant concomitant of the clearest human Soul No satisfaction without the belief of a Providence page 166 EPIST. IX Wherein the Author maintains a divine Wisdom and Providence ruling in and over the Soul of man more especially and more apparently if considered than any work of Creation And that the Affections in the heart of man seem that part of the Soul whereon God more especially exerciseth his Prerogative moulding and changing them on the sudden to his secret purposes beyond and even contrary to any foresight conjecture or Imagination of the Soul it self page 185 EPIST. X. Of Credulity and Incredulity the rise of both and that Credulity of the two is of more pernicious consequence And of the evil of imposing on others or creating or raising a Belief on false or uncertain Principles Of the word notion and grace of Faith Of the strange variety of Beliefs in the World Of Liberty of Conscience page 195 ERRATA PAge 21. l. 10. for Esau's vine r. Isaiah's vine p. 44. l. ult for Hawk r. Hare p. 45. l. 39. for Have r. Cave p. 46. l. ult for substance r. subsistence p. 47. l. 2. for submit r. subsist ibid. l. 14. for gifts r. Fits p. 52. l. 9. for life r. Fly p. 53. l. 15. for their r. the 54. l. 25. dele since p. 56. l. 11. for that r. they ibid. l. 30. for piece r. Pease CONSIDERATIONS AGAINST Immoderate care for a Man 's own Posterity and sorrow for the loss of Children SECT I. Of Afflictions in general their Usefulness and Necessity and in particular the loss of Children considered with the use and end of it THE first thoughts which presented themselves to me and what I ever before firmly believed were these That first as there is one Eternal wise God Creator of Heaven and Earth and all things therein So secondly the same God has a care over all the works of his Creation and continually rules and disposes all things according to his infinite wisdom which act of his we call Providence To doubt of this were not only to deny all Scripture and relinquish my profession of Christianity but even to abandon my very Reason For from this first part of my belief I think there are few dissenters and although this Age affords a number of David's jolly sanguine Fools who at some time think otherwise in their hearts yet those same hearts from afflictions will think the same with mine unless they have hardned them on purpose to shut out all Deity and since at first they would have none to serve now they are resolved to let in none so long as they can oppose it to punish As to the second part
delirium dotage or frenzy whereas in all other creatures their life terminates quickly after the beginning of any visible delirium in them or decay of their native or natural homebred intellect as I may call it SECT IV. The Immortality of the Soul of man illustrated from the manner of its acting in the inferiour faculties similar with Brutes THe Soul of man does in many things shew its different Original and Extract from that of other creatures not only by its extent and contraction but by its manner of working in those very faculties wherein they are similar and which are proper and necessary both for Man and Beast For though Beasts see as we do hear as we do tast as we do c. and have the like passions of desire and joy fear and sorrow with their concomitants yet their senses may be satisfied and their passions circumscribed within the same Elements from whence they have their Original Ours alone seem to be Prisoners here and of us only it is that Solomon has truly said The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear with hearing and then I cannot reasonably imagine the Creator of the Universe so unkind in his special work of Man as to make him with a desire inherent in him so capacious as never to be filled or satisfied and thereby allow a vacuum in the Soul of man which we admit not to be in Nature but must acknowledge and conclude that there is a possibility these very inferiour faculties of our Souls may be allayed and comforted with hopes at present and satiate hereafter with some fruition or else in their working we were of all creatures most miserable For I find no sufficient ground to think or believe that Man is endowed with two Souls the one consisting of motion sense passions or affections and natural the other rational supernatural and Divine For though while annexed to a Body here it shews its divers faculties whereof in another World it may not make the same use and some of the senses will need no imployment about such objects as they receive into them here yet so far forth as they can add any thing to our happiness hereafter we may imploy them and they are an essential part of this Divine and never-dying Soul and that in some sence and manner we may tast and see how good and gracious our Lord and Maker is We often term the inferiour faculties of the Soul brutish sensual and filthy not that they merely arise from the flesh but for the like reason as St. Paul calls Envy and Pride c. works of the flesh which yet are inherent in wicked Spirits as well as men as they are amongst men excited by carnal and sensible objects and are also perverted and turned aside by them from others of a more noble kind which they are capable of being affected with But they are still faculties of the Soul and as such are neither extinguished in the regeneration of it here nor as far as is consistent with the perfection of it and its state of separation in glory hereafter I think the Soul of man to be an Host or Army always in its march for the recovery of its proper Country in which march though some of the Rascal multitude will be laggering behind and be busie to make provision for the flesh yet they are accounted as part of the Army and triumph with the rest after Victory and acquiring their native Soil or else suffer with the rest upon an expulsion Undoubtedly we may love and joy and I know not why one kind of fear may not consist with great joy if we attain our end and the mark that is set before us and we shall have fear and sorrow shame and confusion of face weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth which are effects of passions if we miss that end Now because the very restlessness and inconstancy of the senses and affections here shews them part of a Soul that will have being and continuance after death I will therefore a little behold man in comparison with other creatures and try first how far our very senses and affections differ from those of Beasts and after see what more noble kind of faculties there are in us which they want SECT V. The Immortality of the Soul of man illustrated from its different operation in different persons WE differ in respect of our senses and passions not only from all other creatures but even from one another so much as might make a quaere whether they were not hunting after somewhat that no man could ever yet find out in this World There never was yet any one object grateful to any one sense of all men nor equally and alike to any two There are to be found those men who would not move out of their Cottage or be any whit pleased with the sight of the most glorious Pageantry the World affords One colour seems more beautiful and pleasing to one mans eye and another to anothers no one prospect is pleasing to all men some men will swoun at the sight of particular things That which we call Musick is harsh and grating to the ears of some men several men are taken most with peculiar Musicks some had rather hear the noise of the Cannons than the voice of the Nightingale and so è contra So that if that which is fabled of Orpheus his Art had been real and amongst the Beasts and Trees he had had several Men auditors the first might all have followed him but some of the latter would have staid behind Some men abominate Sweets as we call them and are ready to faint at the very smell of them and delight in what is generally termed stinking and noisome The tast in men is so different that it has raised a proverb and that varies in the same man several times in an Age. Our affections are various and wandring that which delights us to day may happen to vex us to morrow what we desire sometimes earnestly we presently spurn at like little Children What pleases at one time pleases not at another so as there is become a proverb of pleasing too Nay this pleasing and delight were it settled and fixed in men where it once takes hold and were there a calculation in this present Age besides that Ages differ of every Worldly thing some particular men did chiefly affect or principally delight in the things would not be concluded in a short Ode as I have touched but a Poet might run himself out of breath and be weary before he came to Me doctarum hederae c. Me gelidum nemus c. We have our Pannick fears and terrors or as the Text says are afraid where no fear is and we have flashing joys upon as small visible grounds and in short we are the only ridiculous creature here on Earth On the other side take the Beasts of the Earth the Fowls of the
of Affections and call them by name Desire Joy Fear Grief Sorrow Love Anger Hatred Malice Enmity Strife Debate Frowardness Peevishness Curiosity Indignation Revenge Cruelty Lust Luxury Jealousie Pride Boasting Vainglory Ambition Envy Emulation Detraction Contempt Impudence Admiration Covetousness Miserableness Parsimony Care Doubt Desperation Lamentation Amazement Pensiveness Sadness Distrust Anxiety Shame and many others Now herein we often give several names to one and the same Affection according to its degree in working or the subject matter upon which or from which it worketh We have Pusillanimity Timorousness Dastardliness Cowardliness Fear Amazement Dread and Terrour as well as the Latines have metus formido timor pavor tremor terror horror exanimatio and we have Love Fondness and Lust as well as they have amor dilectio libido and we have Anger Wrath Fury as well as they have ira excandescentia furor and we have Sorrow Grief Pensiveness Mourning as well as they have dolor moeror aerumna luctus the first of which last to wit dolor when they come to define they call it aegritudo crucians the second aegritudo flebilis the third aegritudo laboriosa and the fourth aegritudo ex ejus qui carus fuerit interitu acerbo and all is but Sorrow Now besides that some of the aforementioned words denominating our passions may be taken in a good sence as Love Fear Sorrow Joy Indignation Care c. so may we reckon up and adorn the Affections on the contrary part with as many commendable and well-sounding words which are as proper and peculiar for them as the other as Charity Peace Gentleness Calmness Meekness Purity Benevolence Alacrity Chearfulness Constancy Courage Valour Pity Compassion Tenderness Humility Caution Frugality Liberality Mercy Modesty Sobriety Content Comfort c. And I think our so accounted Divine and Moral Virtues are no more than well tuned Affections or germins springing from them by native Reason and the superaddition of Grace And where either the one or the other is wanting the result from them is very harsh and grating and of an evil sound I will for instance pick one out of the former sort of a sound most abominated and detested the term we fix upon the Devil as a thing inherent most proper and peculiar in him and that is Envy The word it self is of no original evil signification the Latine expresses it best from whence we derive ours invidia is from in videre to pry or look into the estate being or condition of another creature Now if from this looking into we conclude him happy and are pleased with it that is Joy and I think a good Joy of the mind if from our insight we conclude him unhappy and miserable and we are any whit displeased or troubled at it that is Pity or Compassion and I think that good too and a true fruit of Love and Charity which Tree of Love flourishes the better by that dropping or excrescence from it But if we either sorrow at the apprehension of another's happiness which effect hath with us appropriated the word Envy to it self or rejoyce at the apprehension of his unhappiness which we may call malum mentis gaudium then is our affection wrong-tuned and evil yet all terminates in joy or sorrow and sorrow is indeed but a privation of joy and those other many words are Coins made by us to express our selves in For Hatred Malice or the like I cannot apprehend there is any such thing as either in Nature that is subsisting by it self separate and diverse from other passions that which we call Malice or Hatred is but an evil desire or wish tending to the weakning or depressing or removing that object which we imagine obstructs the joy or comfort we would have or should arise from the excessive evil Love of our selves or others And for Anger which always has for his object to work upon something or other offensive 't is defined but ulciscendi libido a desire of revenge and according to the height of that act unless where it lights on inanimate things and so accounted Folly it may be termed Hard-heartedness Oppression Cruelty or the like SECT III. Of the rise of the Affections COncerning the rise of our passions or affections my thoughts and conjectures at present are these That there naturally is in every thing and every creature but especially out of its place some secret hidden appetite desire endeavour propension proclivity inclination tendence or motion called which you will to some place of rest quiet or good but often receives lets or impediments in that its tendence And the Soul of man being an emanation from a Divine Essence and God as I may say being the Center to which naturally it tends until it come to that beatifick vision it cannot be at rest Now a rational Soul naturally working by Love and Joy in its fruition for want of that fruition necessarily and by consequence Desires and Sorrows so as I do think Love and Joy Desire and Sorrow to be of the Essence of a Soul wholly disjoyned from a Body and rational acts of it not properly passions but when the Soul works in that manner through a Body then are they called passions Now the Soul conjoyned to a Body may have yet notwithstanding some love purely intellectual and rational by some reflexion and drawing in some amiableness as through the imagination though it cannot fully by the imagination reach the proper object of love to it self and this may be upon some consideration a proper and peculiar act of an Humane Soul as I have said of some infinite power goodness and wisdom in the creation and preservation of the Universe of which it is a minute particle And certainly the Soul of man may be discerned now and then to act in the Body as if it were out of the Body summoning its powers and drawing its forces together from some tending affection as if it were about to take its flight ravish it self from the Body lay aside its senses for a time and have no manner of commerce with them but did see with other eyes and seem to it self for a while as disjoyned from a Body Which kind of motion has undoubtedly been selt as I may say and observed by some in a pleasant healthful state and more especially after waking from quiet rest These gracious kind of prospects of the Soul are cause sufficient to make any man cry out with St. Paul cupio dissolvi c. but these kind of extasies are short and rare and the Soul is straightways forced to a return and act again as usually in and through a Body Now were it granted that no affection can move but from the imagination and that sense is the general Port and entrance into the imagination which thing at present I cannot grant but believe the imagination may receive some stroke from that thing which I call a pure intellectual rational love of which I shall have fitter
Soul lets it self out into the World or lets the World into it Now espying through the Eye and perhaps a hear-say would work the like effect a covering of the same mould over another but withall attended with Riches Honours Dignities Power Place Authority or any outward worldly pomp or vanity whatsoever from this sight it may be with some little present concurrence of the imagination is the concupiscible part of the Soul irritated and stimulated and somewhat bent and inclined The imagination from them again which perhaps otherwise would be quickly at work in Eutopia and do little good or harm there is stayed from its present pursuit to attend them and being over-apt to gratifie the affections to the full presents them again with a false beautiful glass and it may be some such like inscriptions as these Haec omnia vobis dabo or bonum est esse sic in the room of hic From hence again the concupiscible part of the Soul becomes so inflamed that it awakes and rouzes all the other affections ready for its attendance though often from its very Brethren it meets with obstructions For if this spectacle be introduced to some Soul though the desire therein may be as great and as large and extensive as in another yet fear and care of the Body and a number of anxious thoughts and doubts frame a Lion without because there is a Hare within The man would move his hand out of his bosom but it grieveth him to do it and his very desire as Solomon says slayeth him His desire is for the glory of his Body and the rest of its fellow-faculties being for the Body too they fight for the ease of it But if a vigorous active Spirit become once infected with an itch from this prospect admitting the itch not natural then besides the imagination ready at all turns to project design and contrive all the ways and means imaginable as we say all the other passions run full cry after this desire now Hope and Assurance now Fear and Distrust now Heaviness and Displeasure Ahab's case when he coveted Naboth's Vineyard now Anger threatens and strikes now Dissimulation courts c. and together without notice of Friend or Foe they endeavour and agree to run down every obstacle in the way and the Will is carried along with them as a Captive or Slave which indeed is the proper subject of right Reason And in this career I cannot but say Reason bears a part and is one in the company but yet blinded and as it were a Captive under dominion for the present It moves indeed as Reason weighs every circumstance convenience and inconvenience but yet is for the Affections interest and at their beck and becomes like the General of an Army in a great Mutiny ready to gratifie them in whatever they demand Yet withall 't is never such an absolute Slave in man though it goes along with the Affections and serves them sometimes for as I have already said and it must be ever observed that in every action properly Humane although there be a kind of dissention too yet there is some kind of concurrence of all the faculties of the Soul and no one faculty is wholly and fully excluded as not to have a Negative voice and some power left to use its exhortations at peculiar times 'T will be now and then trying to reclaim the disorders in the Soul and shew it self fitter for Conduct than Vassallage point out and lay forth the falsity and circumvention of the Imagination in the first rise or beginning the false bent and foolish inclination of the Affections the captivity and slavishness of the Will I and it self too for the time passed hold forth to it self and the whole Soul prospects at some further distance make us see the uncertainty instability mutability and vanity of all Earthly enjoyments the certainty of death and withall that as with the enjoyer there will be no remembrance or thoughts of them in the Grave so neither will there be any remembrance of them who now enjoy them by those who come after That above the present necessary support of the Body there is no need or use of any worldly things that they add nothing of real worth to any man that there are always necessary troubles and vexations attendants on them that in a mean and private path we are least subject to affronts and justling that the Creator of the Universe cannot but be just and a wise dispenser of all things and that we shall never want things necessary for our journey that there is a possibility of the Souls existence after separation from the Body and then by consequence there is as much necessity for the imploying its faculties in the well-governing it self and laying up some treasure or provision for it self which can neither be of things here nor properly laid up here And besides this it will sometimes forthwith get the assistance of the Memory to its aid to shew us instances and examples of other men some failing in their attempts when they were got to the uppermost round of their aspiring Ladder others crushed down and ground to pieces with the weight they drew upon themselves and on the other side others weary of their very acquisitions and casting them behind them others joyful happy and quiet in a very mean and low estate and condition And happy were it for us if Reason could in any time or for any space win the Imagination to take part with it too and so leave the common Rout without any Officer to side with them in which desertion their heat is soon allayed and cooled For this cogitative or conceptive quality is of ability in some sort to work even upon Reason's account alone and can imagine there may be a happiness beyond all bodily sense and then forthwith all its former glasses become but painted Paradises and formal nothings I say though Reason sometimes runs and works from the Eyes of sense it has Eyes of its own and sees far beyond the capacity of the Bodies Eyes and what can never be introduced through them only and so St. Paul not improperly mentions to the Ephesians the Eyes of their understanding Nay such is the strange and admirable frame of man's Soul that as the understanding has Eyes to see and power to direct in some measure so have those inferiour faculties the Affections Ears to hear and hearken to its direction and call what is the meaning else of those words He that hath ears to hear let him hear if the Affections moved not sometimes upon some inward stroke or noise No man ever made doubt but all those to whom our Saviour then spake had bodily Ears and yet he concludes his Parable with that saying being about to move the Affections and keep the heart from being rocky stony or thorny and make it good ground telling us in the explanation that the good ground are they which in an
any of the four things mentioned by Agur and I may confidently speak in the words of Solomon to any such diver As thou knowest not what is the way of the Spirit nor how the bones do grow in the womb so thou knowest not the work of God who maketh all 'T is not a thing I dare undertake to discover nor a thing I have absolutely desired to know But only to quiet and satisfie my self I have endeavoured to make some little search or enquiry which of the faculties of the Soul may seem a visum est only primary or most potent in operation not which in truth are for that shall never man certainly define And therefore let no man till he be able to find out himself the circulation of the Soul and the origine of that circulation and be assured to convince others in reason of that his 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 blame me of sloth or ignorance but allow me something of intellect if it be but in finding out my own defect therein And yet because I am willing in some degree to satisfie my self and others too but not wade herein further than some light from Scripture which I believe to be the true proper light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world may seem to direct and mark out I shall set down somewhat of my thoughts concerning the priority precedency or prevalency in the faculties of the Soul one before or above another Whereabout though I may seem to dissent from the received opinion and learning of the World and therein be exploded by some yet I trust and hope I shall in no wise wrench or screw that Sacred Word for my purpose nor much swerve from the true and genuine meaning of that which I alledge to be the principal if not the only ground of my opinion I am not able to find out any great ground of contest to arise between any faculties of the Soul for priority or precedency that is any dispute or question thereabout unless between the Imagination and the Affections barely Now that which we call the Imagination or cogitation in the Soul of man we find to be an unconstant fluttering as well as a restless faculty which at no time can be found settled or made to fix long nay much or often upon any one single object unless some affection do first seem to draw it and set it on work and in a manner fasten it as its attendant for a time though then also it have some momentary flyings out and extravagancies And though it be a thing undeniable that the imagination may often move or rouze some affection which was quiet before yet it is a thing as undeniable that the imagination or cogitation never created or made any affection more than any affection ever created that for we must agree they are contemporary in the Soul and so neither hath the precedency But yet where one seems to work more often in obedience and to some ends and designs or safe lodging or pleasing of another we may allow that other some kind of excellency and so priority And this I am ready to afford to some affection lodged in the center of the Body or innermost place of recess for the Soul there secretly fixed by its Creator with some reason to direct and guide as well as imagination to whet it Indeed the imagination and the affections when they are orderly or regularly working if not at all times and seasons do whet and as it were give edge to each other but surely as the Love of God far exceeds the thoughts of him so the Soul being an emanation at first from that Spirit of Love Love of him may be said to be a cause of thoughts of him and that if the Soul were not naturally capable to love and tend some whither we could not so much as think Sense must be agreed while we live in the Body to be the chief though not the only inlet or Port to the Soul and that every object by and through sense has some touch in its entrance upon the imagination or else we shall make a strange Chimaera of the Soul But not barely resting upon sense we may allow some prior inherent quality upon which by sense the imagination may seem attendant and in subjection to And though at some times the imagination do appear as the usher of the affections yet the least affection once kindled and something there must be allowed to be kindled whether of it self bursting out into flame or however inflamed or kindled will often hale the thoughts to the object without any farther help of sense But many things are presented to the imagination by sense upon which no affection seems to stir or move that we are able to discern and thereupon we may allow the imagination's work or motion to be chiefly from something occult whatever use it sometimes makes of sense to which it is or may be in subjection and not prior but rather posterior SECT II. That it seems to be in the Affections rather then any other from Scripture THere is a common saying how true I know not that life is first and last in that part of man's Body which we call the Heart and it is generally agreed and believed and I find no reason to dissent much from that opinion that there is the principal seat of the affections and that That is the Cell wherein they chiefly move and work Now nothing is so much called upon in Scripture as the Affections nor any part of man's Body so often named as the Heart the chief and principal seat thereof as if that part were taken for the whole and the content for the contained and whole man Soul and Body were included in that one word Heart and no act or thought of man were significant without affection or did arise or work but from an affection I shall not in this place going about to shew some peculiar prerogative the affections seem to have over the other faculties of the Soul scrape up together and cite the multitude of Texts wherein God by his Prophets and Apostles seems to strike only at the root of the affections the Heart and call upon that particularly to be given him or inclined or bent towards him they are obvious enough and I believe a thousand such are readily to be found But I shall only mention some peculiar places occurring at present to my thoughts which seem to allow not only a native or dative power in the affections over the whole intellective faculty whether Imagination Memory or Reason but also some primary influence which they have upon them all or as if the other faculties had their rise or spring from them Thus generally whensoever the intellect is mentioned in Scripture it is coupled with the seat of the affections and taken for them as if from thence it rose and had its influence For if the very imagination had any motion of it self or by sense
first and great Commandment Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy Soul and with all thy mind The whole Soul beside seems naturally subservient if not subsequent to the affections motion and the motion of the Soul would be strange without them and not imaginable they being as necessary as they are useful And therefore I think we may as well cease to be by our own power as cease to affect and they who have gone furthest or most covertly herein have in going about to hide some particular affections shewed others more visibly and for the covering of their joy or sorrow fear or anger or the like have set up for predominant in their Soul a seeming contempt of all things which is an affection it self and for ought I know as subject to be faulty as any For surely the Soul may seem no less glorious in its march with all its parts and retinue than some of them provided it marches the right way and each faculty help and assist and not go about to destroy each other SECT VI. How the Affections move from the Imagination or otherwise IT does seem to me as I have said that the affections or some or one of them we properly so call are or is the chief inhabitant in this our Body from which or from whence there is or proceeds motion and operation voluntary Now if the Imagination be granted to be that glass in the Soul from whose reflexion they only move which for the present let us grant then do I conceive that glass may receive its light which it casts on them three manner of ways 1. By Sense 2. By Reason 3. By Divine Revelation immediately by God or mediately by his Word From the two first the imagination shews unto the affections this present visible World only but yet after divers manners From the third it shews them another World which sight from this last as it is more glorious so it is here more rare and men that once obtain it have their affections so fixed by it that they seldom quite turn away or utterly lose it 'T is that which I humbly conceive the Author to the Hebrews speaks of with a kind of impossibility of retrieving or renewing it if once men wilfully turn away from it Being says he once enlightned and having tasted of the heavenly gift and made partakers of the Holy Ghost and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the World to come if these fall away c. Then immediately after he uses this expression But beloved we are perswaded better things of you and things that accompany salvation though we thus speak for God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love which you have shewed towards his name in that you have ministred to the Saints and do minister As if whatsoever light we had or whencesoever it came Love were the worker and labourer in our Harvest but of this I intended not to speak 't is a subject very unfit for me to handle God is gracious and merciful and as I am not able to depaint that light so it behoves me not to limit his power no not in my thoughts But how our affections move from that first or second light is my intended enquiry at present From this second kind of light viz. that of Reason by reflex from the imagination the present World is shewed to the affections with all its vanities whatsoever the certain period of man and all things else in it the falsity and mutability of it the futility of the love of it or care for it And from the reflex of this light though the affections are sometimes cooled towards the World and bent and inclined somewhat towards some greater and more perfect good yet finding it not they often suddenly fall away again and know not where to fix By reflex from the first light that of sense only the World is seen as Beasts see it for fleshly delights and for support and maintenance of the Body but with this difference between us and them that their Souls being of a bodily extract and terrestrial their affections move no further than in reference to some present utility of the things of the World for the Body Ours are coelestial and of continuance for ever yet necessitated in respect of the Body and for its sustentation to make use of this light from sense The concupiscible part of the Soul being first and most often moved from this light before Reason appears and shews her self aud yet never fully satisfied with any present thing it enjoys although it often receives its checks from reflex of that second light if it be not graciously restrained by the third and led to take some hold on that good wherewith it may be somewhat satiate in hope it grasps at innumerable things neither useful to Soul or Body shews only it is not terrestrial and yet withall that it is capable to lose in future its title and signature of coelestial SECT VII What light the Imagination receives from Reason and the weakness of Reason THe second way by which light is communicated to the Imagination and from thence reflected on the Affections is as I have said Reason which is the proper light and guide of an Humane Soul and by which it doth discover the vanity of this World But it is not the least wonder in Nature that after this light begins with any brightness to shine forth in Man never so little withdrawn from the noise and business of the World and in conjunction with sense for its assistance doth give him such a clear prospect of its vanity that a contempt of all its superfluous unnecessaries is raised in the heart and his affections are so far diverted for the present from it that a full and somewhat settled resolution is begot there not to let them possess that place any more That that man shall yet forthwith from a little pageantry here presented by the Eye or Ear have his imagination wheel about again and by consequence his affections as fast rivetted to the World as ever Surely there needs must be some Spirit or powerful Prince of the Air that does bewitch every rational man how else were it possible almost that such an one discerning his folly and madness by a far clearer and more excellent light than that which caused them shall again often return in despite of it to act over his folly and madness which he himself had condemned and his affections rejected If there were not the very light of Reason would prove sufficient so far to extinguish and dazle any weaker light that the affections might be held and kept within some ordinary bounds and limits But then withall we have ground to believe and as sure it is that when we find our sight from Reason thus strangely baffled and made as it were subject to a weaker light there yet remains and must be some
greater infinite power above that Prince of the Air who gave us our light of Reason and from whom we may expect support one who is able to strengthen his first heavenly gift by a second and if Reason it self be not Armour sufficient proof against the World or the Prince of this World where we now live there is somewhat to be asked and given that may be so which I shall speak of hereafter in due place I am at present in quest of Reason only that inherent Eye or light of the Soul of what use that may be towards our happiness or bliss Why truly unless it smooth out some way for the current of our affections and a little turn the stream of them it may prove in the latter end to have the quality Solomon attributes to knowledge increase our sorrow Be it never so great or shine never so bright Satan will allow it us and matters not though it be always imployed on Heaven so our affections be imployed on the World or at best only kept in that they move or search no whither beside it He knows well that for men to chain up or to condemn them to imprisonment within the Body is impossible When once from the light of Reason and its influence on mans Soul the affections shall become like a Water at full Tide seeming to move neither way if they return not to the Ocean they will be sure from so many Springs feeding them from Land to break in again upon that If Reason be but able so much as to give some stroke to the affections as I have touched in the definition of Conscience and doubtless every man has in some measure felt it then certainly 't is an earnest of some greater light which that Prince of the Air endeavours by all means to have hid from us And that the one may never lead us or direct us to the other whereby our affections might work another way and he be deceived of his hold he is willing we should believe that this our best native light Reason is but a pure emanation from the Body which if so how can we ever expect any other And 't is no slight artifice of his that he has brought us now-a-days to impute every sober serious thought arising in the Soul every check upon the affections every quid feci as Ieremy expresses it towards a return to some temperature of the Body and call it Melancholy and herein he has got the assistance of some of our bodily Physicians to attribute a little too much to that Mine wherein they dig their Oar. I would fain know what affinity there is between the thoughts of Judgment Justice Mercy or another World and the Body If I could find it I should then think the wiser sorts of Animals had such thoughts and could be melancholick too How the Body first espied any such thing with its Eyes is strange to me It is not the Body but Reason the off-spring from above and usher of some greater light that is of ability to behold some things future and when from the light of Reason the Soul shall stand for a while at amaze to behold what a thorny labyrinth she is got into whatever Flowers may grow in it knows not for the present which way best to move but desires direction from above in all her motions to attribute this to the Bodies temperature what ground have we Never let us seek for the Hellebore now in fashion for a cure If Reason be the Beam that which men call Melancholy will prove as steady a Hand to weigh things present and future in the Scales as any Airy temper in the Soul they call Sanguine And while Reason is in the Enquest it will neither hurt the Soul or Body but in some measure take an equal care of the one and of the other We might as well and upon as firm grounds impute every disease in the Body whatsoever to some impression of the Soul upon it as every motion or mutation of the Soul to some temperature or change in the Body There is no doubt some reciprocal operation between them and as they confess some diseases to have their origine from some passion in the Soul and yet not all or most diseases so shall I readily acknowledge that the Soul works many times diversly and in different form and manner in the Body according to divers lets and rubs it meets with there is brighter or dimmer according to the subject matter it works in and this without derogation from its Sovereignty or Immortality more then we do detract from the nature or quality of Fire when we say it gives a clearer light from Pitch than Brimstone I shall agree it is now and then dull and as it were lumpish and heavy from obstructions and whenever 't is stopped in its passage and its operation in its more noble and chief rooms and receptacles of the Body it makes its Exit I shall agree likewise that 't is tied by the Law of Nature to take thoughts and care not immoderate as well of the Body as it self and has Reasons allowance and accordance for it I am not endeavouring to bereave any man of his senses or hinder the Soul to look abroad that way or to make man expect to be fed and cloathed or healed of diseases from Heaven barely yet withall I think every defect or extravagance of the Soul every flight or turn of it is not rightly imputed to the Bodies temperature since we are able to discern its strange mutations and changes on the sudden even in a moment without any alteration of the Body or any seeming help of Sense and if it were possible to keep the Body always in one state condition and frame and deprive the Soul from all intromission of sense for a time Reason might consider its present and future being Yet 't is very requisite the Soul should move here as well by Sense as by Reason or any other light He who thinks he has it ravish'd from the Body here has it converted from a Pilgrim and Traveller to a Vagrant and a Wanderer And such there are too many who by the help of Satan would imagine themselves out of the Body while they are in it Extinguish their light of Reason and Sense too together sometimes by a new Light the World shall never be able to define nor say whence it arises unless from that Lake of Fire which has the title too of utter darkness 'T is not a little withdrawing of the Soul or consideration how it should or ought to act in the Body with the Body but this strange imaginary roving flight of it is that which may properly assume the attribute or title of Melancholly This is it surely in a literal derivation that is the suggestion or inspiration of some Black Fury SECT VIII The excellency and advantage of Reason and yet its inability and dependance REason in man may justly challenge the dignity and
of the Inventor such as otherwise would not have been viz. That he who first started this game for the Imagination to hunt after to the confusion of it self and the clouding of Reason so far as to betray the Soul to the delusion of Satan and averting it from a ready and willing obedience to that guide set over it was no good Christian nor no good moral man If he were alive I am pretty confident he would grant it were in my power to be idle that is permit my thoughts to ramble in obedience only to sense present or prior so as without exercising my Reason how weak soever that thought of him would never have risen within me but I should have believed or granted All he had said to be true and then had I prevented such as I suppose he would call it evil thought of him Reason though it be the least Earthly or the least of cognation with the Body of any faculty in the Soul yet is most like it in this that it acquires strength and vigour by use and exercise If it but once reclaim the Imagination If but once thereby we master an unruly Affection for a time If from it we once behold our past folly and madness and have some glimmering light of truth besides the present comfort therein how ready is it upon every turn to afford us its help and assistance It seems indeed at first an irksom thing to the Imagination perpetually working as of it self ad arbitrium and naturally working to feed and please the passions to have Reason called in for its regulation or direction in all or any of its motion It begets in us that disease we fansie so at least the Apostle calls a weariness of the mind Let the Affections and Imagination work and run together without control men seldom complain of a weariness of the Soul however it may fare with their Body in pursuance but if Reason be obeyed in its checks and called in to weigh all circumstances future danger as well as present enjoyment and to distinguish real good and happiness from colourable delights We presently faint and give over leaving our Imagination and Affections to themselves again And so instead of a weariness of the mind for the present subject it to Agues and Feavers doubts and distrusts anxiety and perturbation in the conclusion such as are far more unpleasant irksom and intolerable than the pains we indeavour to avoid If any man who has felt it shall make a diligent search into the cause of any his involuntary disquiet of mind he will find setting aside some particular cases not to be prevented it has been from the too great trust the faculties of his Soul have had of each other and the too familiar compliance with each other that which way soever the one has first moved the other has followed or at least not resisted as it should or might that in their course together which soever has been originally most to blame the Imagination has been the Ring-leader or File-leader that if they had been now and then at a little distrust and now and then had had a little contest for precedency and superiority it might have prevented that mutiny and disorder in the Soul which is not seldom occasioned by Reason's stepping in and exercising its power and shewing us our Errors when it seems too late I must confess every dispute or contest amongst the faculties of the Soul is for the present troublesome but who would not if he could indure a small trouble to avoid a greater A voluntary dispute or contest between our Reason and Imagination is never very dreadful or deadly neither can I foresee any dangerous consequent thereof The danger is only when it is involuntary when Reason is roused and awakened by some unexpected accident sickness crosses or the like when it starts up as it were on the suddain and as Gods Vicegerent of which we were not sensible before seems loudly to cry out and condemn us for not making that use of it we might or not obeying its private monitions before and this to the suddain amazement and confusion of all the other faculties in the Soul then does the Imagination sometimes according to its wonted falshood so far comply with it too as to present us a prospect of a just and revengeful God and forgetting mercy his utter desertion and rejection of us which likely ends in despair but if it be voluntary and so the Imagination and Affections be as it were prepared for the encounter let no man ever fear the evil success thereof Reason Gods Vicegerent will never condemn us utterly at such time as it works of it self and as it were of its free motion to reform us This contest in the Soul I recommend and this mutiny if it might be for the present I look upon as the readiest way and means towards a setled and lasting peace and quiet for the future We are prone and ready enough to distrust each other and to fall to foreign or outward dispute and controversie and to go together by the ears for God's sake as we say But truly if there be in Nature any struggling or contest any difference or division any fighting or combating acceptable to the God of Nature and the God of Unity Peace and Concord it is between the several faculties of a Soul amongst themselves when Reason shall as it were voluntarily exercise them and call them to an account when Affections good and bad shall as it were fight together when Pride and Vain-glory shall be undermined and fall to the ground through a sense of our own unworthiness when modesty and shame shall quench the flames of inordinate and more than bestial love when perfect love shall drive away fear and the like And this through Reason's shewing us the delusion of the Imagination before all the wound we receive thereby is that our Affections seem a little disgusted for their too great compliance with the Imagination and disobedience to some former checks of Reason which will be perfectly healed by their present compliance and the Imagination hereby will be somewhat reclaimed from presenting to them a pretence to any absolute authority for the future Surely this most excellent Divine gift Reason was not given us barely to condemn our selves for our neglect of the motion of Grace in us but that there is a kind of will and power in us attendant upon that admirable gift to act I own there is Grace co-operating with it or working in it by which it often moves and guides us but yet I judg it may move from some strength of our own or as of it self It stands by often as it were idle and unconcerned in relation to our thoughts and actions but we often find it is not dead in us and then surely we our selves may give it strength by exercise or add strength to it and exercise it we our selves may and that it will sooner and better work
by way of case put how doleful such an act would prove to him imagine and think of it waking and yet loath and abhor the Act nay tremble at the very thought of it And therefore it appears to me a strange folly as well as cruelty in Dionysius if the story be true That put one of his best friends to Death for dreaming he had cut his Throat and alledged no juster cause than this that what he thought on in the Day that he dreamed on in the Night Had the party that told his dream withal affirmed that his Affections seemed delighted and pleased with the Act I should have thought there had been some ground for the execution but without such declaration no colour of Justice for it If we voluntarily drown as we say our Reason with Wine we cannot excuse the irregular motion of the Imagination nor the assent or compliance of the Affections therewith much less the assent of our will and the putting our thoughts and designs in execution Yet I cannot allow that there is thereby an exaltation of the crime as some Lawyers would because there is an exaltation of the Imagination There are two sins indeed but the latter is not made greater by the former but rather the contrary In no other cases of Reasons disability whether temporary or perpetual whether that we call Delirium Lunacy or Phrenzy and all that we comprize under the general notion of non compos mentis I do verily think that if it happened or came by the default of our own Soul we are answerable to Divine Justice for the deliquity of our very Imagination and the consequent Acts thereof nay I cannot see why we should altogether exempt men from human censure and corporal punishment if the evil of their Imagination appear at any time by overt act provided that punishment extend not to the present separation of the Soul and Body so as to leave the Soul remediless by Death which for ought we know might recover its pristine state here and so purify it self for another state hereafter Most certain it is men can in these cases of Lunacy c. happening one way or other imagine and design evil and not seldom accomplish and compass their evil designs And therefore our great Lawyer in commenting upon the Statute of the 25th Ed. 3. of Treason wherein the very Imagination is struck at shews very little of a Philosopher whatsoever he shews of a Lawyer in my judgment by telling us That a man Non compos mentis a man who is not Master of his Reason or Reason is of no power or Authority in him as I expound it is totally deprived of compassing and Imagination I think he might more truly affirm that he who imagines the death of our Sovereign with any the least appearing assent of his Affections is Non compos mentis than that a man Non compos mentis cannot imagine or have his Will and Affections assent to that Imagination which we find but too often in these kind of men And truly since all our safety depends much on that of our Soverigns and that Lunacy may be so acted as the wisest of men cannot discern the reality thereof I think that Comment might well have been spared and the question left undecided till there had been a necessity for it which God prevent and so of his goodness direct all our thoughts as that they do not outrun our Reason too far and kindle in us such a blind zeal as requires at length a greater power than Reason to controul and suppress I must confess I have ever looked upon this one faculty in us Imagination sufficient to shew us that the extract of the Soul is Divine that as it may be and often is rather than any other faculty immediately influenced from that good Spirit and by it we are enabled sometimes to think that which is good without any precedent motion of any other faculty so it is most subject to delusion from infernal Powers That duly beheld it almost necessarily drives us towards an invocation of one Eternal wise Mind the Creator Preserver Guider and Director of all its works Which is the chief and last thing I designed to set down in this Treatise IV. We cannot deny unto Beast these four faculties of a Soul very fimilar with ours Imagination Memory Affection and Will But we may and do rationally suppose for we cannot observe more in them or the contrary that they imagine through Sense they remember again from Sense they affect by Sense and Will in pursuance hereof only and not otherwise as we have touched already neither can they or are they enabled to weigh and consider so as to raise within themselves an evidence of things unseen which is the proper act of Reason a thing merely incorporeal and necessarily moving upon the cooperation and making a judgment with the assistance or help of other faculties of themselves somewhat more than corporeal likewise So as all our faculties are of Divine extraction and capable to be wrought upon otherwise than through Sense though indeed they are most commonly roused and set on work through bodily Organs as those of Beasts Most certain it is that we do as well as in that excellent faculty Reason whereby we are enabled to ponder and weigh and try and judge of the reality and truth of things herein excell them and go beyond them That we do now and then wish our selves out of this Body which we could never do from Sense and desire a clearer evidence or manifestation and appearance of the truth and reality of our own being and all beings whatsoever the original from whence c. than Sense is able to assist us in or indeed can rightly afford us Then next are not all our Affections readily imployed upon things meerly incorporeal and insensible whenever they offer themselves or are offered thereto Do we not love and admire Truth Justice Mercy c. Do we not hate the contraries thereof falshood wrong and cruelty Every one will confess this But now how are things brought in this shape to the Affections Why chiefly by an Imagination capable of divine impression an Imagination that may be wrought upon otherwise than through Sense and able to introduce apparitions to the other faculties of the Soul without the least help or assistance by Sense so as human Imagination is most certainly divine 'T is no battery upon the Soul through Sense barely no inculcating or telling us by word or Writing that Vertue is amiable which properly make it so to us But first an Inquest our Imagination that presents and next a Judge our Reason that allows and approves of it within us as such Indeed Imagination in Beast lodged immediately over the doors of Sense do's from thence work so strangely to our admiration so circumspectly as I may say direct their Affections and Will as that it has obtained the allowance of some to supply the place of Reason in
one and the same man at several times And therefore I am willing to behold it again and say somewhat more of it according to my capacity under the afore-mentioned heads of Love Lust Charity and of Friendship only orderly and in course When there is no motion in the Soul further than for the pleasing it self or the Body it inhabits or it has no other chief respect than to their worldly ease and pleasure only and looks no farther therein than the obtaining Riches Honour Children or the like I call it Lust or self-love When it beholds God alone as the only perfect good and the Author and giver of all goodness and places a trust and repose in him without taking any anxious thoughts or care for worldly things and delights the Soul in the Contemplation of his absolute and complete goodness I call it pure Love or Love in the abstract When from it or with it the Soul beholds all men as Gods special work and pays a just and due respect to every member as his Image howsoever deformed or which way soever defaced without any great respect to persons I call it Charity When it primarily respects and imbraces particular persons for some visible inherent goodness in them and God only secondarily as the Author of all good in man I call it Friendly Love or the inition of that mutual aspect or League we term or name Friendship The first of these is directed and guided by Sense only or Reason captivated the second by Grace the third and fourth by Reason at liberty with some assistance or help of Grace The first of these we may not improperly term Natural the second Supernatural and the third and fourth may be said to participate of or proceed from both viz. Nature and Grace The first works or burns inwardly only the second flames outwardly and directly ascendant the third and fourth flame laterally outward after several ways for the one is more intense upon particulars than the other but both point upward Love in man of it self good I have called and do call here when it greedily catches at or lays hold on any thing before it Lust or Concupiscence Cupiditas effraenata that is Love unbridled for so I take the meaning of the word 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 to be and withal a greediness in it unbridled to be presently satisfied as 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 aviditas cibi signifies Reason I have said before is the proper rein of human Affection though there be a hand above which sometimes guides or directs it and when that rein is laid aside as truly it is when we look no further than our present ease and pleasure and Love moves by Sense only or chiefly We may well call it Lust or an unbridled Desire and not Love The word 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 is by some often referred to a peculiar fleshly desire but I take it more generally to signify a greedy desire of any Worldly thing whatsoever and so does Saint Iohn seem to make use of it according to my apprehension of his meaning where he opposes the Love of the World and the Love of God to each other Love not the World neither the things that are in the World if any man love the World the love of the Father is not in him says he and then immediately after makes use of the word 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 For all that is in this World the lust of the flesh the lust of the eyes and the pride of life is not of the Father but is of the World and the World passeth away and the lust thereof but he that doth the will of God abideth for ever And St. Iames immediately after his speaking of a Crown of Life which the Lord hath promised to them that love him useth the word Lust as a degenerate Love by which we are drawn aside Which raised in the Soul and coupled to the flesh conceiveth and brings forth sin Now I have called this Lust natural because since our fall Reason being much clouded by the Flesh it is for want of Grace most prone to be led by Sense in every human Soul as well as bestial And because it chiefly respects our selves I have defined it to be an inward burning And truly human love thus pent in and a thing very vigorous of it self although it cannot be satisfied within shall never want any fuel to feed it which Sense is able to bring in with the Devil's assistance But this inward burning generally creates a smoak and a smother in the Soul sometimes visibly to a spectator and often feelingly to the owner and how ere it may sometimes warm or comfort for the present is never delightful or pleasant in the end When this Love in man is pure or purified as we cannot describe the manner so we cannot describe how joyful and delightful a thing it is Neither is any man able so much as to imagine it unless he have in some measure felt it and then perhaps he may cry out with David One day in thy courts is better than a thousand c. I know there is no man but would take it in great scorn to be told he loves not God every one pretends to that however he deal with his Neighbour but sure this kind of Love the most excellent will never be made visible in any to the wiser sort of the World but by some outward clear and manifest demonstration of the two following kinds of Love to our Neighbour and to our Friend And 't were heartily to be wished above all things that self-love did not often colourably set it up and march under its seeming Banner It may and has done so certainly which is so base and treacherous a self-love that the name of Lust or Concupiscence is too good for it neither can any man invent a name for it which may properly refer to man 'T is inhuman and worse than sensual it is Devilish neither can I call it other than Devilish when men once indeavour to open a way to their self ends with a scriptum est Towards our present ease and quiet in the World I have already declared my opinon that the observance or performance of that second great Commandment that is an Universal good aspect or the bearing about one a love and kindness for every individual Image of our Creatour let that Image never so much vary in opinion or fancy from our own we will again set it down in one word as before Charity is that unum necessarium And this is a thing which in my opinion every man might God assisting blow up and enliven in himself by his Reason so as his Love might flame out on every side as I have described But that is not the thing I am now upon neither was the consideration of it or of pure love or of self-love either my chief aim or design herein but Friendship or Friendly Love A thing which though it seem not so
which hurry us headlong we know not whither are grounded in opinion and fancy 'T is not barely application of Truth from without but serious consideration of Truth within must cure us And every one perhaps will do it best in following Cicero's way when he could receive no comfort from his friends upon the death of his Daughter Tullia and compose a cordial de consolatione himself This was the way of my cure and this I conceive is best for every man But he who cannot do this of himself may yet think well of that medicine the operation whereof has been experimented by the Author and rather take his probatum est than anothers opinion and to such do I propose my case and the considerations respecting it And because the perfect knowledge of the cause may be sometimes thought as material and necessary as the disease it self and men being apt to take up that exclamation in relation thereunto Was ever sorrow like my sorrow c. and think another mans cause but trivial I am content whoever sees this should know and judge of mine It was thus My Ancestors having continued many descents possessed of a small but competent Estate under the notion of antient Gentlemen left me the eldest and I fear the last of the family to struggle with and retrive their several former incumbrances which my care and assiduity with God's blessing performed I married the daughter of a Gentleman of an antient honourable Family and by her had several Sons and Daughters to reap the fruit of my care as I thought whereupon I was ready to say I had all that my heart could desire And though I might place my Affections on some other things more than was either becoming in bare sobriety or requisite in prudence yet these stole away the strength thereof and I took greatest complacency therein After I began to sing this earthly Requiem to my Soul it pleased God to put some stop thereto by taking away one or two of my children and at length to leave me a pledge of his mercy I trust and not a subject for his future trial of me one only Daughter remaining The death of each of my children were arrows which stuck fast in me and pierced me sore but the last coming on the suddain upon the most healthful and least expected and in the neck as I may say of another made so deep a wound in my Soul that it caused me to despise all other his worldly blessings and to begin to question with him like Abraham Lord God what wilt thou give me seeing I go childless Such an overflowing frothy sorrow it begat in me that the very allaying thereof in some measure I have Reason to impute to the merciful loving kindness of a bountiful good and gracious God assisting and strengthening me 'T is true there yet remain such reliques of the Disease that whenever either the countenance or pretty Sayings of any of my Children offer themselves to my thoughts it causes a chillness over all my Spirits which I look on as remediless in any one who carries about him the least bowels of natural Affection and such I trust may well consist with Grace But I have brought it to that that the smart is no greater than the Wound requires in any one whose bowels are not petrified and whose heart is not wholly senseless and mortified Next and immediately under God's grace this cure has been thus far effected by my own thoughts and consideration if they may be said to have been mine And after the cure I was willing to make them publick that I might not hide his righteousness within my heart or keep back his mercy and truth but declare the same to those who come after Indeed I cannot but here acknowledge that these thoughts or Meditations brake forth very abruptly and it may be in many particulars blame-worthy from the heat within But to hear one man speak feelingly may sometimes work deeper impressions upon an Auditor than another eloquently and a poor Prisoner who has found out a way to free himself from his Fetters may gain more attention from his discovery than a great Professor in the Art My thoughts have been too much busied God knows about the World and besides that my Calling and Profession never required Books adorned with Rhetorick as some of those who may chance to see this know to make their exit in any artificial dress and if in a plain garb they shall work any good Effect upon any other labouring under or in danger to labour under the same or the like disease Let that person then assuredly know that God had a design for his good as well as mine in my particular Affliction And indeed such is the universal care he has of Mankind that every one might if he would reap some benefit in anothers loss He who is not at present assaulted may yet prepare himself for a defence and he who beholds the bruises of another may walk more carefully and take heed lest he fall He who has lost no Children or has none to lose may yet see and consider the vanity of disquieting himself in heaping up riches and knowing not who shall gather them These my rude thoughts which have eased me may possibly incite another to more sober considerations of God's Wisdom and Providence and Man's folly And then I hope that man will not blame me for thinking only according to those abilities God has given me since every one of us will confess that the wisest of us are but the best conjecturers and 't is God only that knows and though I have thought rudely and amiss yet it being not willingly I hope my want of Learning or Wisdom may receive Pardon from God and at least a charitable Censure from man I was somewhat the rather induced to commit these my rambling Thoughts to Paper from some hopes that such as chance to see them would not look on them as the Cry or Trumpet of one that indeavours to drive men into the Sanctuary from a gainful Art and yet stays himself without the Vail but the genuine search and effect of trouble and sorrow which never finds Rest till it enters there Here are indeed some little Essays of our own sufficiency but tending and pointing to a better Physician of our Soul and Body to one that is able to shew us the true method of cure and without whom we shall never be able to find the shadow of any certain rule but groap about till wearied and fainting and find our Errors only on the other side of our Graves THE CONTENTS BOOK I. SECT I. Considerations against immoderate care for a man 's own Posterity and Sorrow for the loss of Children taken in general from the Providence of God from the usefulness and necessity of Afflictions and those brought down to the case Page 1 SECT II. Particular considerations to moderate our passions such as 1 the advantage of God's
choosing for us 2 The folly of our own Choice with respect especially to the Goods of fortune and particularly to Children we cannot foresee how they will prove or what may happen to them to make them and us by them miserable 3 Our sins are the cause of all Evil and exceed our sufferings and which are often to be discovered by them as is exemplified in the loss of Children 4 Our remaining enjoyments surmount our sufferings page 8 SECT III. Of the Nature and Origine of Sorrow that it ariseth chiefly from Love which is the root of all passions The cure of sorrow by the love of God page 20 SECT IV. The remedies ordinarily prescribed against Sorrow considered and shewed to be of little force towards the cure of it as that death is a common thing that we cannot recal our Friends that they are happy that our case is not singular That it s not to be cured by Reason and Philosophy alone and by nothing less than an influence from above What graces are exercised in Affliction page 29 Ejaculations used in the state of the disease page 36 BOOK II. A Treatise of the Soul containing several discourses of the Nature Powers and Operations of it The Preface shewing the occasions and Reasons of writing such a tract page 45 PART I. SECT I. How far the Soul of man is similar with that of Brutes The Soul considered in the three prime faculties of the Intellect viz. the Imagination Mmory and Reason That Beasts work more regularly in order to their end than men That man only beholds things at a distance p. 52. SECT II. Wherein the Soul of man exceeds that of Brutes It s immortality considered and proved from Scripture and particularly from the writings of Moses page 56 SECT III. It s Immortality maintained and illustrated from its obstructions in its operations as deliriums and dotage page 57 SECT IV. It s Immortality proved from the manner of its acting in the inferiour faculties similar with Brutes page 60 SECT V. It s Immortality further illustrated from its different operations in different persons whereas Beasts of the same species do all agree in their desires and delights page 61 SECT VI. The Immortality of the Soul of man illustrated from the difference between Parents and Children and its difference from it self page 63 SECT VII The immortality of it shew'd from its unweariedness in acting from its reflex acts which cannot proceed meerly from Sense page 65 SECT VIII It s immortality shew'd from things peculiar to man as Weeping Laughter Speech and the nature of these considered with respect to their different causes and which cannot be extracted out of matter Reflections on Atheism and the immortality of the Soul shewed from the desires that are to be found even in the defenders of it page 67 PART II. SECT I. Of the several faculties and operations of the Soul and therein of voluntary and involuntary motion page 75 SECT II. Of the Affections of the Soul the severals of them The nature of Envy c. considered page 76 SECT III. Of the rise of the Affections Love the primary mover of them What part in the Soul is the seat of the Passions Of the Heart the Stomach and Spleen page 78 SECT IV. Of the Imagination which receives several names according to its working as Invention Conception Reflexion Apprehension Cogitation Fancy A Syncope or swoun peculiar to man in which Imagination ceaseth to work In all the ramblings of Imagination there is a dependence It s a faculty Reason hath the least power over And the benefit of not having an absolute power over it page 83 SECT V. Of Memory He that hath a smart invention seldom wants a good Memory The impress in it on the Imagination is according to the strength of Affections and Reason page 87 SECT VI. Of Reason that saving graces are ingrafted on it page 88 SECT VII Of the Will The Will free as respecting self but depending on God No other will in Brutes but what receives immediate impression from Sense such a will as ariseth from but cannot put a stop to thought page 89 SECT VIII Of Conscience what it is of a tender Conscience page 90 SECT IX Os the faculties of the Soul working upon each other Sense works upon the Imagination and the Imagination upon the Affections and both upon Reason and Reason again on the Affections c. Reason influenced by the Divine providence page 93 PART III. SECT I. Of the prevailing faculty of the Soul and wherein the primacy seems to be Of the concurrence of the Imagination and the Affections and the power of the Affections page 98 SECT II. The potency seems to be in the Affections if we consult Scripture p. 101 SECT III. It may seem to be in some Affection from humane conjecture p. 103. SECT IV. Of the potency of the Affections They are not to be subdued by Reason alone but Reason is oft subdued by them page 104 SECT V. Some Affection is the substantial part of the Soul page 109 SECT VI. How the Affections move from the Imagination or otherwise as from Revelation Reason or Sense page 110 SECT VII What light the Imagination receives from Reason Of the weakness of Reason Of the dependence which the Soul hath upon the Body in its operations page 112 SECT VIII Of the excellency and advantage of Reason notwithstanding its inability and dependence page 115 PART IV. SECT I. Means to reclaim the Soul The Affections not opposed forthwith cool Reason shews us our Errors but neeeds Faith to enforce it p. 118 SECT II. Of Love Love toward man a principle of Nature and what Faith doth not set us at liberty from It should be Universal page 122 SECT III. How Love may be regent Though Love be the principal grace it ows much of its vigour to the concurrence of the rest as is exemplified in Humility Iustice and especially Faith page 129 The Conclusion Against Censuring That we search not into things too high for us but make the word of God our guide page 132 BOOK III. Containing several Epistles to the REVEREND the DEAN of CANTERBURY EPIST. I. Wherein the Author after some Apology for the not making publick his Treatises de Dolore de Animâ makes some reflexions on Atheism and blames the unnecessary and extravagant dsputes and writings against such as seem tainted with it That the way to convince such is by the practice of Religion That opposition doth often continue that which if neglected would fall of it self as men of sharp wits delight to find Antagonists page 1 EPIST. II. Wherein he treats of the cause of action or motion under the notion of Spirit That a Spirit conscious of its own work is durable That the flashes thoughts and actions of our own Spirits are often mistaken for and applied to the operation of the Spirit of God Four ways of Gods operation with respect to man 1. By his common Providence
most excellent pattern thereof Nevertheless not what I will but what thou wilt This intire perfect and absolute resignation of our wills to the free working of an infinite wisdom and uncontroulable power is a thing we cannot deny in very reason And it is so coessential to our content and happiness here that the one can never really subsist without the other But because in opposition to it there happen often strong reluctancies of flesh and bloud to calm and quiet that we may do well not only to consider God's wisdom and goodness in his Elections for us But 2. Our folly in our Elections and choices for our selves We cannot in reason deny but that in truth all outward goods are rather imaginary than real and if so we vainly place our affections thereon and falsly think our selves happy in the enjoyment Let us take but a view of all the goods this World affords and we shall find them truly reduced to these three heads Bona animi Bona corporis and Bona fortunae and those of Fortune we shall ever find amongst wise men placed in the foot of the Inventory as the last and least necessary towards man's happy being because without them we have all those goods which go to the composition of a perfect man Soul and Body and the Apostle remembring us that we brought nothing into this world and how sure it is we can carry nothing out advises us to be content with food and rayment as the only necessary things of keeping the Soul and Body united together with their several goods in this World as if these were only the pursuit and prey of reason and the other of imagination For the goods of our mind viz. our natural dispositions as promptness of wit quickness of conceipt fastness of memory clearness of understanding soundness of Judgment readiness of Speech and the like As also the goods of our body viz. beauty strength or the like being the gifts of God with the very form of us they become our own as it were by Birth are inherent in us and grow up together with us for we might be said to have them in our very Infancy in potentia and so in right reason we might look for them and endeavour to improve and preserve them as our own and be sensible of the loss as a proper part of our selves But the goods of Fortune amongst which Children are reckoned are of an after distinct acquisition or grant and so not so properly our own nor in truth therefore so much to be valued by us Now why the loss of an accidental acquisition or gift external and extrinsick to the mind and body both should raise greater storms and work more upon the mind then the loss of its own goods or the Bodies wherein it resides or cohabits would receive some disquisition and as it can never happen otherways than by false Opticks so must be imputed to folly Surely the Soul of man is out of its proper Region and becomes regardless not only of it self but its present Mansion too in some sort by its struggling to unite it self again to somewhat out of the Body from which it is at present disjoyn'd and would settle and take up its rest in somewhat it knows not what at present for want of a renewing of its light or at least a dissipation of those mists and foggs which arise before it from the Body Well it is agreed by some of the ancient and most learned Philosophers as well as Divines that it has not its original from any of the four Elements but is immediately from Heaven and breathed into us from the Almighty whereby we become in a sort after his similitude and likeness And therefore until that Soul return to God who gave it it can never be in perfect and true complacency but being inclosed in a Body of flesh has only now and then besides the hope and assurance of a perpetual rest hereafter some little delights as in a weary Pilgrimage Now according as this lump of Earth will suffer it finds out its several pleasures which we properly call terrenas consolatiunculas which are as various as there are objects in the World and these are pointed out to us by a roving and wandring fancy or imagination especially as to outward things according to our cloudy constitution and frame not that there is any more real good in one of them than another but that we accept it so from our fancies dictates The Poet has methinks very well described this various roving fancy of ours in matter of our delights and begins his Book with Sunt quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum Collegisse juvat c. And truly he might have filled a large Volume with inserting the various vain joys and pleasures of men For as to outward things there is such a dissonancy therein as that there might be found out a Sunt quos for every thing under the Sun Otherwise a man would wonder to see some persons as fond of their Dogs Monkeys and Parrots as of their Children and have made as sad lamentation for the loss of them And certainly though I for my own part should never agree to stay with the Hunter in that first Ode of Horace yet probably such an one might wonder almost as much at me as I at him to see me play with a Child or to place any exuberant affection thereon since the one no more than the other doth add to a man any thing of real worth Now since all outward things please quatenus fancy or imagination approves or dictates why should not I by reason endeavour to stop the current of my fancy Why should I be disturbed or almost distracted for the loss of that very thing which many wise men have not only contentedly wanted but desired to want Our imagination will never find out the summum bonum here which Philosophers so much talked of and never found themselves For surely if there were any thing here on Earth truly good it would be universally desired of all men which no one thing which is perfectly to be attained to in this World ever was and as to these goods of Fortune as we call them and define them surely in the general opinion of men Children are the least desirable The Italians it has been observed make no difference between Children and Nephews and near Kinsfolk And so as they be of the same lump with themselves they are not desirous their particular Bodies should be the Conduits of them And amongst us we daily see men more forward to venture their Bodies and their Souls too often for the obtaining of Riches and Honours than for Children and a great Dowry though with assured barrenness shall be sooner courted by most than the bare promising hope of a fruitful Stock So that doubtless in relation to the loss of the one and the other as well as to the obtaining the Poet might though I have wondred at the
he has shewed me and in particular amongst the multitude of blessings I still enjoy I have this ready at hand That he has given me and yet left me a consort so every way virtuous and so helpful a sharer in my sorrows that without ostentation or just cause of reply she might well put the same question to me that Elkanah did to Hannah Am not I better to thee then ten Sons Now if any other man want that blessing I am sure he may joyn with me in thanks for this for the dead do not complain that he is yet living and on this side the Grave which is the sole benefit that renders him capable of either having or desiring Indeed adversity has made many men Stoicks in words and to commend death to us but I doubt upon tryal every man would find Satan the truer Naturalist Skin for Skin and all that a man has will he give for life And if I should so far Catechize any man as to ask him to what end he was created I suppose the answer would be to serve God and save his own Soul Now so long as he enjoys all those helps and means which tend to the end for which he was created he has little reason to complain But if there be any man that longs for death more then hid treasure and rejoyces to find the grave and thinks that there only the weary are at rest yet until he obtains that desire if he have but reason left him which is the gift of God too as well any thing he would hardly cast that over-board and be willing to part with it to save or regain all his other lading however he might value it before his losses But to descend to any mans particular losses It is a rule that every privation presupposes a habit and from that every man may find reason with Iob to be content and bless God since he that takes away first gave 'T is true the word habit in no good sence is made the phrase of the World Every one can look upon his tenure of Habenda tenenda without the premisses of dedi concessi but St. Iames calleth those gifis which the Heathens called habits and we ought to look upon all our goods as gifts This was the voice of Iacob upon his Brother's question when he saw the Women and Children who are those with thee The Children which God hath graciously given thy Servant though Esau's reply in case of the Cattel only was I have enough my Brother without reference to the gift St. Paul joyns the having and receiving together What hast thou that thou didst not receive Let us interrogate our selves with St. Paul's question and likewise whether concerning almost all goods of Fortune as I may call them because it was the old denomination there was not a time when we wanted them and were content without them and when we have so done and looked for what is left we shall find a remnant perhaps a surplusage of enjoyments for there is not the meanest person but hath plenteous enjoyment In the case of privation by death there are but few that lose a Friend but may reckon too they have lost an Enemy which may be in some sence accounted a benefit and certainly there are but few from whom God has taken a Child but he has before taken away some Relation from the same person who living might have interposed between him and his it may be most delightful enjoyment And can we be content to part with the one but on no terms to be deprived of the other Shall others make room for us and ours none for others whom perhaps God has designed to advance by our seeming loss And shall we make our Eye evil because his is good to others who is Judge of all the Earth and as the Psalmist says pulleth one down and setteth up another But admit we cannot or will not see our enjoyments elsewhere yet God is so gracious to us that they may be found even in our very sufferings and we might even in them rejoyce What greater cause of joy can any man have than that it hath pleased God to make him instrumental in adding Saints unto his Kingdom of Heaven and undoubtedly such are all Children baptized and dying before wilful sin So as a man in this case might make the like reply to any one who should pity him as Cornelia Mother of the Gracchi after the loss of all her Children twelve in number did to her condolers That none could account her an unhappy woman who had born the Gracchi into the World And 't is a right rational inference for us to conclude that we are no ways unhappy by the translation of our Children into Glory where they are at rest and delivered from the evil to come But this happiness is the peculiar prospect of a Soul disjoyned from the Body and through the casement of the Flesh introduces but a weak and faint light and therefore let us endeavour to look every way for comfort And having considered seriously as I said 1. God's wisdom for us in our choices and our follies in our own Elections 2. That the very foundation of our sorrow we thus build on is but Straw and Stubble and 3. That notwithstanding our sins are the cause of all 4. That we have yet left us variety of Worldly objects sufficiently pleasant and comfortable if we would but make them so not only to support us from fainting but also to go on rejoycing in this our Journey Let us not by moaning or lowing after what we least need disrelish all our other more necessary comforts expecially let us not take up Iacob's resolution of going down into the grave mourning and refuse to be comforted That resolution of noluit consolari applied to Rachel is in my opinion a stubborn temder and methinks every one who is diseased in mind should as readily seek out and hearken after all means of cure as if he were diseased of body unless his Reason be infected too because of the two the wise man concludes the first is harder to bear And therefore although I thought the foregoing considerations of force enough if duly applied to put a stop to this head-strong passion of sorrow yet I was willing to search and try all ways and means to be thought on for a recovery and look into and examine every usual prescribed Antidote against it SECT III. Of the Nature and Origine of Sorrow That the rise of all Passions is from Love this particularly demonstrated in that of Sorrow IN order to which I did in my troubled thoughts endeavour as to define Sorrow what it is so to find out the right and true origine thereof and other turbulent passions of our mind I think it has been truly defined that Sorrow with the rest c. is Animi commotio aversa à recta ratione contra naturam And so they
and his Son Solomon the wisest of men have assured us in sundry positions that understanding takes her possession of the Soul with it and that through his Commandments it is that we are wiser then our Teachers And surely if there were not some defect in every man of these Graces by the intetposition of Sin and Satan he would sooner or later hear that gracious and effectual Eccho resound in his Soul from the Spirit of all true love and comfort Let not your hearts be troubled This is the only rational way I think of cure Redire ad cor and to get that clean swept and garnished that the Spirit of true love may enter in and keep possession against all unruly passions and I dare say whoever tries it will subscribe his probatum to it SECT IV. The Remedies which are ordinarily prescribed against Sorrow considered with respect to their force and efficacy and how little Philosophy of it self can do towards the conquest of it BUt as I said let us not altogether reject every prescribed alleviating Medicine Indeed there are many from our common undertaking comforters and we are ready to catch at them like Reeds in a sinking condition Although they are firm Truths and such as have been used by the greatest Philosophers and Divines towards the cure yet barely and simply considered all or either of them have not the efficacy to bring a man to any safe or quiet Harbour They may keep a man from drowning but withall they may and do often leave him plunging in the deep without the co-operation of some more Sovereign Medicines and are some of them fitter ingredients for a complicated disease where murmuring and repining are joyned with it than bare sorrow which I bless God I never was infected with for I own his Judgments just and am more apt to have St. Gregory's noise in my ears Tu vero bona tua in vita tua c. than the contrary But I mention them as I thought on them and leave them to others to make their best use of them which are these following 1. That death is a common thing and a debt we all owe to Nature and must shortly pay and therefore it should not so much trouble us to behold it in another 2. That we cannot recall our Friends and Relations by our mourning and therefore our sorrow is vain 3. That they whom we love are at rest and happy which is rather cause of joy 4. That 't is not our case alone we are not single but others daily suffer the like As to the first the thing is very obvious to the meanest capacity and perhaps if we did in our serious thoughts oftner behold death he might prove like Aesop's Lion to his Fox not altogether so terrible but yet he will be a Lion still and as Aristotle calls him omnium terribilium terribilissimum and further if we did look upon him at hand ready to seize us then together with us all worldly things would change their hue and put on as it were another face 'T is sure that Death passeth upon all men but as St. Paul says because all men have sinned and from thence it is that death hath such a sting And 't is sin that has made sorrow and trouble attendants on death as well as death on it both for our selves and others And therefore the contemplation of the primary cause of our sorrow should rather take up our thoughts as I have already said than the secundary For the thought of death certainly was never wholly absent from any man in his sorrows nor ever cured any but the true sense of his own deserts have As to the second every man knows it as well as the other neither was there ever any man yet that had his reason left him who thought to revive his Friend or Relation thereby or to awake him with his shrieks and cries It is every mans deepest corrosive that there is no redemption from the Grave And though in truth it be a vain thing to persist in that which profiteth us nothing yet that vanity will not be driven away by anothers barely telling us so or our own thinking or knowing it so The faculties of the Soul will not cease to work though there is knowledge that the operation is oft-times in vain 't is in vain we know to fear death but that knowledge will not cure a man of his fear Certainly the wounds of the Spirit are sharper and more malignant than those of the Body and 't is the same reason must argue us into patience of both But let her set us upon the Rack 't is in vain to cry out it will profit us nothing we shall scarce hearken to her and keep silence This advice best comes when we begin to be weary of our mourning and not before and then only will this reason be hearkned unto In the mean time let us consider if we can All things are vanity which are the causes of our vexation of Spirit As to the third I look on it as a good Christian contemplation and may in the declination of the disease prove a pleasant Cordial but in the state thereof of little prevalence to a cure because it is a thing we never doubted of but upon the first departure of the Soul of him or her who lived well c. think it received into Eternal bliss And therefore if these thoughts had in them any present sanative virtue they would rather keep us from sorrowing at all since they possess us as soon as our sorrow and are contemporary with our distemper The wise Son of Syrach allows us a moderate sorrow bids us weep for the dead but not over-much because he is at rest And St. Paul's advice or caution is that we sorrow not as others which have no hope that is with a desperate faithless sorrow as if they were eternally lost and that Christ should not raise them up at the last day But surely no man will charitably deny but that a strong Faith and a deep worldly sorrow may sometimes possibly subsist together and that there may be spe dolentes as well as spe gaudentes For I cannot so discard my own charity as not to think some very good men have gone sorrowing to their Graves and yet have rejoyced too in the hopes that God will bring with him those that sleep and they shall meet together But for our present pensive thoughts and mourning 't is sure they arise not only for want of this belief or from any supposed detriment happened or like to happen to our Relation or Friend whom we once enjoyed and now are deprived of but to our selves from our present loss For 't is most certain with every man that whenever any object has stollen into and possessed his heart and taken root there if the same be eradicated and snatched away though he suppose it planted in a more pleasant Soil there will immediately
turned into joy we may rejoyce in that very thing we sorrowed for and our waters of Marah may become sweet and pleasant by our drinking Afflictions are sent to exercise Our Faith by believing most assuredly God's promises of his deliverance from them Our Hope by assuring our selves of the reward promised to them that suffer patiently and Our Charity in suffering willingly for his sake who loved us and suffered for us And shall this be performed by our endeavours to find out means to forget our sufferings But besides Theological virtues there are Moral too to be exercised thereby and even one of them is sufficient to awaken us and rouze us up from this dull passion of sorrow Let us consider a little the worldly esteem of a noble undaunted Spirit beyond a degenerous and poor one Fortitude is that Heroick Moral virtue which can never shew it self so illustrious as in Adversity There are none of us but would willingly be thought to have it inherent in us and then is the proper time to shew it for it must be a tempestuous not a calm Sea which shews the excellency of a Pilot. Fortitude has already been owned to shew more of its reality in a passive than an active dress and oftner appears with the Shield the Buckler and the Helmet than the Spear and the Sword Let us think with Theophrastus that the World is a great Theatre and that each of us is often called forth upon the Stage to fight with poverty sorrow sickness death and a number of other miseries rather then with one another and besides our Brethren Spectators God himself from above beholds every one how he performs his part and that besides an hiss or a plaudite here we must expect a Crown or Prison hereafter And then let us fight valiantly and think through him that will assist us to master and subdue all adverse Fortune that is in two words to contemn the World and that is truly the definition of Fortitude or a great mind We have great known Enemies to contend with here the World the Flesh and the Devil and we have once vowed to fight against them all and to continue Christs faithful Servants and Souldiers to our lives end Indeed when we wrestle not only against Flesh and Bloud but Principalities and Powers we had need take unto us the whole Armour of God that we may be able to stand viz. the Breast-plate of Love and for an Helmet the hope of Salvation c. But shall one of these Enemies the World when there were more danger from her smiles overcome us with her frowns If ever we think to obtain a Crown of Righteousness after the finishing of our course we must like St. Paul who often uses Military terms to encourage us Fight a good fight and let us by our very Fortitude master a puny sorrow But if neither Honour nor Glory nor the sight of God or man will herein move us but that we are ready to yield and let our affections carry us away like Captives and Slaves there is yet this reserve left us to become at last resolute from fear and tell our selves what Ioab told David that if we do not Arise from our sorrow and speak comfortably again it will be worse unto us then all the evil that befell us even from our youth until now And that worst evil is death if Satan be not deceived in our sense of humane evils who says All that a man hath will he give for his life Immoderate sorrow will macerate these beloved Carcasses of ours and although before pain makes us sensible of our follies and it be generally too late we are apt to take some kind of pleasure in nourishing and feeding our diseases yet methinks in this where we have none of our senses to please which is chiefly looked on in the World we might take the words of wise and experienced persons David telleth us his eyes were consumed with grief yea his soul and his belly and he tells us of those who are brought low through oppression affliction and sorrow St. Paul tells us Worldly sorrow worketh death Solomon hath told us that by sorrow of the heart the Spirit is broken and that a broken Spirit drieth the bones and the wise Son of Syrach in plain terms that sorrow hath killed many and that of heaviness cometh death For let every man assure himself that if he cannot in some sort overcome and master this Tyrant by his own struggling and God's gracious assistance he is become such a Slave to his passion that he is not to expect an enfranchisement from Time but Death I do agree with him who said Nisi sanatus sit animus quod sine Philosophia non potest finem miseriarum nullum fore quamobrem tradamus nos ei curandos if Deo were placed in the room of Philosophia For now at length I must conclude that although Moral Philosophy may be sometimes admitted as an Handmaid and Attendant on Divinity and 't was not for nought that St. Paul termed Religion Our reasonable service yet we must take care we look upon the one in no other respect than under the precepts and dictates of the other I for my part am apt to think and do indeed rest convinced that no man ever yet cured these wounds of the Soul by the bare strength of natural Reason and Argument though even that be the immediate gift of a Divine power without some more special Light or influence from above For although many of the ancient Philosophers and Sages who perhaps knew not God aright have seemed from their profound knowledge and reason to reduce their minds unto a most constant calm serene temper I rather think that tranquility of mind in them was the gift of that God they rightly knew not as a reward of their Moral virtues industriously acquired than the native off-spring of their knowledge I my self am a man like other men and I have been ever sensible by intervals in my serious thoughts of the vanity of this World and I may truly say there is nothing in these Papers but what at some time or other occurred to my thoughts before and in those thoughts I have Goliah-like contemned a pigmy sorrow but find as contemptible a thing as it may seem to the best humane reason being sent from the Lord of Hosts who alone is he that wounds and heals there can be no Armour of defence proof against his Darts but what is taken out of his own Arsenal For if contrary to mans experience which hath found that we are not sufficient of our selves to think any thing as of our selves our wills were present with us and those wills could command our cogitations and our reason to attend them too we might however think what we would or could and dig about and water all our days this crabbed root of Nature and never cause
borrowing for a Patronage any Great man's name or daring to affix my own as a ground-work for him to build on and I should rejoyce to rest assured any one would undertake or undergo that labour I have but this I think reasonable request to any man about to quarrel with these Papers That he take some consideration and bethink himself whether he may not wrong or prejudice his own Soul Because I will affirm nothing in them as a matter of truth with so much confidence and assurance as this one thing here that is if he desire tranquility and peace of mind the greatest worldly blessing imaginable and the thing I seek after he shall never so readily attain it by any narrow search into the errors and extravagancies of my Soul for disputation sake as by passiug them with pity and commiseration for God's sake who best knows whereof we are both made remembreth our frame and how subject we are to mistakes And I hope that no man will before-hand from the Spirit of pride and contradiction raise up a Tower or Fortress for his own intellect from thence to summon all others to vail and come in but let mine or other such like pass as a poor Merchant that chiefly intends to see Countries bring back somewhat it may be for its own support and possibly too for the support of some others of a like or little inferiour capacity though its Wares have no such flourish or signature on them as may make them vendible or prized by the Merchants of this Age. PART I. SECT I. How far the Soul of man is similar with that of Brutes I Think it may appear somewhat plain and obvious to the meanest capacity that the Soul of man is endowed with three distinct prime or principal faculties whereby it appears to work and those are 1 st the Affections 2 ly the Will and 3 ly the Intellect or Understanding which last is more commonly reduced to and made to terminate in these three faculties 1. Imagination 2. Memory 3. Reason For to say more or make any further enumeration at present were to fall upon my second limited subject which I intend to handle more particularly in its proper place and might perhaps confound my self and others with strange notions in the beginning which I intend not All these distinct faculties or operations we cannot well deny to be inherent and discernible in the wiser if I may so say sort of Brutes The two first viz. Affections and Will I suppose every man will grant to be apparent in the less seeming intelligent Animals and therefore I 'le not trouble my self to demonstrate after what manner they love and fear or the like nor dispute about their voluntary motions nor whence that voluntary motion may proceed whether from sense or passion or sometimes intellect For though I believe there is not a Sparrow that lighteth upon the House-top without a Divine providence yet I think it had a will to light on the House-top as well as I to write and could not be said to have an involuntary motion like an Arrow shot thither out of a Bow for in all involuntary motion there is requisite a second discernible working cause as well as a first cause But my enquiry concerning them shall be only in those three faculties referred to the intellect viz. Imagination Memory and Reason none of which I know well how to deny to be in several kinds of creatures in some sort beside man And first for Imagination which is the representation of some image or apparence in the Soul not at present introduced by sight c. and therefore may as well be sleeping as waking Though otherwise there appear no ground to us of their imagination which is internal yet such an effect there is often seen in them as cannot proceed from any other cause but some internal image of an outward object And this is discernible in sleeping Hounds and Spaniels whose bodies from thence are moved and agitated with such kind of motion and accompanied noise as if they were in pursuit and quest of their imagined prey or game For Memory he who denies its being in the Soul of Beast either believes not or has forgot the story of Darius his Horse or has not seen or observed the common course of Dogs and other creatures in hiding and covering their acquired food and upon occasion going as readily or dexterously as I may say to the place as any man could or has not been himself a common Master or Rider of Horses some of which in a maze of ways and turnings shall with the liberty of his Rein bring his Master to his accustomed home and indeed it 's strange to see divers creatures brought from their usual and accustomed place of residence after some time of stay by reason of some let and hindrance to return again many miles to their old abode which they could never so readily do nor could be effected as I suppose without the aid and help of what we call Memory Our chief enquiry will be whether we shall in any case allow them Reason which we have already so appropriated to our selves that we have differenced our Nature and Being from theirs in that only notion Toward the resolution of which we must enquire and define what Reason is now if Reason be only a conception by speech whereby we are able to explicate our minds and thoughts as some would have it we may well deny it to all creatures but our selves but if it be a discerning faculty of the Soul by which we judge with any election or choice what is or may be good or hurtful to it or to the body what is good and what is evil what to embrace or avoid we cannot deny it in some measure to be in meer Animals Whatever distinction is made between Instinct and Intellect when the word Reason is taken away from them and the word Fancy allowed to supply the place I do not think it amiss to admire God in them and though the best of their faculties quite differ in the extract from ours yet they are the work of the same God in a different manner and wonderful it is to see such faculties as we must needs allow them by some title or other to proceed from a corporeal substance only attenuated and rarified as I shall say anon and so similar to ours They were created with us for our use and service and all for God's glory and if we made a right use of our own rational faculty we should neither sometimes vilifie them as we do nor at other times extoll and enlarge their faculties beyond their due limits and bounds seeming rather desirous of having our own understanding admired among our selves by amplification of theirs than making any true state of our different cases thereby shewing our invention rather than our knowledge This we cannot but truly acknowledge that they having had no such lapse or fall as we work more wisely
regularly and orderly in reference to the end they were created than we and whoever shall duly look into their manner of working and more narrowly observe what kind of cunning or stratagem some of them use either in acquiring their food or else preserving or saving themselves from dangers must needs afford them the attribute of Reason or somewhat tantamount to it What subtle ways do some of them use towards the obtaining their desired prey what intrigues and fetches to let pass ordinary stories may a man see in a poor imprisoned Fox how he will sometimes counterfeit himself dormant till a prey be within his reach what ways have many Fowls to uncase a poor Shell-fish I my self have seen a Crow not able to swallow a large Acorn nor break it with her Bill leave the Pasture Fields where she first found it and mounting with it a considerable height let it fall in a Stony ground as if the very place were chosen out of Reason and repeat that action near twenty times and till I have disturbed her in it I have credibly heard and once saw it at a Chalk-pit that a Hare in a course has taken directly to a precipice and upon a sudden stopping at the edge thereof has cast down head-long her pursuing Dogs and that this poor creature has repeated this action again at other times And what origine of this cunning or sagacity can I give but something like Reason it being a distinct act and not deducible from the common natural instinct of that creature whose every days and nights work for the preservation of her self visible in a Snow seems so prudent that it would puzzle the wisest of us to find out or contrive so safe ways of artifice Well if we cannot afford them Reason let us not take from them those attributes the Scripture has allowed them of subtilty and wisdom which in our selves we esteem but as the effects and fruits of Reason The Serpent in the beginning was said to be more subtle than any Beast of the Field and our Saviour has admonish'd us to assume the Serpent's wisdom with the Dove's innocency The Ant is an exceeding wise creature says Agur and to her Solomon sends his sluggard to School and some Philosophers have termed that creature amongst others Political And we are told in other places of Scripture of the Ox and the Ass and the Crane and the Turtle and the Swallow by way of exprobation as if those creatures did often exceed us in the foresight and knowledge of those things which tended towards their own preservation And surely there is such a kind of forecast and wisdom in most if not in all other creatures besides Man that I cannot well tell how to appropriate the word Reason to Man alone unless we distinguish our selves in the very work of our creation and allow our whole Soul to be a coelestial durable flame and Reason to be a connative inherent light therein given to guide and direct all the other faculties towards the attainment of some ultimate end or enjoyment of some future permanent bliss and happiness and not barely for the preservation of the visible Body nor arising or springing merely from any passion of mind by the bare inlet of sense Such a Reason I may call it Right Reason as beholds things at a distance and weighs future events and distinguishes us from all other creatures as Aesop has distinguish'd one of his Frogs from the other That is by our Reason we are capable to foresee a possibility of failure of all things here and thereby prevent our falling into those gulfs for the satisfaction of our present lusts from whence we cannot after get out which no other creature is Indeed many other creatures besides our selves from that natural instinct of self-preservation common with us and fear of destruction have had some short flashing light of ratiocination if I may so call it and by that sudden flash quickly extinct elected or chosen the most likely place for a present continuing preservation and upon failure of water in the Brook have got down into a Well but no creature save Man ever yet beheld events at a distance and so weighed time and place as before-hand to take care upon failure of water in the Well how to get out again as Aesop makes his later Frog to do which thing indeed is properly and peculiarly an act of Right Reason SECT II. Wherein the Soul of man exceeds that of Brutes and its Immortality considered and maintained from Scripture NOw at present to leave all other creatures acting according to their abilities more regularly than our selves it would not be amiss here humbly to search into and behold our own and see how we act by a distinct and separate gift with abilities beyond and exceeding the natural capacities of any other visible creature In search of which it will be needful that we have recourse to our original frame and because that is already set down to us according to my capacity beyond the invention or just exception or correction of the most subtle opponent I will search no furthet than the Books of Moses and behold the Creation as he has described and delineated it wherein it is observable that after the Creation of Heaven and Earth and the separation of light from darkness and the gathering together of the Waters and the appearance of dry Land when he speaks of the formation of living creatures 't is not expressed as before Let there be Light and Let there be a Firmament c. but Let the Earth bring forth the living creature after his kind c. plainly intimating that in their composition there was no addition of new Matter or Spirit added but only together with their Earthly visible Bodies a product Soul of a corporeate substance attenuated and rarefied and so not capable of acting beyond its native original But when he comes to the formation of Man it 's said God created him in his own image and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and says the Text Man became a living Soul So as there seems to be from thence not only a gradual but a specifick difference between the Soul of man and that of all other creatures for that of other creatures being immediately made out of the same Matter with the Body is no other than a fluid bodily substance the more lively subtle and refined part of the Bloud called Spirit quick in motion and from the Arteries by the branches of the Carotides carried to the Brain and from thence conveyed to the Nerves and Muscles moves the whole frame and mass of the Body and receiving only certain weak impresses from the senses and of short continuance hindred and obstructed of its work and motion vanishes into the soft air But the Soul of man being breathed into him by God and the main principle of his life being derived from that infusion must be consequently of
Air and the Fishes of the Sea too and so far as we can discern we find them agree in their desires and delights with one another of the same species They have each their particular Food and rest contented satisfied and pleased therewith during their whole course of nature 'T is not with them as with us what one loves another loathes 'T would be a difficult matter to find an hungry Ox that would refuse Hay either when he is young or old A man may well ask Iob's question Doth the wild Ass bray when he hath grass or loweth the Ox over his fodder 't is man doth only that or the like when he hath what his fleshly heart can desire The Beasts are more constant and content and their Soul seems settled and the inhabitant of its proper Region they neither fear nor joy in excess their choices and elections are still alike and every Cock like Aesop's Cock will yet to this day prefer the Barley-corn before a Jewel though amongst men some prefer the one and some the other I speak thus much for this cause only that viewing the Soul of man in its very inferiour faculties and finding it so various and disagreeing so little at a stay or at rest so fighting and combating so snatching and catching at it knows not what things neither useful nor profitable for the body or the mind it somewhat convinces me 't is a thing very capacious and that there is a place of fulness of joy or fulness of sorrow for it hereafter SECT VI. The Immortality of the Soul of man illustrated from the difference thereof between Parents and Children BEsides this some enquiry might be made into the different qualities of the Souls of men beyond those of Beasts in their ordinary workings though they inhabit or actuate Bodies which have their being from one and the same production For if the Soul of man were the ordinary work of Nature only a fine rarified vigorous quality in the Bloud Man receiving his body from his Parents by the ordinary course of Nature as other creatures do his Soul would always somewhat resemble that of his Parents too and Brethren twins especially would resemble one another in the faculties of their Souls as well as 't is often seen they do many ways in the Body But there is generally found as between Iacob and Esau such dissimilitude in the Spirits of Brethren and those of Father and Son Mother and Daughter as greater is not to be found between meer strangers in bloud which thing daily experience will not only demonstrate upon search but may be readily found in the Histories of Princes in all Ages Now the Soul of Beast being the bare product of flesh only and necessarily taking its rise and essence from the substance of its Parents if I may so call them for the word may be proper enough pario being only to bring forth or produce never varies much or altogether at any time from that of the Parent We shall never find an absolute Jadish Spirit in a Horse begot from free and well-bred ones nor a meer Curr from right good Hounds no not in one of his senses the Nose or smell But if in any case they excell or degenerate from their Stock 't is by degrees and not per saltum which thing per saltum may be found and observed in the Race of men And besides this variation of the Souls of men from Birth there sometimes happens on the sudden a strange kind of total Metamorphosis of the Soul of man so as one would scarce adjudge it the same but according to Scripture phrase that one becomes a new man and this without any alteration at all of the Bodies constitution Now if the Soul of man were not a substance of it self capable to be wrought on ab extra by somewhat without any introduction by the senses then no such alteration without the Bodies alteration could be made but through the senses and if such alteration were made from sense through the Organs of the Body then upon the shortest obstruction or letting in of prior forms again the Soul would consequently return to its pristine state according to that simile of the dog to his vomit c. which change or alteration in the Soul of man we see sometimes settled and remaining notwithstanding all interposition during a long following life Thus we find that men have utterly contemned and hated without any offence raised from the thing it self even with a perfect hatred that which was formerly their delight which kind of hatred never yet happened or was discernible in Beast Now if any man shall ask me At what time the Soul of man being a substance of it self distinct from the Body enters and possesses the Body I can make him a reply with as difficult a question At what instant doth this other arising product Soul from the Bloud begin its circulation and move If we know neither why should it seem more wonderful and strange to us for the God of Nature upon man's conception in the womb to create and have ordained a Spirit to actuate that conception which Spirit should continue for ever notwithstanding that conception should decay and perish for a time as well as that there should arise a Spirit from the Bloud to actuate move and govern the Body for a certain period of time which time we could never define certainly from any course of Nature And further that the wise Creator and Governour of all things should ordain that if the first created Spirit to inhabit a Body both together being Man should wander in disobedience from its Creator all others sent and entring into Bodies product from the Loyns of the first Body should be infected with the same wandring disease and have no cure but by Grace from the first Creator But I would not wander too much my self nor desire to pry into any of God's secrets further than he has thought fit to reveal by his Holy Word and so shall lay aside my thoughts of the manner of Man's creation every way wonderful as the Psalmist expresses it as also the consideration of the inferiour faculties for the present and try and see if there be not some sparks in the Soul of man which give such a light as can by no means naturally arise from any thing barely and simply terrestrial SECT VII The Immortality of the Soul of man illustrated from its unweariedness in searching c. and its reflex acts and operations WHy has the Soul of man in all Ages when it has been at any time withdrawn from that quick intromission of worldly objects by the senses and has not been hindred or obstructed by some mists fogs or lets of the flesh wherein at present 't is confined to work hunted after wearied and tired it self to find out and comprehend what it is not able to comprehend The first sin of man shewed at once the Soul's error and its
extract and being For the very innate desire of some distinguishing knowledge of good from evil could not have its motion from sense nor ever was introduced by sense There is a kind of knowledge springs it self from sense as the Ox knows his owner c. but knowledge by causes such as it is is peculiar to Humane nature and has no relation to sense Know indeed so as to comprehend we cannot knowledge in the abstract being the peculiar of the Divine nature If we had been capable to have known good and evil absolutely the Devil had used no Hyperbole in telling us Ye shall be as Gods But the very desire of knowledge even such a knowledge as the Soul is in some measure capable of that is by causes shews a Divine spark in us tending towards the cause of all causes which exercised about God's revealed will here might be more clear but mounting in desire is apt to lose its light and vanish Nay not only our desire but our fear or doubt of somewhat we know not nor can perfectly attain to by our search nor is reasonable fully to demonstrate must necessarily have its origine from somewhat more than sense If we at least fear a future being and continuance for ever and future punishment that very fear is either native and natural in our Souls or else arises in us from the Tradition of some others if from Tradition then sense being the Port and Inlet I allow to be Parent too but yet while we allow it to spring from Tradition in our selves we do by consequence allow it to be native in some one particular person and he who allows it native in any one must allow the Soul to be a substance of it self and not a resultance from the Body for thoughts of infinity could never first spring from a bare temporary finite existence I said I would lay aside the inferiour faculties of the Soul from my thoughts Desire and fear are affections I agree common to Brutes I know they desire and fear but I dare say never any one of them yet desired knowledge or feared any thing to happen after this life and therefore these as they are in us being in respect of the object no such affections as are led by sense or work by sense barely and so not having their essence from the Body are not to be accounted amongst the other inferiour faculties common with Brutes But to proceed and go a little higher Whence arise those accusing or excusing thoughts mentioned by St. Paul in the Soul of man though wholly ignorant of Scripture and having no accession of new Light so much as by Tradition Certainly it must be some glimmering of that coelestial native spark of Justice implanted in every Humane Soul I dare leave it without further pressure to any quiet sedate reasonable Soul to determine whether if there had never been any Divine or Humane Law written or divulged by Tradition against Murther but that that same fact by the Laws of his native Country were allowed and approved if done against meer Strangers whether I say in case of that man's private imbruing his hands in his Brother's bloud with no other colourable pretence or provocation than some slight worldly gain he should not upon the consideration that we men made not our selves but that every one was a fellow-member with other of the visible Universe and of equal native extract expect to find some inward regret disgust trouble or vexation of mind If he determine that he thinks he should the question will be about that consideration how it could arise For we find that or the like consideration has risen without the help of any outward Engine or sense nay when all the Spels imaginable have been used and applied to allay it Now no disgust or trouble or sorrow was yet perceived in any other Creature beside Man upon the destruction of his fellow creature or Man the Sovereign of creatures And whence is this but because their Soul is not extensive beyond its original nor has any motion but from sense that is it is not capable of any consideration For consideration weighing or pondering of a thing whether it be good or evil is a proper act of a reasonable Soul distinct from a Body and is somewhat more than desire of knowledge by causes 'T is the very exercise of Reason 't is the Soul's waving of its senses for a time and summoning its noble powers to tryal which have some little native ability This trying considering or weighing good from evil by Reason the ballance of the Soul is I say the Soul 's peculiar act from which act there may be very properly the Author to the Hebrews uses the like words a weariness of the mind and so it 's distinguished and is different from such acts of the Soul which Solomon saith are a weariness of the flesh For that kind of study which he respects viz. composing reading or hearing are no peculiar acts of the Soul as withdrawn from the flesh but are a bare introduction of somewhat to the Soul through the Organs of the flesh and so are a weariness to it Whereas the Soul after reception and some light of a thing by sense in considering the good or evil of it quite lays aside the senses for a time and so the mind is peculiarly affected SECT VIII The Immortality of man's Soul considered from things peculiar to Man as weeping laughter speech with some conclusion against Atheism THe Soul of man does not only shew it self and its original by the aforesaid manner of withdrawing it self or as it were by separation from the Body to be above the capacity of a Soul extracted or springing from the flesh but even by peculiar actions and motions through bodily Organs which a bare earthly or fleshly Soul does not There are three things generally held and esteemed proper and peculiar to Humane Nature and no ways incident to any other living creature whatsoever and those are Tears or weeping Laughter and Speech in each of which or from each of which may seem to appear somewhat more in Man than a product Soul part of the Body or extracted or raised from the Body though never so curiously or admirably framed I do not alledge each of them apart as any infallible demonstration of a Spirit distinct and separable from the Body yet coupled and joyned together they become of some seeming weight and strength to me to confirm my opinion It does not seem much wonderful at any time to behold a distillation from the Eyes that thing is to be found in Beast as well as Man not only from a disease or some distemper in the Bloud but upon every offensive touch of the Eye yet when neither of these are present or can be alledged for a cause to have the Body as it were melted on the sudden and send forth its streams through that unusual channel makes it seem to me no
less than the quick and violent agitation of some Divine flame thawing all the vital parts and drawing the moisture through the chief and clearest Organ of the body the Eye and not to be caused by any thing which is part of it self I do agree that every living Soul whether arising from the Body or by a greater Divine gift infused into or sent to actuate a Body has equally in either some influence upon the visible Body and according as the affections with the imagination are moved worketh visible effects therein and that Man and Beast such as have their parts similar may and do equally tremble for fear and the like But yet as to this kind of motion or extasie mentioned that is weeping for I know not how to term that or laughter either a passion but both strange attendants or consequents of some kind of passions I cannot adjudge it to arise from the acceptance of a bare representation of an offensive object through sense but by some inward distinct conception of a Soul as of it self though at the same time agitated or rouzed by passion For if it were from the first barely then the same effect could never proceed from any pleasing object the contrary whereof we find and men to weep as well upon the predominancy of joy in the Soul as sorrow nay weeping is a concomitant often of a weak anger which not able otherwise to satiate or satisfie it self has this help to vanish and resolve into tears as may be observed in Women and Children Now tears being the attendant the effect as may seem to some of clean contrary passions such as joy and sorrow are they cannot really be the proper and bare effect of any passion nor the sole work of any such Spirit as is no other than the refined and most curious part of the Bloud For that were able to cause only different effects upon different occasions or representations and still the same effect upon the same occasion so far forth as we are able to look into the ordinary works of Nature Indeed salt brackish and chrystal tears flowing in that abundance as at some time is to be seen would puzzle the most learned Physician as well as a Poet to alledge a right fountain as well as a cause and wonder in searching after the original Spring-head of them in the Body If I should alledge or affirm Laughter to be some denotation or demonstration of a pure intellectual Spirit separable from a Body and no ways arising from any other single or primary cause then such I hope I should not incur the censure or become the subject of laughter to all men though I might to some By Laughter I do not mean a bare dilatation or contraction of the mouth or lips and other parts of the face such a kind of grinning as is incident to Apes and no less to Dogs and such as in the latter we term fawning a kind of habit or faculty some men take up for peculiar purposes as seeming pleased with others actions and sensible of some such involuntary motion voluntarily counterfeit one nor yet any agitation of the lungs with expulsion of breath and other odd motions of the Body in others whereby perhaps they would seem to please themselves But I mean an absolute involuntary motion upon some sudden slight pleasing touch of the Spirits by some bare conception in the intellect different in notion from what is represented by the senses It is a thing that differs much from true joy and is often extorted from men in their greatest griefs and sometimes tortures of Body as is storied of that Villain who murthered the Prince of Orange that in the midst of his pains and while he was tormented with burning Pincers for a confession laughed at the fall of a number of Spectators from a Scaffold It is one of the first unnecessary as I may say motions in Infants it is incident to wise men as well as foolish and old as well as young though not in the same measure or degree and is and happens sometimes as well sleeping as waking Now I do take it to arise properly and peculiarly from the intellect's judging on the sudden though that Judgment is not always aright of somewhat of folly lapse or oversight in a rational creature or some ill or shrewd turn happening thereupon which from prudence might have been prevented and have been done or acted otherwise and I do not judge it to arise unless we will allow something of voluntariness in it after the manner I spake before upon any sight or action proceeding from an irrational or brute creature Therefore I do think that I my self should not with Crassus the Grandfather of Marcus that wealthy Roman as is so storied of him and that he never laughed but that once have laughed at the beholding an Ass eating of Thistles I think the Beast does it with a great deal of Art to save the pricking of his mouth but had I seen a man smelling on a Thistle to gratifie that sense and thereby in pricking his Nose much more offended another I do think I should have laughed Now though laughter be a thing more incident to the Fool than the Wise whose clearer Judgment is best able to correct its rise yet it proceeds from apprehension of the intellect ready to judge at all turns and quickest often in that notion when weakest and may denote at once some kind of inherent wisdom together with folly or frenzy in man that we being created to act most regularly and prudently from a disturbed intellect become often the most giddily erring and foolishest of creatures so as if Solomon said of mirth what doth it he might well say of laughter It is mad As for Speech which is a power or ability the Soul has so to move the Tongue and other Organs of the Body that from thence shall result such a modulation of the Air that each rational Soul from an articulate voice might apprehend others meaning and intent This formation of words made to be the Idea of the mind appears not nor could ever break out from the earthly extracted Soul of other creatures not that there is any absolute defect in their Organs for then no other Spirit could frame an articulate voice by them and we must deny the Devil 's speaking in the Serpent and some other Spirit for a time in Balaam's Beast for they have curious and admirable Notes and some of them have framed as plain a 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 with many other words as man can utter which has been a resultance from the ear when they were taught but no Index of the mind This gift and power of Speech I say is the chief outward livery badge or cognizance of the Soul by which Mankind is distinguished from and hath the advantage of all other creatures Brutes do indeed fellow together and apprehend and if I may so say understand one another by signs
Ionathan a loving man Nabal a churlish man Iehu a furious man Ionah a pettish angry man Ieremy a sorrowful man Iob a patient man and David a valiant man yet for Moses the first besides what some may collect from his slaying of the Aegyptian we find sometimes he was very wroth and for David the last we find most kind of passions in him at the full height and growth And surely every living man may rightly cry out upon occasion to another in the language of Barnabas and Paul I am a man of like passions with you For 't is but want of prospect from the imagination or otherwise God's grace that any one affect or passion is silent and lurking and shews not forth it self in man Passions are not only accidental but inherent as David himself seems to hold when he says The ungodly are froward from their mothers womb And which our Saviour when in the flesh was not exempted from for though passion were in his power I do not think those expressed to be only seeming ones but real effects He looked on the Iews being grieved for the hardness of their hearts He had compassion He began to be sore amazed and very heavy and his Soul exceeding sorrowful He sighed deeply in Spirit which is an effect of sorrow he wept for Lazarus and over Ierusalem and he commends passions arising from a right spring and head to us in his Sermon on the Mount and pronounces a blessing on them that mourn and therefore Humane Nature however it may imprison and confine them must not think to expell or banish them What part of the Body is the chief seat or receptacle of the affections has been agreed by most men and doubtless they rightly approve the heart to be their most frequented Cell and I am of that opinion but yet there is some doubt left for enquiry whether some kind of passions do not principally move elsewhere as Frowardness and Peevishness in the Spleen and Stomach and we use the word Stomach often for that motion though Solomon indeed apply it to the heart and says a froward heart Anger in the Liver c. The Scripture mentions bowels of compassion and yerning of the bowels and whoever has been a Father has sometimes I suppose sensibly found a stroke deeper than his heart and a heaviness that has immediately gone down to the very bottom of the belly This is certain that many passions are in an instant visible in all parts of the Body as Fear in all the outward parts Anger in the face c. and Solomon mentions a proud look as well as a proud heart But to leave all the Affections for a while let us make some enquiry about their general supposed Father from whence they are said to have their being and original viz. the Imagination a faculty of the Intellect more nobly seated and define and describe that SECT IV. Of the Imagination THe Imagination I do take to be A strange admirable though roving faculty of the Soul more peculiarly scituate in the Brain always working sometimes as it were vainly working of it self but more properly the purveyor or hunter of objects for the affections sometimes set on work by them controuled or recalled by them and sometimes by Reason sometimes obeying one or both and sometimes neither sometimes inciting and inticing the affections and leading them away captive without regard of Reason and sometimes won to take part with Reason against the affections Now according to its manner of working do I think there are several names bestowed on it or titles appropriated to it When 't is eagerly set on work or working to find something Invention when it has it and brings it forth to the affections or reason Conception when it suddenly turns about on things past for the introduction thereof into memory Reflexion when it suddenly takes in an object whereabout reason at hand is somewhat consulted Apprehension when it goes on methodically or rovingly without interruption Cogitation when reason and the affections seem most distant from it or it from them Fancy or Phantasm It is all and every one of these and we often call it the one or the other but because there is always framed from it some image of things from Soul I rather treat of it in general under the notion and title of Imagination Well I have defined the Imagination to be not only a roving unstable faculty in its working but always working yet surely that may receive some little exception Some indeed have defined man to be substantia cogitans and have thus argued themselves into manhood cogito ergo sum as if that were the very essence of a man It does indeed work when all other faculties are or at least seem still and quiet the Affections the Reason and the Will too It works in sleeping Lethargick or Apoplectick persons and for ought I know or can conjecture to the contrary it may move in an Infant in its Mothers womb though the impress it then makes is so weak that nothing thereof remains But in all these there is a motion of the Bloud and a pulse and that helps their sum Now with submission I do think a man may be said to be a living creature and be for a time without any cogitation at all and that in case of an absolute Syncope or swoun when there is a total cessation of the hearts motion for a while And men of perfect intellect who have suffered under that distemper or obstruction have observed presently after that the most quiet sleep was not like it and thought then that they thought not at all during that space which is an equal argument to me first that the life or Soul not moving the Bloud and yet existent in the Body is separable from the Body and Eternal next that the Bloud in man is not the life of man as 't is of other creatures for if it were then upon a total cessation of its motion would the Spirit vanish as it docs in every other creature upon a cessation For this kind of distemper if I may so call it never happens in any other creature but man in man it does sometimes in an healthful state of body from a violent passion it may be with the assistance of the imagination And lastly that if the imagination do at any time cease to work and yet life remains then is not the imagination amongst the faculties of the Soul primary in operation but rather some other latent faculty to remain when as David says all our thoughts perish which I shall have occasion to speak more of in my third general enquiry Whenever the Imagination moves at any time without some discernible concurrence of the Affections and Reason we are at that time little otherwise than in a sleep or dream and the impresses it leaves in us not much greater sometimes not so great Nay often
it than otherwise and are not to be trusted too far in that pretence And according as the Affections and Reason have gone along with the Imagination to make that impress so it is still more durable and less subject to be worn out He who has ever been terribly affrighted will scarce ever forget the object and circumstances of his fear neither shall we easily find out a man that ever forgot the hiding of his Treasure being a work that his affection led him to So that as the quick and lively inlet of the senses strengthens the Imagination so the strength of the Imagination is generally that which makes and fortifies a Memory And when it treasures up things springing from the proper strength of our own imagination or invention well ruminated by Reason and having the concurrence of well-governed affections it helps again to incite and strengthen them seeming to be a faculty as well active as passive and so is a more proper and fit Nursery for our own off-spring than a strangers For when it only or chiefly is a treasury by sense viz. reading or hearing let it be never so vast and spacious 't is not of so great use or profit it being hard to find a wise or good man so made from other mens documents though from the largeness or capaciousness of his memory he were able by once reading to repeat over the whole Works of the most voluminous Author And therefore as he that is affected with what he knows is ordinarily sure of a good Memory so that Memory is always best most useful and likely to hold which is the fruit of our own conception imagination and observation SECT VI. Of Reason REason is the Humane Touchstone of good and evil right and wrong truth and falshood c. the Superintendent Vicegerent under God Moderator or Monitor of all the other faculties of the Soul though not always of power yet at all times ready to curb the Imagination and Affections in all their extravagancies and reduce them under its dominion and government Right Reason that Divine gift and Humane enjoyment is a thing which does or may bear or produce many Leaves and some most excellent both Flowers and Fruit as Temperance Justice Prudence and the like and besides such its natural Fruits as I may call them I hope I may without offence think too it is on its proper Boughs and Branches only though it is impossible they should naturally spring from thence that saving Graces are ingrafted For he who has his Faith only placed in a light and airy speculation or imagination and not inclosed and held fast bound within the verge of his Reason or otherwise some way imbraced or allowed by his Reason will find it upon every occasion apt to fade of it self as well as to be loose and blown away with every wind of doctrine but this requires another place Here if we seriously behold it in our selves as natural men and view not what it is capable to imbrace and nourish but what by good husbandry 't is able to produce of it self we may and do find and now and then undoubtedly tast most excellent pleasant Fruits from it but then we must esteem them as gifts or else they quickly lose their savour Reason in us may be likned to some Plants of the Earth which in the shade grow rank enough and increase to a sufficient magnitude or dimension yet have no pleasant tast or relish nor ever bear good Fruit though large they may and therefore it is good to have it ever in the light of the Sun tending and looking that way and then never fear increase will hurt us SECT VII Of the Will THe Will I take to be An assent of the whole Soul to any present moving or ruling faculty thereof in intention or act and therefore can assign it no peculiar place of the Body more than other for its regal seat as we do the Heart for the affections and the Brain for all faculties of the intellect but that there is a concurrence of all parts of the Soul which indeed possesses the whole Body to this Fiat or at least the major or stronger part whereto the others though not silent give place I look on my own Will as I sometimes do on my self in general whilst I am at home within doors and look no further then do I take my self to be some petty Prince without controul but whensoever I look abroad into the World then do I find my self restrained as a common Subject to act no further than the Laws of my King permit cease that Law and my power ceases My Will may be free respecting my self but 't is sure dependent respecting God or else I must by exempting my Will think his power finite which God forbid Such a thing there may be in us from his Eternal wise disposition as is sufficient to render our actions good or evil and yet that sufficiency is involved in the whole Creation subject to Divine power What power we have let us endeavour to use well without questioning the extent or utmost bounds of our Commission 'T is said to be the perfection of Humane Nature to know good and to will it For the first we all agree that we are for the present imperfect in if we can do the other let us always do it and which is good let us ever pray His will be done without enquiring farther or beyond what is plainly revealed to us of his Will or of our own Will in us does seem much to exceed that of Brutes and to be of another extract than theirs as all other faculties of our Soul do for though I cannot behold them as meer Machines or Engines yet I cannot rationally perceive or conjecture that there is any Will in them other than such as receives an immediate impression from sense or that has its rise barely in and through sense such a Will as necessarily springs from or follows their thoughts not such an one as is able at any time to correct or put a stop to their thoughts neither do I believe there is so much as a Wish in them at any time that their thoughts were other than they are But such a kind of corrective Will most of us now and then perceive and find in our selves and yet we cannot but conclude that such as it is it wants a special Divine assistance to co-operate with it even to make it ours Howsoever when we find or perceive a desire or a will be it what it will in us that our thoughts were other than for the present they are it may assure us our Soul is not part of our Body or naturally extracted out of our Body for then it would not be prone and apt to resist and controul such thoughts as while they were travelled to please the Body SECT VIII Of Conscience COnscience is a Latine word from con scire to know together and I think the Greek word 〈◊〉 〈◊〉
〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 is to the same effect from 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 simul videre As if there were now and then some stop or consultation held amongst the faculties of the Soul This consultation demurr or dispute in the Soul is from the glowing of some spark of a primitive purity which though raked up and covered ever since our Fall with all manner of infirmities and blurs that our imagination is able to invent or bring in so as it gives not that clear light it should to lead us and conduct us aright yet it often produces a light to warn us or inform us when it is that we go right and when wrong and blessed be God 't is not quite extinguished in any man I have sometimes in my thoughts resembled the faculties in mans Soul to a Law or Judicature and Reason to the Chancellor which though not alike in all men but in some stronger and in some weaker and in some one man sometimes stronger sometimes weaker yet still remains of some Authority at some times to put some stop to those inferiour Courts of the Affections c. whereto the Will is as it were the Sheriff or Executioner And therefore I do take Conscience to be and cannot in short define it better than A reverberation of that light of Reason God has given us into the innermost recesses of the Soul whereby or from whence there becomes a perswasion for some demurr stay or hesitation for a while of the other faculties though they often forthwith again disobey and proceed And I cannot but think the Poet has well enough defined it and no ways worded it amiss in this verse Stat contra ratio secretam gannit in aurem as if Reason perswasively and convincingly did secretly whisper in its injunctions I know this our Chancellor here as I call him is subject to error and I doubt too generally in which case he is not able to determine either way very weak yet obedience and disobedience to his whispers are the two things wherewith we usually entertain our selves by way of reflexion and the one is pleasant and as the Wise man calls it a continual feast the other is bitter and a continual remorse For though the error of this Vicegerent of God do not at all alter the nature of good and evil but that they remain as they are in themselves and if we do evil from his error we are punishable yet that gives our offence no worse a title than erroneous and is properly the Understandings fault whereas the other is stigmatized presumptuous and is the Wills or the Affections indeed the whole Souls fault Now by the way if I have guessed or defined it aright that Conscience is a result from Reasons whispers or the inward reverberation of that best natural light we have to guide us why since we all daily offend and do wrong do some of our high-pretending Rationalists seldomest feel its strokes and why are the same most felt or most pretended unto by men of weak Intellects or Reason Why truly in one case I think man may become a deaf Adder charm the charmer never so wisely and on the other side I think that a weak Reason may be so dazled by the flame and zeal of the affections that it knows not how to discriminate between them and it self and that the flashing and light of the affections is often mistaken for the light of Reason or at least Reason seems to enjoyn and command as a Captive whenever the affections would have him or else they only colourably set him up as their Authority against a Foreign Authority For against Authority it is that Conscience is ever most pretended What is the meaning of the word Tender Conscience properly and strictly taken I do not well understand yet if there be such a thing I am not about to rake or harrass it in another man having enough to do to look after my own Weak indeed it may be Reason is very weak in the best of us and wants assistance but sure methinks men should not pretend tenderness in it too and such a tenderness as no man must come near it so much as to inform it or guide it but let it go which way the affections please I hope men only mean hereby tender affection or tender heart which I pray God grant to every one and that it never become hardned stubborn or obdurate in any man and then we shall not fear but Reason will suffer information without offence Well be we as tender as imaginable in all parts be Conscience a post-cordial or a post-wound as truly 't is the latter whenever we act against the tryed light of our Reason we shall do well to endeavour by all means to avoid this wound not only in humility exercising this our best faculty but hearkning to others reasons and praying God to assist us For there is no man but may live to see the error of his own present Judgment which if it err for want of diligence and care or receiving information may that way prove a wound in the end too However let us all be assured pretence of Conscience will never want its darts in the latter end There is no man knows his own heart 't is deceitful above all things much less can any of us look so far into other mens Souls as to see whether the light within them a thing much talked of now-a-days be the light of their Reason or the flashing of their Affections and therefore we ought to be as tender in censuring any man as he would be to be censured I beseech God to enlighten me in all my ways from the first Reason and beg of others not to be too tender in trying themselves search narrowly whence that light they have proceeds remembring that speech of our Saviour by way of question If the light that is in thee be darkness which I much doubt it is if it spring from the affections barely how great is that darkness SECT IX Of the faculties of the Soul working upon each other HAving slightly run over the several apparent and most discernible faculties of the Soul distinct and apart I will endeavour to behold them working together fighting and combating raising or inflaming helping or assisting drawing or inticing quelling or allaying ruling or governing one another in some plain and familiar instance which may be this A man who has lived until his Reason has been able to inform him he lives and shew him some ground how and whence he lives for that it is not from himself that he lives A man I say endowed once with this faculty visible which never much appears till some perfect stature of Body and having all other faculties of his Soul quick and ready to work but by reason of the Souls conjunction with a Body necessitated and constrained to work by and through the Organs of that Body through them I say by one means or other the
course They are these passions which metamorphose a man into a furious Beast 'T is they which are able to destroy that best faculty or light of the Soul Reason and therefore Solomon's maxim is to be observed above any Custodi cor But Reason was never yet found of ability to destroy or wholly mortifie any one passion It may somewhat from Divine assistance regulate or calm lead or direct but if it should wholly destroy the affections as some have pretended to do by it it would prove in the condition of a Prince without Subjects that is indeed no Prince or Governour at all but we find the Subjects able sometimes for want of his vigilancy to destroy their Sovereign and set up a strange confused Anarchy amongst themselves Whatever faculty of the Soul we may give precedency to we sometimes too sensibly find the strength and power of our passions For besides that they are able to destroy one another and that love or hatred can drive away fear and fear is able sometimes to suppress love or hatred so as it seems more difficult to determine which of the passions are strongest then it would be of those things Darius his Guard disputed about while he was asleep They are all strong and either of them is of power enough oft-times to make us destroy our selves or at least neglect our selves and work more hurt to our Bodies than any other faculties of the Soul whatsoever Reason never destroyed any man the imagination might help to do it but never did it of it self but sorrow has done it if we believe the wise Son of Syrach And this common experience will tell every man who lives and is not yet destroyed that the slightest of the passions is able to keep us waking by its proper strength when the imagination were it not for some affection would let us sleep By the strength of that only I mean the imagination we seldom so much as awake from our sleep unless by some terrible presentment it do irritate the affections and then they are the cause and not the imagination and if we do awake thereupon Reason forthwith shews us the folly of our imagination and our affections become quiet But when they have their rise from sense more peculiarly than from the imagination then is the combate dubious they then go on in their rebellion and there is no mastery to be obtained over them by power but by fraud as it were The Will they outlaw which was ordained the subject of Reason and that necessarily carries with it the Organs of the Body as its ministers The aim of the Will may be good in general but that is not of power to distinguish between reality and apparency of good neither good the end nor virtues the way to that end have any corporal shape and therefore cannot be shewed as so to the senses whereby the affections might be reclaimed and made to fix upon any real good Besides Sense is only judge of present things Reason of future as well as present the imagination is somewhat capable of both And therefore if ever the affections become fixed on a real good 't is not that they are mastered but that next and immediately under God's special Grace often leading and directing them they are deceived into good hoodwink'd a little from sense and caught as it were by a wile or stratagem The imagination is slily drawn away from taking part with them and somewhat of real good is first from Reason as it were darted into the imagination and by the imagination conveyed unto them Affections being native visibly working in us as soon as we are born without controul for a long while unless ab extra as we say and no Reason to govern till they have encamped and fortified themselves the wise man might well say He that ruleth them is better than he that ruleth a City The City where they inhabit is a deceitful place many Caves and Vaults in it for them to lurk in we find it but too true when we enter into it and search it and think we have wholly won it We may well wish that Ieremy were a false Prophet and somewhat deceived himself in telling us it is deceitful above all things and therefore we have a hard task to make those Citizens there good Subjects and fit for another City whose maker and builder is God If ever they prove so they must be dealt withall like as with men wedded to their affections as we term them proverbially and as they are usually dealt withall that is allured and led not thrust and driven they are too stubborn to move that way SECT V. That some Affection is the substantial part of the Soul I Have thought and do think and believe which is somewhat more then a thought it is a thought with the concurrence approbation and allowance of ones Reason that the Soul of man is immortal and that the very Essence or substantial part of an Humane Soul disrobed of a Body or subsisting of it self is some restless working however at some times invisible affection and that if those more noble faculties of our Soul next and immediately under that bright heavenly Star are the Pilots to conduct us unto rest some affection as it seems to me is the chief Passenger in this frail and weak Vessel of the flesh St. Paul in that admirable Encomium of his of Charity tells us that it abides when many other gifts fail And if we shall know as we are known as he tells us in another place there will be then little use of the Invention Memory Reason or the like which are but the Handmaids to knowledge Neither can I rationally imagine after return of the Soul to its place of rest or for default thereof in its banishment to everlasting wandring any use of other faculties than the affections unless towards the exalting or heightning them in their several degrees whether love and joy on the one side or sorrow fear c. on the other The Soul of man being an emanation from that Divine love must necessarily partake of it love and not able at present by any natural light it has to reach unto it self its proper object lays hold on any thing rather than seem to vanish or be extinct and withall that it happens to have such several inclinations in man while it is here is surely by reason of some false imaginary light or the want of a true one and that we want both power and skill in the setting or tuning some strings of the affections as I may call them And 't is want of a clear inspect into our nature and frame that we become as David speaks a stubborn generation a generation that set not their hearts aright and whose Spirit cleaveth not stedfastly to God And I do further believe that all the faculties strength and power of the Soul which we have are given us towards the performance of that
pardon and receive again into favour And 't is our only rational way in the like case to acknowledge our errors and get our affections somewhat hot and then melting in us that any dross contracted in our Souls any cankering rust cleaving to them may drop off that they may be somewhat bright and shine again The Heathens who had no other light but this to lead them had their purgations of which Socrates I think was the beginner which though after a vain manner may seem no ways to hurt them And certainly this manner of purgation that is melting into sorrow may do us good and prevent many sharp pains the Soul might otherwise feel even here in the Body I am not about to enquire and determine whether after thus doing we shall be at rest here or how far more or less from hence the Soul may become obnoxious to afflictions or crosses but certainly in all reason she will bear them better when she has done all she can towards a return and can find in her self no ground to think but that her boils proceed rather from some outward than any inward cause and that her disease is rather Epidemical than singular Having our Souls somewhat restored and cleansed somewhat at ease and calm we may I trust without offence and without rejection of more Sovereign Antidotes make use of our Reason towards the preventing of a Tempest in her for the future by finding out and judging if we can first the most probable and chief cause of her billows and why she is often thus tossed and almost shipwrack'd in the World and next espy out some ways or means for the future prevention of these storms But first by the way let us acknowledge that Reason in man such as it is and whereby we exceed all other visible creatures as it is the special gift of God and the thing we have least cause to term our own or too much think of the nativeness or inherency of it in us so it wants a more than ordinary daily support and supply for 't is that faculty or ability in the Soul which I have said man is most subject wholly to lose and be deprived and bereft of and without beholding through it that light which gave it being we may as I may say run mad with our Reason And such Rationalists there are in the World for why some men who have had a greater outward visibility and appearance of Reason than others have yet acted in the conclusion as if they had less if this presumption in them be not the cause or that they looked on their strength of Reason too much as an Habit and too little as a Grace I can find none If the Donor of the Talent be but owned it may surely as well be Traded with as laid up in a Napkin and not unlikely even from it may be found out too some other inherent gift in the Soul which if rightly disposed and ordered I will not say disposed or ordered by Reason may somewhat abate all excrescencies in the Soul and become the chief and only Foundation-stone for any Spiritual building spoken of before even that Tower of defence Faith Reason I say may point at or find out the proper corner-stone for building though she cannot move it of her self or erect any thing on it SECT II. Of Love SUrely he who created us neither gave us Invention to find out nor Reason to judge in vain I must acknowledge I am not able so much as to think a good thought nor well able to judge when my thoughts are as they should or might or ought to be yet that roving faculty of mine call it men what they best like labouring to introduce into my Soul divers and sundry causes of the disquietness tumults and disorders happening in her as well as others my weak Reason after rejection of some has seemed to rest satisfied and pitch'd upon this as the chief if not the only proper cause thereof That that essential part of the Soul Love from whence at some times we feel greatest delight suffers often too narrow an inclosure is pent up and imprisoned by some means or other and has neither that free scope and range or full and clear prospect abroad into the World which Reason is able to allow it and afford it whereby it loses that common acceptable title of Charity in a word Love is not rational but sensual Love may seem with the allowance of our Reason I think to be placed in every of our Souls like the Sun in the Firmament which though it may have peculiar Flowers that require more than its ordinary influence at least its visible rays and we are allowed some such things as we may more particularly call here Flowers of our Sun yet its circuit should be to the ends of the Earth and nothing hid from the heat thereof And then whatever becomes of those Flowers though they are cropt dead or withered it finds innumerable objects to exercise its rays upon and still shines bright and pleasant but if it become once eclipsed by the interposition of any peculiar objects there happens such an Aegyptian darkness in the Soul as most properly may be said to be felt Whenever we look into the Soul and find such a thing as Love there Reason though it be not able to quicken nor blow it up to any bright extensive flame for that is ever from Divine influence yet can demonstrate to us to what end and purpose that spark of Love is inherent in us that is to love the Author of our Being Now as we cannot see God but by his works so neither can we be properly said to love him but through his works Amongst which as there is nothing more deserves our love than such as bear his Image in common with our selves so there is no more certain way to judge of the sincerity of our love to him than by our love to them Thus the Apostle If we love one another God dwelleth in us and again He that loveth not his Brother whom he hath seen how can he love God whom he hath not seen This is so much the dictate of Reason that I should have thus thought upon consideration had I never seen Scripture and it is to a certain Law antecedent to all that is written that the Scripture it self doth refer it Thus the Apostle speaks I write no new Commandment unto you but an old Commandment which ye had from the beginning and calls it the message from the beginning of the breach of which he gives an instance in Cain's unnatural murder of his Brother before there was any written Law so that the Apostle might in this sense say As touching brotherly love ye need not that I write unto you for ye your selves are taught of God by the light of Nature and the Law written in the heart to love one another Now if the obligation to this Charity ariseth
and condemn all men who receive it not as 't were from us and from our hands Indeed he who feels any blessed effect of his own Faith will not only wish all men believed as he did but endeavour without breach or rent of Charity they should But surely methinks he should not with ease or without feeling some smart undergo a rupture in his own Charity for the transplanting the same Faith into others since he will certainly find neither himself nor any man barely was the planter of it in himself nor think there should be any diminution of the one for the propagating as we call it of the other in other men Without some rent of this thing called Charity I doubt whether there can be an approbation of or assent to Cleonard's proposition to the Princes of Christendom that is without other just cause an endeavour to shew the Turk our Faith with Temporal Armour over it if we were able so to do and put part of his Nation to the Sword to draw or hale the remnant of them to the Faith and to heal some Souls through the wounds of others Bodies They are men as well as we of the same mould and their Souls of the same extraction and we might consider first how we could approve of the like conviction amongst our selves The Sword doubtless has often made a way for Faith and I believe it to be or happens sometimes through God's Eternal wise decree but I do much question the truth of those mens Faith who are upon such a reason at any time the immediate visible instruments of this preparative When a man shall once own the New Testament as the Word of Truth and stand convinced that all the Precepts laid down therein are righteous and grounded on Moral equity if he make his recourse to the New for his belief only and to the Old only for some of his actions I would ask a Stranger in that case whether he thinks that man's Reason or his Affections bear the greatest sway or be most predominant in his Soul It may seem strange how some men can step from Mount Gerizim to Mount Ebal as it were at will and pleasure settle a Tower of peace or defence for themselves on the one and raise a Tower of offence against others on the other let the one be the seat for their Reason and the other for their Affections and place Faith as they call it the attendant on both and that Reason all this while should not espy that the Affections lead it thither There is one esteemed a great planter or reformer of our Faith in these parts who to maintain the lawfulness of Malediction in some case I am sure against Christ's precept and his example who prayed for his persecutors and against St. Stephen's too who did the like would make a distinction between a persecution of man though for the Gospel and a persecution of the Gospel If it be against the persecutors of the Gospel according to his definition he then calls it Faiths malediction or cursing which says he rather than God's Word should be suppressed or Heresie maintained wisheth that all creatures went to rack If this be the work or effect of some mens Faith I hope I may say without offence I pray God deliver me from such a Faith Surely it may be questioned how and in what manner the Gospel of it self may suffer persecution and no less whether the believers therein would suffer so much from their common Enemies or one another were it not for their too positive condemnation sometimes of all who do not believe just as they do or profess themselves to do Theano a Heathen Nun had in my opinion more Divine thoughts in her than some of our late Reformers and 't was a better and far more charitable saying of hers when by publick Decree she was commanded amongst others to ban and curse Alcibiades for prophaning their reputed Holy mysteries That her profession was to pray and to bless not to curse I am so far from adhering to any party more than other and so far prone to blame all parties in this case that I am not like to receive the favour or good opinion of any But whatsoever I receive from man I trust and believe I shall never incur God's displeasure for declaring my sence of things only according to the best light of Reason he has endowed me with Some such thing I do believe there is on Earth as St. Augustine has intitled his Book A City of God that is a peculiar select number of people who so pass their lives here as that they shall be Eternally happy hereafter But for several men to frame and imagine such a peculiar City in any Nation or corner of the World different in some fashion form or mode from all others and then think that to be the Model or Platform upon which future happiness must necessarily be built or depend seems very strange to me and may do so perhaps to some others I cannot think those Citizens whoever they are require such a different habit or dress from all others but rather all of them generally use one special attire or ornament for the Soul whereof somewhat is to be found in all Nations and places and which men free of that City may be best known and distinguished by And that is that becoming ornament St. Paul seems to mention upon another account Good works that ornament which naturally arises from a meek and quiet Spirit which St. Peter seems to intimate the hidden man of the heart not outwardly worn in pomp but that whosoever privately wears or carries about him will not too narrowly dissect rend and tear much less suddenly condemn the Spirit of another man True Charity saith the Apostle beareth all things believeth all things hopeth all things endureth all things and if we put on that which is the bond of perfectness it will reconcile us to all mankind and be as useful to others as it is ornamental to us It will be like the Dove in the Ark as swift of wing and as fit to be sent abroad upon any employment as the Raven or Vulture and with that will bring a branch of Olive solid contentment and satisfaction to our selves we shall then have all the old leaven purged out and become a new lump and shall render unto God by such a restauration of his Image that which is Gods SECT III. How Love may be regent I May seem before to have undertaken a rational discourse of the Soul and to shew by what steps and degrees even that way it may be fitted to resist assaults from without and therefore in reason it may be expected that I should set down some rule some probable demonstrable way or means how this thing I call Charity which is ever the main principle of Action may be set up regent in the Soul which I have said and do think there is some
them at least question a Deity and divine retribution from the like passion they say others believe one viz. Fear And if they are sensible of something invisible to be feared under some notion of justice and like Metrodorus I think the name is in Cicero fear what they deny there needs no conviction of opinion but rather extortion of confession which is the peculiar work of a Deity by distress affliction or the like If I could once prevail with any man to ransack as I may say his own Soul seriously to consider and observe the strange motions tendencies operations and sudden alterations therein I should have greater hopes of some clear manifestation to that man of an eternal wise working spirit in and through the same than from any outward prospect and beholding its work under what notion soever Atoms c. in and through the whole Universe beside Certainly God would shew himself to any one who did but seriously and humbly behold view and consider himself which we can never shew a man by any outward demonstration That sight must arise from within How some endowed with so great perfection of Intellect beyond the ordinary sort of men and able to discern a vast disproportion or difference of spirit and yet none of body between themselves and others should not fall into some admiration at some time or other with a kind of thankfulness to somewhat or other is to be wondered at Every mans Soul is not only an image of God but looked into of its self is the clearest glass to represent the most perfect shadow that can be of that Original There is some spark of fire in man beyond the reach or finger of chance which if he might be prevailed with to uncover and view himself would afford some light which all the raking or blowing from another cannot do God himself can and will shew himself so far as he sees good and none else can shew him to that person who will not vouchsafe humbly to look into himself If there be any such thing as a beast in the likeness of a man and one should fight with it I may ask St. Pauls question What advantageth it I begg your pardon and others c. for such an expression besides the meaning of the Text I am not prone to impose such a title or attribute upon the meanest human creature but surely if we once come to that pass as to reject an infinite wise just eternal Being a Reward and punishment hereafter and disclaim our own immortality our prerogative above beasts is very small and I am sure we may not improperly take up the subsequent words Let us eat and drink for to morrow we dye for which ends and purposes t is to be feared some men have owned though they have not been fully convinced of that opinion The world did and do's and will abound with Atheists that is persons living as without a God in the world or duly weighing divine retribution But whether those on whom we most commonly fix and impose that title best merit the same is some question There is no great distinction to be made between men denying God in constant daily works yet owning him in words and denying him in words yet owning him in some measure by works unless we should term the first sort real Atheists and the other professed ones only and conclude the latter are of more evil consequence because the first sort or kind require the intellect to discern or espy them and the latter only sense forasmuch as the tongue which is such an unruly member infects even through sense but actions do it not so readily but require the intellect to judge and discern whether the party be an Atheist or no. Had I not in beholding the Soul in an human body happened to consider that admirable power it has to frame an articulate noise given chiefly to magnify its Maker and withal how it is otherwise imployed I had not first so much as mentioned such a thing or called one Atheist and Davids dixit insipiens in corde I cannot intend much further For however it be spoken from the heart that is voluntarily and with some kind of affection going along with it yet I do verily think there never was man so confident or that ever so assuredly believed there was no God as I and thousands others do that there is one and that seeming negative opinion were at an end if every man would permit his tongue to declare his belief or at least his doubt and not use it to obey some appetite of being singular and thwart the general received opinion of the world from some desire to be esteemed wise or learned Methinks this question were enough to convince any man that he is not an Atheist in belief Why is he or how comes he to be at any time just and faithful Why a lover of truth Why do's he regard his promise and sometimes perform it to his disadvantage If he will not own this belief of a God by word others may espy it in him for I dare say never any man was yet able so to obliterate the image of God in himself but some mark or impress thereof might at some time be observed by another and therefore let us condemn nothing in man but that unruly member set on fire of Hell over which too there is now and then a kind of fatal necessity of contradicting it self in these reputed Atheists none sooner or more readily unworthily invocating that name they deny than they I have yet that good opinion of many professing or rather saying there is no God That they are actually in some measure just merciful liberal and charitable which is some owning him in their work however it happens they deny him with their lips and they must necessarily secretly own and confess the belief of a Deity from themselves and some of their own actions unless they are able to demonstrate to me or others how these excellent extracorporeal qualities as I may term them as justice mercy c. or a goodness of mind universally inclined or inclinable to all beyond and quite out of its individual self or progeny can possibly arise from a bare concretion of Atoms We have lived in I hope passed an age when generally the tongues of men owned a God publickly enough and might seem to have been a little too familiar with him given him high and excellent Attributes enough called on his divine providence and summoned it down for the justification of every wicked action When Reason God's vicegerent in the Soul seemed quite abandoned and Conscience was defined a new light from above to gratify the affections of some and the fancies of others And t is no great wonder if upon a sudden change and alteration some men run into the contrary extream That when reason begins to take place again there start up a philosophical generation of men upon the stage some say the world
those whom we shall scarce meet with in company but we shall receive a challenge from As to the first I have said somewhat but properly to hold a dispute against him we cannot either we must deny his premisses which we are unwilling wholly to do or else we must necessarily grant him his conclusion For the other so much a Sadducee as not to believe Angel or Spirit other than his own if that and resolving to believe nothing without a plain demonstration We must not provoking that spirit of his of which he thinks himself the only master and we think he is therein deceived answer him at his own weapon reason and indeed we have none other as of our selves and argue with him in calm manner if at all not philosophically not Aristotelically but as rationally and as plainly and as perswasively as we can or are able leaving the success to the guidance of that good spirit in which we our selves already believe 'T is a strange thing a man should admit of any ordinary inference or any indifferent argument à probabili as we say to satisfy his reason and raise a belief in any case but that which is of greatest concern to him the belief whereof would only do him good and which could not if upon a false ground possibly prejudice him or do him hurt If I should begin to talk of the nature of the elements how each several one as we divide them hath in it some latent quality or virtue of the other And that some particular species of one participates so much with or is of such cognation as we may say with the other that from some little reflexion or light from that other it shall in a manner change its quality and seem to be quite another thing than what it was And then tell one of these kind of men some such strange story of Naptha as Plutarch do's A kind of a sulphureous fattish soil to be found which taken out of the body of the earth and brought to light shall forthwith at a great distance from any fire take flame from thence and become of the nature of fire it self consuming every thing about it there is little doubt but I might without demonstration to sense obtain credit therein Now since we cannot make out that our soul conscious of its being and capable to enquire after the nature or original of its own and other beings is the bare product of flesh and blood or that it can be actuated from thence towards these kind of enquiries Why should not these men as readily believe that there is some spirit or intellectual mind far above our own from whence our own receives some influence or agitation and by which it is disposed ordered or governed I dare appeal to the secrets of any one of these mens hearts their conscience if they please to allow of that term Whether or no if I should have done him some great or grievous injury such as after all ineffectual indeavour of revenge should lye heavy upon his spirit or leave a sting there he should not by a kind of secret wish seem to invocate for we will not imagine he has so much of the Christian Tenet in him yet as wholly to forgive all offences and return good for evil some Nemesis or resort to some secret revenger of evil to punish my injustice towards him On the other side should I bestow so many gifts heap so much kindness and do so many good turns to that man as after all indeavours of requital in point of gratitude he should find he were in no wise able to make me sufficient recompence or amends he should not by a like secret wish invocate some good power above his own for a reward upon me If in either of these cases he thinks he should so do or upon examination of himself finds he has at any time so done in like cases then surely he naturally as I may say believes that which in word he denies viz. That there is some spirit above our own for if he verily believed from his heart there were no such thing as some all-knowing all-powerful and all-sufficient spirit a just rewarder of good and evil superintendent over us it were the most ridiculous thing imaginable for him barely to wish nay he could not wish me good or evil But if he has unawares by his own spirit recourse to some invisible power why should he not confess which he often swears by unawares too that there is a God Now though it may seem here from the present purpose give me leave to say in this place that it is some confirmation of my opinion in relation to the soul of brutes proceeding barely from their blood and vanishing therewith which thing I mean to insist upon more at large in some other discourse that it makes no foreign appeal in any case nor uses any weapon but bodily I do here think that God may punish us for the abuse of brute creatures and that their blood may seem to cry for vengeance but it cries only silently not intentionally from them For although we do really perceive a kind of gratitude as well as revenge in many creatures besides man yet we cannot observe no nor suspect upon just ground any recourse they have in prosecution of their love or anger to any superior power above themselves I do not think my Spaniel ever wished me good or evil if I could conjecture there were imprecatory thoughts in any creature save man and the weakest of men has them I should forthwith renounce and recant my present opinion of the annihilation of their spirit after death For if that spirit of theirs can wander out of the body any other ways than directly by sense it certainly neither vanishes with the body nor can be said to be mortal There are many such like cases as aforementioned of some strange foreign work in the soul of man which have occurred to my mind sufficient as I thought to convince any Atheist of the falsity of his assertions in point of the original of all things and the government or guidance of all visible creatures more especially our selves But lest I seem guilty of what I condemned in my former Epistle I shall forbear to insist thereupon and leave all to that attribute that superabundant stream flowing from the Deity and which is over all its works its mercy and loving kindness towards man And however any of us think or believe either of our selves or ought else in relation to our selves for the present it can be no uncharitable wish or desire no nor foolish one I hope that before we cease to be as we are that is have finished the race of all flesh we may so think and act as that at the end of that race we miss not of eternal rest body and spirit But if these two kinds of men amongst us I have often thought could be brought to some moderation shall I say to a
Why give me leave to tell him Knowledge Wisdom Power Truth Mercy Justice Love Goodness and the like for I hope we may safely affirm as well as some Philosophers that there is morality in the nature of God and that his happiness consists as well in goodness as in power and knowledge united in one eternal mind is that God which we adore not through amazement and out of a confounded astonishment bestowing these attributes on him but rationally believing they are essentially compleat and perfect in such mind of which ours is some image or shadow but now dark and imperfect Moses brings in God himself speaking after this strange manner My spirit shall not always strive with man and this came to pass at such time as men began to multiply on the face of the earth and this happy solitude God and a mans self seemed to be rejected for visible company The citing any books of Moses to an Atheist will 't is likely prove to little purpose perhaps he may say Moses was an Impostor if not worse and to talk of God's spirit under any notion whether grace of illumination or sanctification c. will be to as little purpose until a man has some knowledge of his own spirit I will only say this more That if any man please to follow my advice and withdraw himself a little from the world and all company in an humble manner in relation to enquiry on that subject Himself How himself so intellectual from whence and whom himself or the like he may perchance find a striving or strugling within himself in relation to that other subject matter God Whether it be his own spirit or somewhat else that so strives or struggles in him I will leave to his own determination This I am sure of that upon such withdrawing and search he will be afraid there is some such thing as a God and I believe for that present instant would venture a considerable summ for the return of an infallible assurance there were no such thing and he is a most insensible man that would venture a farthing to be secured from that which his reason plainly tells him is impossible says that most excellent Author whom I had rather cite than seem to rob though such notion came into my head as of it self before reading him and why then should he not confess his fears and jealousies Those fears and jealousies are an heavy nauseous burthen to the soul retained and kept in but cast up and discharged in that manner will cause very much present ease and may fit and prepare the soul to let into it a more pleasing and cordial belief in relation to a Deity than such an one as that of Felix which only makes it tremble I doubt not but you have sometimes as well as I thought on the madness of the people and more especially these two seeming kind of opposite mad-men I have mentioned both equally bold with God the one avouching him as the sole and immediate spring of all his good and such he is ready to term any or most of his own whatever they seem to others thoughts and motions and that in an high and admirable sense and notion not in his providence but by his very spirit The other denying that he is at all or that there is any such thing as either What either of these believe I know not or whether any of them really and cordially believes what he says I know not But whatsoever either of them believes 't were to be wished for peace sake amongst us they sometimes would be more sparing of their speech especially the latter And I think he might in prudence soonest be silent because I cannot judge of any great design he should have to gain proselytes whatever the other may But the best way to quiet them both is I have thought and do think not to provoke them over much but leave them a little to themselves that so by degrees they may through Gods providence over us seem to be at quiet of themselves And I beseech almighty God that none of us ever provoke other in the way of dispute out of some secret lurking passion the love of somewhat else rather than the love of truth the sight whereof if we are once so happy as to behold and can but retain any glimmering light thereof the same will reduce us to unity of mind and not set us at discord and variance Shall I in the conclusion of this Epistle plainly tell you the result of some of my solitary thoughts in relation to the fluttering motion of our spirit here That though it be governed and enlightned in some case by that good spirit of God the very eternal spirit of truth yet it is unsafe and dangerous for us to conclude when and how far we are thereby actuated further than the bare embracing that eternal word by faith as the alone Saviour of the world That the providence of God may be safely averred and affirmed in all things and that it is or may be visible to all men and he who beholds it not in some degree is not rational That were there not some foreign or operative power ruleing in and over our spirit besides what is natural or what we call nature that is any absolute power it has of it self it could not notwithstanding any present lust of the flesh or eyes be drawn any wise to promote any act the inevitable consequents whereof viz the disquiet of it self and disease of the body it naturally loaths and abhors upon consideration And that consequent certainly every soul more or less foresees in all intestine division and civil War That he who considers our late past troubles and the madness of the people then may safely conclude our punishment therein was from God's just vengeance for our sins in his providence And that if he thinks there was any thing of his spirit therein as was then much pretended or contributing or assisting thereto he is besides himself That if the like madness now beginning to possess us again perhaps through the general neglect of our ordinary duty to God or the like break not out into open rage and hostility I will without hesitation affirm 't is the merciful providence of God alone and what we can scarce rationally expect beholding our selves to sin so much against the light of reason And thus much may any man see That the soul of the wisest man at best receives but a dim and short sight of the truth of things and causes that if such sight at any time happen through the goodness and bounty of the Deity it is apt to vanish again on the suddain by reason of the interposition of some clouds arrising from the flesh so as the soul cannot long behold it nor know where to fix but in faith of some future clearer vision That Man cannot find out the work that is done under the Sun because though a man labour to seek it
out yea further though a wise man think to know it yet shall he not be able to find it But to believe there is wisdom and truth and justice and mercy in some one eternal mind and that the judge of all the earth must needs do right is almost a necessary consequence raised in the soul of man upon any humble search into himself and that the whole duty of man is no difficult thing to know That even Solomon whom we agree to be endowed with the spirit of truth as well as naturally wise appears to me in that excellent book intituled the Preacher to have had his soul at a stand and in a maze not knowing where to fix in the demonstration of any certain wordly course that ours might follow But that he seems to allow its guidance by the providence of God rather than his spirit For if it were guided by the latter it could not so often err neither then would he call all its works vanity That the spirits of men are then most keen and most sharp set towards the world and most likely to resemble the hawk or the birds of prey when there is most talk of the dove and that we are willing to hide our selves under that shadow though we have little of the light of truth That some mens outward profaneness and publick contempt of God seems ground sufficient in justice for our punishment by the hands of those who driving at wordly designs only pretend to honour him And that if those in authority took vigilant care to see the very form of godliness better observed those pretenders to it in humane probability could not have obtained those advantages of alluring and drawing the vulgar to their side as now they have That in the misery of civil dissension we shall be all more or less involved the Atheist the spiritualist c. and every of us more or less shall feel the smart of it in the end whatever any of us aim at present that though there seem a necessity of offences yet there is a consequent woe particularly attending every offender and therefore we should all indeavour to be void of offences towards God and towards man and prevent if we can that storm which seems to hang over us But if it be otherwise decreed then we who seem spectators only but spectators only we are not since we are sinners and neither deny God in word to provoke him to shew himself in our punishment nor boldly vouch him in his spirit to cover the lust of our flesh have this ready and open passage to fly unto God until our calamities are over-past His just and wise and merciful providence And this certainly must necessarily be the door or gate of the Lord as is expressed for every man if ever he enters to enter in and truly behold that stone which the builders of this world refuse For in the instant of personal affliction chastisement or correction I dare confidently aver the Atheist will neither boldly deny God nor the spiritualist boldly ingross him but both own him as he is just and wise and wonderful in all his doings and to be feared To whom be Glory c. EPIST. III. Wherein the Author sets down some further grounds and reasons of his opinion of the mortality or utter annihilation of the Souls of brutes upon their death And therein indeavours to clear himself of all seeds and principles of Atheism wherewith that opinion seems taxed in a certain Book presented him by the said Dean THat Soul which pries into things even below and inferior to its self do they seem at first never so ordinary mean and obvious and be it clear-sighted as may be and perhaps from the clearest sight the soonest will at length if it dwell long on any subject begin to stagger and suspect it self of dimness and weakness and that there is something more in every Creature than it is able to discern or comprehend and if it resolve not into a blind kind of chance or fall asleep in occult qualities it will own one Almighty wise and only all-knowing Being or existence and therein resting it self will dare to assume no knowledge but conjectural and seeming probable that is no more than belief This is my present thought and confession But because in my Treatise De Anima I might seem to you a little too positively to assert the soul of Beast to be no other than part of a body rarified to a proportion and with the body perishing and upon the dissolution thereof becoming annihilate and totally extinct I am now desirous to declare unto you a little more fully the grounds of my opinion thereabout And the rather because in that little discourse we had together I received this only Querie from you How an intellectual spirit could naturally arise out of a material or bodily substance And if the same were an infused spirit and not part of the body how the same with the body should cease to be or move A Querie perhaps only made to hear what answer a plain rational man without learning would make to it and though a curious one and such as I acknowledg my self altogether unfit to resolve or so much as to handle yet I have made this further adventure in reference thereto Truly Sir I am not or ever was so positive in any assertion of my own or so enamour'd therewith as not to suspect my self of fallibility and whenever I consider the soul of beast with those excellent faculties it is endowed I cannot but wonder at and admire and extol the God of Nature who was pleased to ordain That from such individual corporate substances there should spring so much of intellect especially to be seen in many of them as might seem to be rather a special gift and emanation from that Spirit alwayes and every where moving and which was once said more locally to move upon the face of the waters than any peculiar essence of so rare framed bodies But yet I am not satisfied nor methinks could easily be convinced in reason That therefore there is any duration of such Spirit after the body is again converted to earth That Spiritus Mundi if I may so term our God and Creator blessed for ever is every where and moves every where by his Original fiat His works are manifold in wisdom hath he made them all But yet without offence I hope or any breach in that reason he hath given us above other creatures we may conjecture his emanations are not all alike If in relation to brutes for of such David there speaks When he letteth his breath go forth they are created and so the face of the earth is renewed Yet there may be a reassumption and taking away again of that breath and then things die and are turned again to their dust and no local continuance of that breath remaining so as to be a spirit circumscribed There is no manifestation
seats and cells fit for its proper work and operation towards the conservation of that body whereof it is a more refined part as necessary and requisite thereto and without which we cannot so much as imagine it were capable to have duration and continuance in that form it is But yet withal no ways comprehending or desiring any matter or thing further than in relation to the sustentation or preservation of the same body And therefore for such a Soul or Spirit to perish with the body and to resolve again into its first elements is not altogether incongruous to our reason And we may I think further conjecture in reason that though for his pleasure all things are and were created Yet he being worthy to receive glory and honour voluntary from some terrestrial creature For whose sake next and immediately after his own Glory and Honour it may seem to us all others were made He might endow the most excellent of his terrestrial creatures us men with such a spirit as might not only have some glimmering light of him here but might have continuance to magnify him for ever when the Earth and Heavens should be no more Yet herein again I must acknowledge that the thoughts of the immortality of our soul are more apt and ready to encounter and stagger our reason than the mortality or vanishing of that of Brutes Since we are not able with reason to imagine but that as I have already said in my Treatise de Anima whatsoever thing had a beginning may or will have an end and that there is nothing Eternal but God alone the Maker and Creator of all things out of nothing And therefore there is no perfect Medicine to cure those reeling cogitations of ours about our immortality but Gods promise in his Holy Word with his special grace to believe it to be his Word Nor any thing else to strengthen us therein more than some specifick and not barely gradual difference to be found out and espied between our Spirit and that of Beasts That is some acts or thoughts of man even extra-corporeal or peculiar to a soul or Spirit wholly separate and disjoined from a body and which indeed are no ways discernable in the wisest Animal whereof I have made some mention in my Treatise de Anima and which seriously and duely weighed and considered I leave to the World to judge of and shall repeat nothing of it here in relation to our present subject only or chiefly now inquiring about their Mortality or Immortality without questioning our own There are indeed many and various different kinds of operation between the soul of Beast and that of us in many things as not only sufficiently distinguish us without appropriating to our selves and wholly ingrossing the word rational but seem plainly to demonstrate their Soul rather essential with the Body and a peculiar substance of the body than ours and therefore more probably terminating in and with the body some whereof having now and then occurred to my thoughts and drawn my reason to accept and allow thereof I here present you and submit the weight and consequent thereof to your more serious or solid judgement though they have already somewhat prevailed over mine to conclude the Spirit of Beast though an admirable work in nature to be a thing only temporary and fading or mortal There is in all living Creatures whatever not humane either immediately upon their first being and motion or so soon as there is any vigorous bodily strength for motion a perfect clear and evident apparency of that intellect they at any time have or enjoy as a special present attendant of their being and subsistence And whatever Adages we have of a cunning old Fox or proverbial interdiction of catching old Birds with chaff I could never yet discern but that the young Fox or the young Hawk had the same compleat stratagems to preserve themselves as the old and that if they sooner fall as a prey to the Dog 't is want of strength rather then subtilty The Kitling sure needs no instruction to catch a Mouse with a kind of cunning watchfulness as soon as it hath strength and the young Bird makes her nest with as much curious art as the old one And what is somewhat wonderful most creatures at their first production into the world are able to distinguish sounds and capable to understand the very language of their kind I have observed a very young Lamb to distinguish the bleating of its Dam from twenty other doing the like almost at the same instant and to move at her bleat only and not otherwise 'T is observable in Fowls and I have taken more special notice of it in the Turky that whereas they use three or four several notes or tones to their young ones one of allurement for food another of attraction for covering with their wings a third for progression or motion along with them when they move a fourth of admiration and wonder or warning to preserve themselves upon apprehension of danger and approach of Birds of prey they have within an hour or two after they have been brought forth apprehended the differences of these several tones and readily observed the old one's dictates Especially it would almost amaze one to behold these little things of an hour or two old upon that alarm of danger how instantly they will couch down and approach the next covert to hide themselves Nay many of these Creatures need little of document from their Parents or Dams or yet our Mistress experience there being in them a Native intellectual perception as I may say of every special and more peculiar destructive nature or quality towards them in as much as we may observe Birds taken out of the Nest never so young and bred up in a Cage shall upon the first sight of an Hawk or other Bird of Prey brought into the room presently by their fluttering and otherwise discover a kind of knowledge of some approaching danger or adstant peril which upon the sight of any other Fowl or Beast they will not Whereas most probably or undoubtedly rather to a man brought up in a Have or otherwise never beholding before any creature save humane A Lyon and a Calf would prove equally terrible upon their first approach And whereas there are many Herbs Plants and Insects too of a poysonous nature and of an absolute destructive quality to Man and Beast if received into the body for food What creature is there to be found young or old except man not able by sense or otherwise to distinguish between what is agreeable and what destructive to his nature and will at all times most certainly avoid and reject the latter unless by man inserted or intermixt with some food agreeable to its nature We see many of these brute creatures even Physicians to themselves and all of them naturally avoiding such of the Elements as are destructive to them Let a Duck hatch Chickens trial whereof
has been made and no allurement or invitation she can make shall draw them into the water An Element equally destructive to our nature and yet from which we are often inforced to use some care and industry to preserve our own young ones I speak all this to shew and to make it somewhat apparent and plain that that kind of Intellect which is in Animals how great soever it may seem to be is nothing else but a more curious kind of perception with sense and motion than that of Vegetables or inanimate bodies and arising in the blood or other such like thin fluid substance in Insects because as soon soever as it has its full current and motion the intellect of those creatures is at the highest unless some actions of theirs from our documents seem to make an improvement of it which in reality is no addition of intellect but the exercising a prior inherent Intellect some other way towards their acquiring food or the like But the Soul of man though chiefly seated in the blood and upon a total effusion or shedding thereof necessarily leaving the body do's not in the most florid and vigorous condition thereof and in youth so much shew it self nor is so quick in discerning things obnoxious to the body as theirs and therefore may seem rather some wonderful way inspired than to be connative and of the substance of the body for certainly a separate created Spirit though of a wonderful knowledg and apprehension as subsisting of it self yet sent into the gloomy dark vault or tabernacle of a body wants not only the introduction of species by sense as some inlet to work upon but also some considerable space of time to shew its intellectual power and vigour rather than a spirit raised in a body for the substance and government only of the same body without which speedy work in Nature to some perfection the body would not long submit in that state And therefore in the case of a first created and after infused spirit only it sometimes happens from the darkness or closeness of its mansion it has little other visible operation than the very carrying its Tabernacle about with it as I instanced in the case of an Ideot in my Treatise de Anima and yet as to its excellence and sublimity in point of its original being and intellective power were it freed and discharged of those obstructions ithas far exceeds that of the wisest Animal So as immaterial and from thence probably immortal spirits want but room to display themselves or having room want some space of time to recover and expel some mists of their present obstruction and then by gifts only break out in any lustre To will a Spirit endowed with some kind of preservative intellect to arise from a body is equally the wonderful work of an Omnipotent Power with the creation of a body and endowing the same with a spirit ab extra as I may say and no less than either to endow an inanimate body with peculiar operative Qualities or Vertues But if it be once admitted and granted that in Animals the blood is the life or that the spirit is essential with the body whereof there is some sufficient ground from the course of Nature to believe its motion and tendence regarding nothing else It will necessarily and consequently follow That the whole spirit and body how ever we divide it by particular names is subject to one and the same Fate Destiny or Period As to these spirits of ours If they were a part of and coessential with our bodies I cannot see how it were either natural or possible that there could at any time arise in the soul a desire of disunion or dissolution from that body of which it self was a part Which desire in certain humane spirits has most certainly at sometimes appeared nay often worked its desired effect Nor is it reasonable to conjecture that any thing can possibly will or endeavour its own destruction or annihilation and therefore if our Souls were of the very essence of our Bodies we must grant A man could never voluntarily or intentionally make away himself the contrary whereof is manifest As to those spirits of theirs if they were distinct or any way separable from the body and no part thereof since they labour and groan under the Creation as much or more than we and are no less subject to passions of fear and the like then at sometime or other upon some displeasure or other there would be espied a voluntary indeavour of its separation by its own act to ease it self of those flames it felt for the present But this could never be observed in any of them by any of us but alwayes such a voluntary resistance of Separation as there is usually in us unless at such times as this separable Soul of ours is ravished with Hopes and Joyes or tortured with Despairs and Fears At least if the Soul of beast were a distinct thing from the body and separable therefrom it might now and then as well as ours be observed naturally to act after such a manner as in no wise barely and simply tended towards the preservation of the same body but seeming to neglect the body were somewhat fixed for a while upon a subject matter altogether unnecessary to the bodies ease quiet or well being Now if any man could be able to satisfy me of so much as a voluntary abstinence in any creature save Man at any time from any thing which might seem to afford delectation or nourishment to the body or satiate or please the same at such instant as there was a present appetite or desire and when there was no impendent fear or other passion to obstruct so as the body might seem to be at the same instant voluntarily neglected for the pleasing or satisfaction of the mind Much more if I were able to discern any kind of motion of the spirit of beast the most subtle or wise tending out of its proper element the Flesh and the preservation thereof and exercising its passions about qualities or accidents as to love Justice or Mercy to fear ignominy or contempt to desire to know or the like whereby it might seem to be capable of or merit a future reward or punishment and be a just subject thereof for nothing uncapable to act voluntarily beyond the preservation of it self can so be I should then be inclinable to think that there is rather a continuation and some transmigration of that Soul than any evaporation thereof and vanishing into the soft air or a reduction thereof into Earth with the body But besides what has been alledged and some places of holy Scripture which might be alledged seeming to give a period to the soul or spirit of beast together with the body It will be difficult for our imagination so long as we have any reason left to go along with it aid or assist it or else but correct it to assign a place for the
Since we often afford an helping hand to their destruction by laying their heaps and banks open to the power of Northern blasts and cold as being how ere so wise for themselves noxious to our grounds and fruit How many Spirits or Souls of that other wise creature the Bee do good Housewifes at a peculiar time toward the approach of the fall send together in transmigration by Brimstome to some other place Truly the Ant in great numbers may be thought as well to make a voluntary transmigration as that there is any transmutation of species in them as some hold since this is most certain that every kind of them at such an age or period of time become winged and leaving their heaps or banks to the younger Brood or Frye flee away and are seen no more But that they convert to a life of another species I believe no more than that there is a conversion of species of those little black Clobheads which we call Tadpoles bred in Ponds of the spawn of Frogs by the accession of legs and quite different features from what they had before As to that other most subtle and wise creature so termed in Scripture the Serpents if our Adders and Snakes may come under that notion How many of them do some Winters cast into a profound and lasting sleep as may be observed from the paucity of them seen in a Summer suceeding a sharp and tedious Winter So as those which have but shallow caverns or holes to sleep in are scarce thought ever to awake again These are but a species or two of many thousands for ought I could ever perceive as wise in their kind as they whose bodies Winter leaves altogether inanimate We make our predictions of a plentiful Summer from the sharpness of the Winter preceding and we give our reasons sometimes from some native or inherent warmth in Snow the contraction of the pores and keeping in the spirits in the earth by cold the retardation of all plants attraction of their sap and moisture too soon thereby and then their more vigorous operation and exhaleing of the same upon the more near approach of the Sun beams with the like which though they may be good reasons of our plenty too Yet I am apt to think the exanimation of innumerable Insects hurtful to plants and fruits from the sharpness of the winter or it 's imbecilitating their Eggs or Seed for production is a reason of more weight than all others usually given For he who will at the Spring time but walk into his Gardens or Fields with a light in the night season may espy a various multitude of little creatures who as the Psalmist expresses it all wait on God for their meat in due season Which as ordinary Earthworms and of them there are divers kinds too are not to be seen in the day time nay some of them so small and of colour earthy as they are not easily discernible but upon a green plant This every provident Gardiner is sensible of and does not impute the nipping off or little holes in his tender Plants like common Country people to Easterly Winds which may indeed wither or discolour but neither bite nor perforate To find out or imagine bodies ready prepared for all these spirits at an instant frosty time would puzzle the best Intellect or strongest imagination Should we pass by these spirits inherent in all these little creatures as insignificant and because we are not able with our eyes to see behold or distinguish any parts or blood in them laugh at those trite sayings Formicae sua bilis inest Habet musca splenem and find out some pretty distinction between their Spirits and the Spirits of Beasts of visible parts and greater bulk Certainly since their Shambles are fuller of their bodies in Winter than in Summer and most of them especially wild creatures bring forth young only in some peculiar Summer months We shall need the like help as in our case of Insects to salve the errors of a transmigrating imagination In case of oviparous creatures as all Fowl I would willingly know Whether after the Egg conceived and formed from treading or copulation there be not a spirit therein contained and included And yet they who can imagine an immortal spirit in the Chicken will hardly allow it I believe in the Egg or that upon corruption of the Egg or conversion of it to draught there is any transmigration and yet no doubt the spirit in the egg and the spirit in the chicken are one and the same only in the one case by gentle and proper heat continued for some space rarified to a greater degree and proportion than in the other and by consequence is subject to receive its termination and period with the body of one as well as of the other If we think the life and motion in the Chicken be a new peculiar spirit introduced by heat then do we allow our selves a power not only of sending spirits in transmigration to other bodies by our destruction and devouring of the present but creating I will not say alluring and drawing spirits from one body to another at our will and pleasure and so kill bodies at a distance which thing would have made a Lady I knew who hatched a Hawk in her bosome a little more proud of the act than she was and thought herself equal if not superior to Livia of whom Pliny relates a like story and I think it was but of a Chicken I am unwilling to move out of my own element and to indeavour any discovery about the spirit or souls of Fishes what becomes of them Those aquarious Spirits in our standing Lakes and Pools do usually in a very hard winter undergo the same fate of many Insects and want at that time a numerous company of bodies ready prepared to receive them and no less at other times that is in peculiar Summer months when they lay their spawn do they want innumerable spirits to animate the same more than that instant season can well afford either from the destruction of insects or any kind of moving body But I think we need not trace after these Spirits by Sea or Land or trouble our heads with any narrow search upon such a subject since whatever becomes of the souls of other living creatures is rather a curious and unnecessary enquiry than in any wise advantageous to our own any ways useful or profitable to our subsistence or any ways tending towards the well ordering or governing our Passions or Affections unless it may be in this only that from the assurance of the duration of the soul of Beasts as something more excellent than bare Earth or other Element we become more careful how we abuse or unnecessarily vex them Which without knowledge thereof we have sufficient ground to forbear and since beholding our selves and them together undoubtedly the workmanship of one and the same God of Nature we cannot but be if we be barely
of Trees from the Cedar that is in Lebanon even to the Hyssop that springeth out of the wall and of Beasts And we may grant him to be the greatest Philosopher and best Naturalist the World ever yet afforded and yet think there were many things in Nature beyond or out of his sight Some men indeed have fansied to themselves that he had a kind of Universal Knowledg and was thoroughly acquainted with the nature of all manner of Plants annd of their own too and seem much to lament the loss of his Writings and observation in that kind by the reason of the Universality as well as excellency of the subject yet I hope I may without offence think that there are infinite kind of Trees which Solomon never saw read or heard of when besides the many other Countreys far remote from his the West-Indies which have many Plants not found elsewhere were not known as we may fairly suppose notwithstanding what some conjecture about the situation of Ophir that way to that Eastern part of the World in his time And when any one Nation nay one single Acre of ground in it may find a man work all his days we may conceive even those things which Solomon saw read or spake of had so much of Mystery beyond any mans comprehension lock'd up in their Nature that there was more in them that he did not know than that he did And herein I had rather confine Solomon's knowledge and so understand his speaking of Trees from the Cedar to the hyssop with its due limitation as it ought to be so as not to comprize all mediums and particulars whatsoever than bring any particular part of Gods Creation within the bounds and compass of his or any mans understanding But besides had it been as some imagine that he had thus spoke of all these and their several Natures by a wonderful kind of sagacity if not Divine Inspiration yet that discourse of his upon those arguments was never reduced to writing For if he had wrote of all Trees Herbs Beasts Fowl Fishes and Creeping things as the Text reckons them up we may conclude without any Hyperbole that no subject matter of Paper c. would be able to contain all that should be written Since the number of the last of these and the least considered is unaccountable every body I will not except Snow or Salt producing at some time its peculiar Insect and some bodies several The search into Nature has afforded many pretty inventions various and wonderful helps to man in this Pilgrimage physically and otherwise thanks be to the God of Nature and may do more yet seldom or never by any nice abstract Philosophical inquiry but rather casually and unexpectedly upon some first humble discreet universal observation of the things of the World and then of some particulars And the event and success hereabout has usually moralized the Fable of Pan who though a rural God sooner found Ceres lost by accident than all the more select Gods by their curious speculation and search This I observe not to dehort any man from it but advise it rather so it be performed with due moderation and circumspection That great Book of Nature which is before us all and somewhat laid open for us to read is daily mistaken and we are apt to forget the first and last letter of it the Alpha and the Omega and adventure upon causes not only lamely for that we do at best but blindly too and then 't is no marvel if at last we find we imbrace a Cloud in the room of a Goddess I am not about here to set down any Catalogue of the Errors or misconceited sights some men have made into the works of Nature though it might prove no unprofitable work to have them marked out but only declare to you my opinion of the fallibility of this kind of search And that unless we therefrom by the goodness of a gratious as well as incomprehensible wise God see our own ignorance and thereby somewhat of him our search is usually vain and that he who terminates there only hits the proper mark set before him whatever he seem to aim or design at or light on profitably besides 'T is true in the search of Nature we often for the present light on causes agreeable and acceptable to our Reason and t is the peculiar property of human Reason only to search and find out causes the words are often confounded and shewing a Reason put for shewing a Cause but no man yet was ever able to extract by his invention with the present allowance of his Reason such a certain cause of any Work in Nature as to be imbraced by himself or others as altogether indubitable Fancy indeed having oft-times somewhat of similitude and likeness with Reason though not of cognation with her is so much quicker sighted though not clearer sighted than reason her self that if it keep the Watch-Tower in the Soul there shall not be such a thing as an occult quality in nature nor any thing so hid as it cannot easily discern No man who has it regent in his Soul will ever dye the death of Aristotle although a death most likely of fancies first framing or inventing It is able to espy not only a Transexion or Transmutation of Sex but a Transmutation or Transition of one reputed species into another a Transformation Metamorphosis or what it pleases and not content to stand still as a Spectator in Natures conception or production will do the office of a Midwife and frame an Embryo to its own model nay raise more monstrosities than ever Nature produced from confusion of Principles But I think reason will as soon espy the defects and imperfections of that Soul it inhabits as any other mans and find that even nature is above its absolute reach After due trial and search into the works of Nature and perhaps invention or experiment of some setled or constant effect therein not to rest assured therewith may be accounted and perhaps is the usual disease of an inconstant wavering fickle if not very weak judgment yet such is the variety of secret occult Qualities and some secret property words quite cashiered by our hot-spur searchers as the Asylum of Fools or Sluggards wrapped up in every individual as is sufficient to beget a Scepticism in any modest sober Soul I am not ashamed to acknowledge my weakness and dim-sightedness into the meanest and smallest Plant or Insect and to confess that after diligent search into some and when I thought I had espied the very utmost extent of their Nature and Qualities I found my self deceived even by something casually or accidentally appearing from them not ordinary in others of the same visible species so far as I was able to distinguish from whence I could afford you perhaps some incredible stories It may seem a bold adventure of so weak a soul as mine yet I dare challenge the quickest clearest and Learnedst Intellect in the
Memory and weak of Judgment whatever our Will or Affections are or seem to be and the sight of that might well put a stop to my Writing But you and every man who finds and owns himself under that Notion will I hope pass by and pardon my infirmities if there appear any discrepancy between these and my former thoughts already set down in relation to this Subject And the rather because you well know all my former Papers were out of my custody whilst I was imployed and busied in these I have already exceeded the bounds of an Epistle and will trouble you no further save in relation to some former demonstration of my weak judgement relating to this faculty of the Soul the Imagination under these four several following heads distinct and a part and those I am bold to set down as follows I. That the Imagination of all the faculties of an human Soul is most subject to infection change and alteration from the humours of the Body II. That the guidance regulation or Government thereof is least in our power of any faculty of the Soul III. That it being a faculty the Government whereof is so much out of or beyond our Power We are not answerable for its Transgression unless where some other faculty more in the power of our will through the light of Reason does apparently concur or comply with it Or that through the negligence of our Reason it was the cause of the Imaginations incorrigible rambling errors IV. That it shews its Divinity and extraction as well as any other faculty of the Soul in the manner of its Work That set on work in relation to its own motion it necessarily terminates with the allowance of Reason in the thoughts of one Eternal Wise Being or Mind Governour and disposer of all things That from such thoughts we are necessarily stirred and incited in all the faculties of our Soul to fly thither for relief and to receive direction and guidance from thence chiefly That yet herein necessary care is to be had and taken that we retain and in some measure make use of our Reason lest we become ensnared through the delusion of Satan I. Notwithstanding my Opinion of the Souls extraction its Divinity and Immortality its power here in a Body from Heavenly influence to mount sometimes above sense its strength to resist all foreign delusion through sense by Reason Its capacity to work without a Body or the help of that more present inlet bodily sense Yet it is in my judgement while it remains in a Body so far subject to some Mists and Vapours arising there from that the Imagination the Eye of the Soul is thereby often deceived And so far deceived thereby that Reason though it remain in its native strength cannot correct its wandring but is forced to yield its allowance and consent and to be led as it were captive by the Imagination This faculty the Imagination the Eye of the Soul through sense as well as otherwise necessarily and perpetually working and in motion Upon any distemperature of the Body whereby sense is in any degree or measure clouded or disturbed is apt of it self to frame and raise strange Idea's and make strange representations to the other faculties to the amazement and confusion of Reason To the allurement inticement or attraction of other faculties from that which before they naturally were bent and inclined to and thereby at length to the captivation of Reason it self This happens not from every humour or in every disease of the Body but in such disease and from such humor only as by fumes sent into the brain clouds or darkens that port or inlet to the Soul Sense Or so disturbs or obstructs those passages that they cannot afford that assistance to Reason as usual against the deceit of the Imagination Sense I say a passage way or means by the perfect openness and clearness whereof Reason oft makes a better and truer judgment of things than it can when those passages are a little obstructed and yet to the Imagination seem open and clear In sleep when that port Sense is as it were wholly shut up through fumes Reason without blame leaves the Imagination as sole Master in the Soul to frame and introduce Idea's of it self which in reality are not Yet upon the opening of Sense again they vanish or are presently rejected and cast out of the Soul as idle But when that port of Sense is open and the Imagination presents to the other faculties of the Soul as if what it presented were rightly and truly formed through Sense with the allowance of Reason and thereby a vain belief a thing somewhat more than a Dream is raised perhaps to the terrour and affrightment of the Affections Reason not able absolutely to contradict the Imagination because it seemed to have the concurrence of Sense is sliely drawn into a kind of consent and this not seldom occasioned through gross humors in the Body In which case there is in my opinion a kind of defect lett or disease in Sense though not apparent as well as fault in the Imagination The Imagination is capable of distemper two manner of ways corporally or spiritually as we say But those two kind of distempers of the Imagination the one from the Body to the Imaginations deception of its fellow faculties in the Soul the other from those fellow faculties as violent Affections to the deception or rather confusion of the Imagination it self being often confounded together and the one not sedom mistaken for the other and the fault of the Body imputed to the Soul and the fault of the Soul imputed to the Body I have thought good to set down here some kind of mark by which they might be distinguished though I offer it not with any great confidence as the light of an infallible truth appearing to me and it is this That if at any time we find and observe a Body healthful as in most Lunaticks and withal the Affections very vigorous and active and every design and bent of them ready to be put in execution by the will and the instruments thereof bodily members There we may rationally adjudge the distemper of that Soul to be occasioned no otherwise than by its own default or neglect and the Original cause of the disease to have been the too familiar intercourse and trust between the Affections and the Imagination from the neglect of Reason and a thing which Reason might have prevented But if we find and observe the Body infirm heavy and lumpish and not active or ready with the Affections to put in execution those things which are framed in the Imagination but that there is a kind of Terror or Horror observable over the Spirits and a doubting and distrust in the Soul there we may impute every false gloss and fictitious formation and contrivance of the Imagination to have its rise or result from some gross humors in the Body such as we call Melancholy such
as Reason in its greatest strength could not rectify or prevent though it strived to resist Nor are the Affections to be accused justly of any inflammation or disorder through the delusion of Satan or otherwise Neither can we justly think there has been any wilful defect or neglect in the Soul to occasion it Further thus when Pride or self-Love or Covetousness with their Off-spring and Darlings Anger Revenge Hatred Envy and the like distemper the Imagination and cause it to wander without any order or Government raising false and fictitious sights in the Soul the usual resort is abroad and in relation to others vileness or baseness overlooking all that is really or may be espied in Imagination at home and in this case we cannot so well impute the distemper to humors naturally bred in the Body as to the Devil and a wilful negligence in the Soul But when men without any great or visible Errors in the Affections condemn themselves falsly when the Imagination works at home and nothing seems vile or odious to a man but himself to himself I judge the fallacy to arise merely from dark and dusky vapours in the Body nay I cannot see how it should proceed from any unruly or depraved Passion by which the Soul shut up as it were a Prisoner from free communication with other Souls labouring of it self and in travail to be relieved for want of help a consternation is suddainly raised in the Affections and from them again the Imagination suddainly and violently set on work Sense before clouded is almost destroyed it becomes as useless as in a Dream the Imagination becomes without controul from without and is sole Master and will be sole Master till these vapours are dispelled or allayed which is best done as I think by Bodily Physick When I once see men come to Visions and Revelations and pronounce and proclaim them as given or sent to direct and instruct others thereby I shall very much suspect their Soul more nocent or more defective than their Body But if I find nothing but self-censure and self-condemnation in man unless in case of a very apparent wicked life before I have ever been so charitable as to think strange and dreadful seeming Apparitions in the Soul rather to be raised first in the Imagination through some defect or obstruction in bodily Sense than that the Imagination through Affection deludes Sense and that the Soul of it self is purer than we can well judge of through our Senses barely Most certain it is and experience tells us how subject this one faculty in us Imagination is to sudden change and mutation from things meerly Earthly received into the Body how a little Wine will sometimes clear and elevate it how the anointing with peculiar Oyls will dull and infest it how particular Herbs and Plants will presently distract and confound it Neither can we I think rationally observe the sudden alteration of any one faculty of the Soul from any distemper of the Body barely but this I neither cease to love what I loved nor hate what I hated nor believe what I believed nor will what I willed from any sudden fumes of the Body nor indeed until the Imagination by its continued disturbance from thence shall have raised and put on other colours on the Objects and through its influence it has over the other faculties in time subjected them to accept such Colours as true The Imagination is many times suddenly changed and altered distracted and confounded from meer Bodily Diseases and so it being as I have said the Eye of the Soul all the other faculties from thence are led into Error the evil consequents whereof the Body only or chiefly faulty certainly God in Mercy will not look upon as punishable or take vengeance thereof to which I shall speak somewhat more at large in the third place but first declare how far I think the work of this faculty is out of or beyond our power II. It is a common saying with every one of us when any Foreign Power lays a restraint upon our actions We can think what we please or what we list Which if it were universally true might perhaps in some cases render us more miserable than men of themselves can make us by disquieting those Affections which they cannot disquiet but through our own thoughts Which are often strangely diverted and the Soul at better ease than if that faculty were in our absolute power But blessed be God since our will is not generally so good as it should be the Will has no such native power over the Imagination 'T is not the strongest Reason the best Will nor any other inherent gift of a Soul placed in the most healthful athletick sound and clear Body that is able wholly to direct this faculty or guide it in any good or regular course for any space of time Whatever men pretend Indeed I have heard of some men who have so far gloried in their abilities this way and with all their devotion towards God for he is now and then formally brought in when we are minded to glory of our selves as to affirm They have been able to pray several hours in fervency of Spirit without the least wandring or extravagant thought Such are very divine men we may well think and happy were we all if we could be so in some less degree But yet I wish no man deceive himself herein and that through his own Imagination ex post facto as we may say chiefly and so have a belief thereof raised from the immediate work of that faculty rather than grounded on Reason or what indeed is the impress of a right Imagination perfect and sound memory Surely to raise this belief of and in a mans self a man must be in what we so call a Trance Sense must be closed and shut up for a time against all Battery In which case we 'll grant the Imagination to be sole or chief Master in the Soul and then 't is no marvel if it deceive men into such a temporary belief But I dare appeal to any such seeming devout Enthusiast if he has been at the receiving that holy Mystery a Spiritual Banquet whereat men usually are or should be as intent and careful to keep their thoughts from wandring as in any case whether presently after he were not able to tell me the colour of the Bread whether white or brown the fashion of the Chalice or the kind of Metal what Vestment the Priest had on what looks or gesture or action he used in the administration thereof and the like Now if he will confess the remembrance of any such thing which I dare say he cannot truly deny I may be bold to tell him His thoughts somewhat wandred For Memory being no other than the impress of Imagination or a cogitation renewed his cogitation did a little ramble and was through sense imployed about visible Earthly things And so long as we retain our Senses which I pray
God we may make use of with our Reason for fear of a worse inconvenience we shall scarce be able to judge otherwise of our weakness and infirmities herein but have such a true sight of them as we ought to have and make us humble not proud in Spirit I do confess we seem to have some little power over our Affections from the very light or strength of Reason in us Not to let them move one way or other in relation to objects introduced in the Soul without some kind of precedent allowance because before they fix or indeed fly as it were out of the Body towards imbracing or rejecting any thing there is a kind of Consult But the Imagination in its first motion admits of no consult nor is capable of Reason's correction till after it has moved Nay 't is so swift and sudden of motion as nothing whatsoever can rightly be compared to it in velocity and swift rise 'T is well if we can any wise stop it or change it or alter its course in the end And surely whensoever that is done it is done by or through the Affections not Strength of Reason or power in Will immediately over it Affection first a little regulated by the light of Reason and made as it were to expect some directions towards the embracing true Happiness does much help towards the correcting our Imagination But in this correction we shall find or may observe the Imaginations better and more regular motion to be rather by the allurement of some Affection than the impulse of the Will or immediate strength of Reason Neither Reason nor Will can wholly reclaim it from following or complying with Sense nor force it to work clean contrary to a present affection So as we must resign it up to some Power or Will than our own if we expect it should be guided by any such thing as what we call Power or Will III. This being premised That we have no absolute Power or Dominion over the Imagination but that as it necessarily and perpetually worketh and we cannot quiet it so it sometimes worketh against our real Will and we cannot reclaim it for who is there who willingly as I may say lets it present death of Relations Friends and other losses c. sometimes before-hand and withal in such dreadful colours as it does and that all the rein that we may be said to have hold on is only from the power which our Reason hath over our Will not to let our Affections fasten on or long embrace what is presented to them by the Imagination if so be our Reason allow it not This I say premised Let us if you please here examine how far we may become liable to Divine Justice or Humane Justice either for our Errors happening or like to happen from the work of the Imagination as principal Whereabout having many times puzled my self in relation to the manner of the Souls working you shall here have my judgment or the allowance of my weak Reason with submission to a stronger your own But here again as all along in treating of the Soul we must suppose in the motion of any one faculty no other Principal faculty is wholly exempt and secluded but has some kind of seeming consequent motion with it As is observable in our very Dreams wherein men do not only imagine but seem at least to affect seem to argue and weigh and seem to will Nay some in pursuance thereof have bodily motion they talk they arise they walk c. For if the Imagination were not attended with those other faculties or did or could at any time work alone or singly of it self I should readily acquit it in most if not all cases as blameless Now then thus I think whatsoever false or naughty or vitious presentment of the Imagination that is a first entertainment in our thoughts what seems contrary to Gods revealed will or that law of his imprinted in our minds if search and inquiry were made is gratefully accepted by the Affections Reason then in its full power and strength though Reason so far restrain the will and them too as that there follows no overt Act thereupon I think doth make us culpable that is we sin Because were our Affections such as they should be or such as we might through our strength of Reason with the invocation of Divine assistance have made or rendred them they would not gratefully accept any thing that were evil but have a reluctancy against it and decline it from some prior instruction I may say rather than present correction But if the Affections upon the first touch of the Imagination do loath and abhor that evil the Imagination brings or lays before them We are in no wise answerable for the irregularity or evil contrivance of our Imagination If Reason be totally disabled to work in us that which is right the defect we call ideocy or perpetual madness without any negligence or default in us we are neither answerable as I think for our evil Imaginations evil Affections or Intentions nor consequently our evil Actions thereupon But if that disability came upon us by our own default or negligence I think of it otherwise in relation to God and punishable by him howe're it may be dispensed withal here by man If Reason be disabled naturally and inevitably though for some time only through the fumes of the Body and the very inlet Sense stopped as in case of sleep though the Imagination invent that which is evil and some of the Affections imbrace the same and the Will seems to agree and consent thereto yet is the Soul blameless before man I think and God too For that Sense being shut and the Imagination as well counterfeiting the same as supplying the place of Reason we may without any prior obliquity in our Soul seem only to have the consent of those other faculties to our Imagination Which other faculties will utterly abhor abominate and forsake what that contrived as soon as ever Sense is open again and that they have the influence of any clearer light to move by And therefore I cannot judge any man culpable for any Act of the Soul whatsoever in a Dream Let him seem to plot and contrive first then to strike wound or kill any man whatsoever I shall not condemn him Because it is not usually any natural malignity of Affection or any evil inclination in mans will that first forces the Imagination to conceive or entertain Evil against Sense but ardency a good and lawful Affection which forces the Imagination for the want of the light of Sense to raise a fear of deprivation of what we best love and they together such fear and fancy composing a Tragedy for there is no man but dreams oftner of the death of his Friends than of his Enemies often make us seem the Actors our selves I or any man may dream of the killing of his own most beloved Child without offence Nay a man may
the Ant it s own Eggs though I find not that quick inspect in other Creatures as may be observed in the stirring of their several heaps But my meaning here is not to trouble your more serious thoughts about Flies but to let you know mine in reference to the Souls of men chiefly with some grounds and reason thereof They have been these That amongst all the works of Nature or more properly the God of Nature no such great and various dissimilitude is to be found as in that chief and principal work of his the Souls of men whether of themselves or arising from the subject wherein they work shall not in this place be my chief enquiry But since we daily find and observe or may so at least a Soul of a great magnitude inclosed in a narrow Body or Prison and a very narrow small contracted Soul in a large one A vigorous and active Soul in a weak Body A feeble in a strong and well built one A bright and beautiful in a cloudy and deformed one A black and deformed in a clear and beautiful one nay any in any we have no Reason to conjecture that it receives any chief or sole power of its operation from thence much less its strange vicissitudes and changes since Seasons may be observed when though through the Organs of Sense all the most pleasant worldly objects are let into the Soul it will be dismal and sad and sometime notwithstanding all the gastly Spectacles which can be presented to her she will be pleasant and joyful and all this as well at such times as the Body is strong and vigorous as when it is weak and feeble as well sickly as healthful and as well healthful as sickly And that the Body should cause a visible mutation in the Soul when there is none discernible in it self by the very Soul that inhabits it will hardly obtain a rational assent but that they are as they are by original Creation or some external actuation We vary from one another in relation to our Soul 's acting far beyond what any Creature does from others of the same species with it self Some similitude or likeness of the Souls motion is to be found in them but none or very little amongst us And this various and different kind of operation in us as to Intellect and Affection both shews an original dissimilitude for being as much alike one another in Body as any Creature of one species we should act as much alike if the Soul had its being from the Body rather than any accidental or casual one happening from some formation of the flesh Do we not observe all Brute Creatures of one and the same Species though in several Climates to use the same way of policy in point of their preservation Do they not build their Nests alike and do they not express their Intellect alike whether by obedience or disobedience to us whether by their crouching fawning or resistance Are they not alike cunning But are there two men to be found in the World think you who left to themselves without instruction or without a Precedent or Plat-form before them would do as they do in their kind Surely besides the various form of each one would prove a Lucullus and another a Diogenes one would think no dwelling too spatious and beautiful for him and the other would think a mean and plain one were most useful and best became him We differ in the manner of expressing our Intellect legibly equally as in our Intellect Could we behold the formation of the Issues of several mens brains upon any subject matter we should find one mans begun at the head anothers at the foot a third at the middle and none alike but every mans variously One would bring forth his Brat with all its lineaments and features at the first and yet perhaps a weak one another his very deformed with much labour and pains licked into form according to that erroneous Tenet of the Bear and yet perhaps a strong one And were licking or rather correction and amendment of the most perfect and exact piece committed to divers men successively we should find in some space it would prove like Theseus his Ship renewed by planks it might retain the first name but would not have one jot of the old materials remaining We scarce comment or expound alike in any degree or measure that agreement of the Seventy or seventy two Interpreters is related as a wonder and were I assured of the truth of the relation I should so esteem it nay one of the greatest wonders the World ever afforded in story In this great and chief work of the Creation the Soul of man especially wrought and effected for the setting forth the Glory of the Creator wherein there are diversities of gifts and diversities of administrations and diversities of operations and one God who worketh all in all It is no wonder that we are altogether ignorant either in our selves or others of the power and manner of its operation but are inforced to leave that to the Creator and are only able to behold and see the great variety and strange dissimilitude of human Souls beyond those Spirits of other Creatures how unlike every one is to another and sometimes to it self for want of a gracious influence and thereby behold that one single and simple essence darting out its various rayes upon all the World and our selves chiefly It is we alone that may be most like that essence who are most unlike one another by his drawing us to himself and as it were renewing this wonderful Image of his perhaps variously defaced but happily mutable Did ever man yet behold two Souls naturally as we say in common acceptation alike There is one who venturing upon comparisons in the case amongst others brings in Demosthenes and Cicero together and tells us in his entrance upon their lives how fortune might seem to have framed them out of one mold and Nature fashioned their qualities alike and yet in the Conclusion he tells us that as their Phrase differed and the one was grave and harsh the other jesting and pleasant so one of them was sharp perverse froward and sowre of Nature the other complaisant the one modest and bashful the other full of ostentation and extremely ambitious of Glory or vain-glorious the one excessively Covetous even to corruption and the selling of his eloquence the other not so but liberal and just And surely had he been throughly acquainted with their several dispositions he might have found divers other contrary qualities in them and perhaps not two alike in any degree and those mutable too and their tempers so to vary that he might have seen his pleasant man sometimes froward and his froward sometimes pleasant and not been able to give a reason thereof I do agree that a curious Painter is able by his Art to give such a true representation of any face that we shall know it to be meant of such
an one notwithstanding all the disguise that can be put upon it either by frown or smile which yet is the Soul's work nay age shall not so wear out the lines of it but that to a curious eye upon comparison it may be known But truly to delineate or depaint any Soul by ones pen requires a far greater cunning than its window the face by a pencil there will be found no Apelles for that that Art indeed a man might wish for as the Poet did and to know men before we deal with them might prove some would think an happy thing But it is far safer to trust to a Divine Power in the present moulding of them than to think we our selves shall ever know of what frame and fashion they are or to what height we may screw them It is that alone which is both rough and smooth sweet and sowre and yet the same as the Poet pictures his companion and the fiction of Proteus no doubt had its rise from some other power over his Soul not from any power he had over his own Body Surely were there any Soul to be found that might appropriate to it self Queen Elizabeth's Motto of semper eadem I should adjudge it to be somewhat more than human and then believe a man might easily know himself but that is no such easie matter if it were every one would observe it of himself and we need not maintain as an Heathen says and avow that that saying or command came down from Heaven I know a Gentleman who was wont to say of himself that he merited not any praise for his being a just and honest man for that he had a plentiful estate left him which he enjoyed in peace Had I been poor says he I know not what I should have been to become rich I fear I should have been a knave which was a true saying in the main whether the good man feared it or not The knowledge of a mans self is more heavenly than the command and if ever man had such a gift as that I am sure he must receive it from Heaven There is certainly such a saying came down from Heaven as Ye know not of what Spirit ye are are though that speech as you seem to intimate in one place may receive some limitation or qualification and it may be manifest to any man upon search for the time past from whence his Soul had its motion and in what state and condition he at present stands yet surely no further than the very present for if any man could foresee his future thoughts or the motion of his Affections his consequent intentions and actions c. he must necessarily know more than himself and dive into the secrets of the Almighty after what manner he has preordained all things to work for his Glory Every particular Soul is so unlike every other and not subject to any course of Nature sometimes so unlike it self that it is not to be known by any but its Maker neither is any man able to declare or rightly conjecture his future manners And this is from the goodness of God that we might find just cause to ascribe all goodness if any such thing be found in us to him Rely on him trust in him solely and thither fly for relief in all our wants and for a cure in all our infirmities and not to ascribe any thing to our selves or any other Creature There are some perhaps who seem to think the Souls of men more similar in their original Creation or emanation than in truth they are And that of themselves they would be more quiet and bend or incline more one and the same way perhaps like those of Beasts were it not for some several Genius or instructor that every human Soul had for its concomitant whereby it is sometimes directed bended or inclined Indeed I do think there is such a thing as a Genius in every man that is some distinct or different character on every Soul in the manner and way of expressing and delivering it self out to others such as thereby a wise man when he comes to be familiarly acquainted with it will be able in some measure to distinguish it from any other as well as the face by any grace or feature and so a Soul may be outwardly distinguished though not inwardly known And the Soul has most properly this attribute bestowed on it or conjoyned to it when by some unusual sharp edge or smart stroke it enters with a kind of life into others nay gives life to Paper it self as he who had a very quick and piercing Genius seems to express it and not for being led it knows not whither for if by Genius men who talk of it mean any informing helping or assisting Spirit diverse in creation from our own and such as Socrates is said to have had whether by name Genius or Daemon I understand it not nor can find in Reason any manner of way how a man should become so well acquainted with any such Familiar I deny not from Scripture but that we may have tutelary Angels or Guardians And I believe besides vulgar sluggish ones which seldom gratify the innate appetite in themselves there are confident daring Spirits enough which for secret purposes best known to God find not always resistance though sometimes restraints like that of Mark Anthony's in Caesars presence and from thence men frame and fansie within themselves some brave discerning Spirit or Genius more than in truth they ever were indowed withal But if every Soul has necessarily this kind of Attendant to advise with and to inform him what were best to be undertaken or let alone whereon to place his Affections in this World or not to place them and the like My Genius has proved a very ignorant one or else deceitful and treacherous to me for this I can say whenever I have been confident to obtain or trusted in my own strength or wisdom I have ever had the worst success when I have feared or suspected the worst event things have succeeded better When I have placed my Affections too strongly on any thing it has never prospered so well as those I less regarded which is ground sufficient for me to believe not a Genius or familiar Spirit but a God on whom I might cast all my care and who careth for us And surely the Soul of every other man notwithstanding any liberty of Will it may now and then seem to it self to have upon diligent inspection and view of its own strange and sometimes weak and ignorant manner of operation and yet better than it self or its Genius could contrive may soonest terminate and rest in the opinion of one original Spring of all motion that sum non mutor without introducing any strange Spectrum Genius or Familiar or yet delivering it self up to the dominion of Necessity or Fortune These strange opinions we have in relation to our Souls and the impossibility to
discern our selves throughly much less others subjects us to false opinions of our selves and false conjectures at least of others For as to the discerning part of anothers Soul the Intellect doubtless we commit sometimes great mistakes There are and have been certainly many Souls who though for want of some outward ornament or some casual advancement or improvement by which we are only capable to apprehend them or conceive ought in relation to their Intellect they have not been able to express themselves plainly and evidently to the capacity of others yet have had a very clear inspect into the truth and reality of things And we are not rationally to think because we find them not in story that therefore there were no wise men before Apollo as well as valiant men before Agamemnon and so are and will be for the future unknown and unheard of to us Nor should we look upon our selves who dare to set forth our folly and weakness rather than ought else legibly to the World to be the only men of parts God knows how far the best and wisest go astray from the truth and it might be easily evident to humanity if men would take the pains to weigh things how much light coyn has passed for currant Men there are who have words at will or command and know how to place them in excellent order but if they were to pass Solomon's test and should be duly weighed in the ballance we should find them to be but words and carry nothing of weight or solid matter in them As to the censure of the affectionary or imbracing part of mans Soul doubtless we commit as many and as great Errors and mistakes That unsearchable thing as Solomon terms it in a King and doubtless is so in others the Heart is not certainly known by any outward motion neither the gesture nor the lips will at any time fully discover it to a spectator or auditor and there is little trust to be given to what a man receives in at second hand It is so ordinarily mistaken in man that truly he who would judge aright had need I think vary from the general censure of the World If a man be but a little facile he is presently esteemed for good and yet perhaps the Italian Proverb may be verified of him That he is so good as that he is good for nothing There is a great mistake of that which we call good Nature I for my part think that if a man be so soft and pliable as to take an equal impression from all men that is indeed none he has little of real goodness in him He who will never be angry will in a strict Sense never be pleased and he who never thinks evil of any man will never think well of any man nor becomes ones special Friend upon the ground of a vertuous and good life and though Charity prompt us to think the best of such a man yet Reason informs us and without breach of charity we may think nothing really good that is insipid and that if a man have lost his savour and taste all things alike there is little of vertue in him whatsoever there may be of goodness Goodness if there be any such thing in man must since our Fall how ere we were created be looked on as a Grace not a natural habit and he is only good who intentionally in respect to God is so not he who is as it were so habitually or casually and unawares to himself as we say I am sure it is no uncharitable part in man but rather the contrary to think that some persons whom we seem to behold surly cross and peevish in their words and actions too sometimes have good intentions and meaning in the general And though in propriety of Speech a man cannot be said to act against his Will but the Will ever accompanies both words and actions yet there may be something besides of a latent Will in the Soul or wish of good to the party injured even at the very time of the injury Indeed it is said he who is of a currish churlish Nature should sacrifice to the Graces but we might pass him by and pardon him without Sacrifice and ascribe that to the Bodies temperature in that particular case which we are but prone and apt enough to do in many other cases There is a kind of condiment or sharp acrimonious humour in the blood not that the Soul is made or compounded of any such which the Spirit meeting with in its operation or motion raises outwardly a kind of mire or dirt and yet may be clean it self I have seldom met with injustice oppression cruelty or rapine in a snarling habit though I have often seen them all in a fawning one and that Scripture verified there are things smoother than oyl yet are they drawn Swords There are rugged obscure and dark passages in Palaces which lead to the fairest rooms and there are soul Sepulchers outwardly painted and constant bright and pleasant shining Tapers set burning before them And we often therefore judge amiss when we judge of the mind by such indications It is a blessed happiness when a quick working Soul can at all times flie abroad into the World and search every thing to the quick as we say without offence and without venom but it is very rare that that salt or gall which has been allowed ever by the learned to quicken the Invention should not sometimes exceed due measure and be mistaken for ill nature in the Affections Affection of it self is not evil by nature it is blinded since the Fall and strangely led and truly whether it be good or evil upright or crooked in the main intention and consequent is impossible for us certainly to know It is esteemed now adays and perhaps ever was the principal part of a Wise man to become acquainted and versed with the several humours and tempers of several men and throughly to study and know a man But as it is an insidious study I think unless in case of your profession only with a purpose barely to reclaim the Soul and make it better So it is a very fallacious one and in that respect may doubtless be very well linked with that of judicial Astrology and many men have but deceived themselves while they thought to know others Surely he who practises upon any Individual beside himself and pryes narrowly into others is not like to find any path that will lead him towards Happiness This he will be sure to find in every Soul a self-love inclosed about with Briars and Thorns and it being in no man's power to eradicate or grub up those Briars and Thorns growing in every man by Nature as we say unless in himself if so be that he may chance to be scratched and torn thereby while he thinks to bring that love to his own Lure He who is so curious to inquire into mens Natures and Dispositions and thinks he
has found out every root and string of their Affection and judges good perhaps to indeavour some mutual and interchangeable transplantation of Affection that thing I mean to speak of friendship for the melioration thereof had need be very wary and circumspect in his choice and rely upon a Divine watering and pruning too as well as his own planting or else perhaps though it grow and thrive with him it may bear him little or no good Fruit. The variety and diversity of human Souls with their several seeming inclinations and suddain alterations and that innate unsatiate love in man receiving its inflammation sometimes otherwise than by Sense from whence every one labours and travails to secure and advance it self by some means or other and especially the difficulty of discerning the motion of the Spirit in a mans self much more in another is the cause in my opinion why there is so little of true and real Friendship amongst us in the World and that there have been in all Ages so small a number of faithful Friends reckoned up and that our love is changeable mutable and unconstant When as we may daily espy in other Creatures of different Species even a Lyon and a Whelp bred up together a constant and continued love to each other during their lives I may say without design or without dissimulation Of Friendship I have read or been taught somewhat when I was a Boy which as I long since utterly forgot so I mean not now to have recourse thither again or to any other Author that treats thereof but having already adventured to meddle with the Soul I am minded to say somewhat of that league or union of Souls Friendship to you my Friend and to give you my natural thoughts of it only according to my plain rustick way and manner of delivery Friendship I take to be an union or knitting together of two Souls as is expressed of Ionathan and David in amity so as the one loves the other as it self Or more particularly An human yet sacred tye made and contracted between two Souls in the mutual and reciprocal aspect of some similitude and likeness in each other Each shining in some degree after the similitude and likeness of its Maker So that to the contracting thereof it is necessary the party who loves as a Friend do behold in the other some Image or shadow at least and Goodness Truth Justice Mercy Love especially and the like without this view or supposed view there can arise no such Love as is called Friendship Or if you please we will in short define it thus Whereas Charity is a general love to all men for God's sake So Friendship is a love to some particular person for the persons sake yet ever having a respect to God Friendship being a kind of alliance of two Souls resembles somewhat an alliance by blood or a consanguinity as we call it He who would make out that to any man must necessarily resort to some one fountain head or Ancestour and from thence trace and bring down the blood to himself and the other party without any corruption or attainter intervening And our Soul being a distinct gift and a distinct creation or breathing which we receive not from our Parents it is necessary in Friendship that as two Souls concenter in belief of one head and fountain of their being So there be no visible corruption thereof but that each participate somewhat of the Image of its Maker and leave not quite off to be Loving Just Merciful c. at least be not stigmatized with any Character of Uncharitableness Injustice Cruelty or the like whereby that Image seems defaced and therefore no Atheist can be a friend to any man nor any other man so to him For if there be such an human Creature in the World who verily believes there is no God he must consequently believe there is no such thing as Justice or Mercy or no need thereof towards our particular quiet or well-being and such man's kindness whatsoever he pretend is no other than a mere self-love and respecting himself barely and not Friendship neither can any one love that man who rejects or disowns the Wisdom of his Maker and attributes all to what we call Nature or Chance Besides this If there be any men who own a God and yet live as without God in the World though they readily perform all offices of kindness faithfully to each other that I hold not to be Friendship but call it rather a Satanical League than Friendship such as St. Iames terms enmity with God For a league of Friendship ever respects God because unless in respect to our selves there can be no other original cause to love one another but God alone who indowed us with a love extrinsick as I may say and such as is not natural or arising from the flesh The Soul of man in the Body is prone to cleave to Earthly things and many Leagues it makes and Alliances it doth contract Some upon considerations merely accidental and transient and which fail with those considerations such is that with respects the bounty of another as Solomon saith Every man is a Friend to him that giveth gifts or as the wise Son of Syrach Liberality pleaseth all men and so gains applause respect and Friendship improperly taken but the Friendship thereby obtained proves but like the Winter Brooks that Iob speaks of that what time they wax warm they vanish when it is hot they are consumed out of their place The paths of their way are turned aside they go to nothing and perish And when we stand in most need of their help will most surely deny it Sometimes again love proceeds from external relations as that which a man bears to his own natural Product which although it be usually real and lasting and is allowable good and lawful yet is not praise-worthy and commendable the like being to be found in Beasts and would be as great and lasting in them had they equall knowledge of their own with us nor can be called Friendship since it seldom and of it self begets a Love mutual and reciprocal and cannot indeed be termed other than love of our selves That which doth come nearest to it is the love in Marriage which being mutual and reciprocal when contracted upon fitting terms the Man and Wife thereby are as our great Lawyer thinks according to Scripture he has rightly defined that mystical knot Two Souls in one Body And when it respects Vertue chiefly they may be said to be one Soul in two Bodies When two Souls can place a repose in each other without distrust or diffidence when they dare trust each other as Gods though men that I call Friendship which can never be without some imaginary at least sight of Truth Justice Love c. the one in the other To such a love I will afford and affix the Attribute of good And doubtless such a mutual Love affords the
greatest pleasure of any thing our Souls are able to frame to themselves here and cometh nearest in delight to that pure love of God even for himself which of his mere love and goodness now and then as the earnest of everlasting love and joy he bestows on us for his Sons sake and is chiefly effected through faith This being premised that every love which is praise-worthy and which is able of it self to create an alternate true Love necessarily respects a Deity Let us behold if you please how far it ought to respect humanity too and with whom we may contract a Friendship By the very profession of Atheism notwithstanding any seeming kindness all obligation of mutual rational amity is become null and void for the cause aforesaid I may have charity for such a man and relieve him in his want but charity differs much from friendship and is somewhat of an higher Orb for charity respects God only or chiefly though rationally and we thereby pay a duty barely to him in his Image which we behold with our Reason as his however or which way soever defaced But this other love respecting man as well as God and man chiefly and God secondarily as I may say cannot arise without some apprehension of human recompence or expectation of a reciprocal kindness and that cannot be from an Atheist for how can I think that mans Soul will ever be knit to mine in amity who denies the very cause of its own existence and attributes that to chance which I do to Wisdom and Love Human love stirred through opinion with Reasons allowance necessarily requires an agreement in opinion about the Author of our being For where we vary in opinion about the manner of our Creation or Extraction there is no ground for rational Love as fellow Creatures or fellow Members But whether this kind of Love called Friendship requires any further consent in opinion than that there is one God eternally wise Maker and Creator of all things in Heaven and Earth and a just rewarder of Virtue and punisher of Vice and the like let us if you please inquire a little further Why truly I can see no just Reason why we may not contract Friendship with a Turk as well as Christian States and Princes make Leagues with them or having contracted Friendship with a Christian why I should dissolve that knot of amity imagine he turn Mahometan which I cannot so much as imagine at present if he ever were a true Christian provided I behold and continue to behold in such person according to the best judicature of my Reason the worship of a God and an unfeigned indeavour to be led by the clear light of truth and a continued resolution not to forsake those known and approved by all men paths of Justice Judgment Mercy and the like which tend towards her Friendship being a voluntary union of Affections between man and man and so of human product It is not requisite it should have the approbation and acceptance of Faith but it is sufficient it have the allowance of Reason which is the proper Judge of all human actions It is an human League or tye a duty if you please of loving one another as men and that not as men out of the Body though it be a conjunction of Souls but in the Body and therefore if we think and adjudge the Will and the Affections in man good in the main that is constantly bent and inclined towards some good we are not to reject such an one in point of Friendship because he believes not just as we do or because we think he wants those graces things out of an human rational prospect which we suppose we have We should friendly indeavour to inform his Reason and heartily pray for the further enlightning of his Spirit and so long as we behold faith in his practice whatever he want in the theory begin to love him and continue to love him If mercy and truth forsake not a man I know no Reason why he should not find favour in the sight of man as well as God according to Solomon or why we should relinquish virtue in the Race which doubtless is not in vain whatsoever it meet with at the Goal Our different opinions in point of Religion though they ought not prove often I confess a great obstruction to Friendship but yet there is a greater which puts a stop to it through the whole race of mankind of what temper soever or what opinion soever And that is besides the strange diversity of human Souls in point of opinion the difficulty of discerning anothers opinion and mans mutability too therein the difficulty of discerning the very right bent or inclination of a mans Affections or distinguishing that which is real from counterfeit ware by reason of that false vail which every human Soul the simplest and weakest has ready at hand and is able to put on and wear by looks and gesture as well as speech and that is Hypocrisie and Dissimulation which no other Creature but man how sage soever did or could ever yet put on Charity sometimes overlooks this natural habit in man but Friendship a thing of human product and expecting a return which charity does not trades abroad very seldom and sparingly upon this account of counterfeit wares and men are loth to venture for fear of false returns Of Dissimulation I mean to say somewhat in another place how little it ever advantaged any man and therefore let it suffice here only to say of it that it is the very bane of Friendship and whensoever 't is beheld as an habit in any man that man must not expect Love and Friendship from another That Love is the Loadstone of Love is a trite and true saying and therefore he who would attract it in this case had need carefully observe the Apostles rule and let his Love be without dissimulation It cannot be with it I am sure acceptable or pleasant but nauseous and loathsome Dissimulation seen in any man being a thing that gives an ill aspect and an ill relish and savour to that and other the best indowments in a Soul It was the variety of human tempers and the difficulty of knowing them that I principally respected in the writing of this Epistle Friendship and the want thereof came in accidentally to my thoughts Well perfect and complete Friendship between any two is as the Heathens feigned their antient God begotten of time notwithstanding this it must have a beginning and comes to pass many times on the suddain in an instant as soon as a man makes an end of speaking as we find that of Ionathan to David if we perceive or at least think there be integrity of heart in the Speech Yet in this league of Friendship sometimes too suddainly made and concluded we ought to take some care that it be such as may be lasting and that since as one says All old Friends were once new we
reject all moral Vertue and Goodness as insignificant will not be drawn to affect or love us otherwise than aforesaid nor imbrace us for any Justice or Mercy shewed them for as for Spiritual Graces theirs and ours are equally invisible we shall do well so to frame our ways as to please our Maker that if they become our enemies because we do not take the same imaginary flight with them they may at least be at peace with us and that if it be possible as much as in us lyes we may have peace with all men In the Christian World I doubt nay I believe there is least visibility of Friendship and this I take to be the cause that the very outward noble badge or cognizance of Christianity I will not say true Christianity by the help of Satan has so much elevated many Souls in opinion and fancy as to make them think no others who wear it not outwardly for ostentation and shew as themselves worthy their common Friendship It is a seeming unhappiness in our nature that our Affection cannot be long at rest and that Love in man only has such several Pilots or Guides Sense would have it stay at home chiefly and please or work for the Body that at least it should not move far nor otherwise than to bring in freight for the ease and pleasure of that Reason would it should traffick abroad and imbrace whatsoever that heholds good and virtuous laudable and amiable in another man and the man withal therefore Grace now and then raises it to mount upwards and beholding that fixed bright Star by which we all move attracts it in some measure to bend and incline thitherward without regard to danger It moves at all these several Summons or calls wherein that in Beast never stirs otherwise than from Sense But yet upon every turn and occurrence so weak is our light of Reason and so uncertain and often clouded through our sins is that other bright and gracious light that it is apt to be drawn and haled home again by Sense and then it catches up every weapon offensive and defensive for the Body Anger Fear and the like Thus are we tossed to and fro as it were by contrary Winds and often shipwracked before we come to shoot that dreadful gulf of Death and we may well cry out before the time O wretched men that we are who shall deliver us from this Body of Death Reason sooner than Sense will shew us some ground whereon we may anchor and fix our Love as it were in a good and pleasant harbour for a time but it self will often loosen it again by shewing us it is sandy that there is no trust in man nor in the children of men and that whatsoever we see of Justice or Truth or any thing of goodness in them for the present those are not things of permanency in them Men are various fickle and mutable in their Habits and in their Affections too We cannot rationally trust our selves We have no power over our selves 't is most certain And we have beheld some seemingly very rational for want of Grace destroy that Body they best loved their own with their own hands And how then can we place any setled trust in another Faith must throw us out at last an anchor for the Soul sure and stedfast and that must be of Love not that it directs or should direct our Love quatenus human that is and ought to be guided by Reason But it may inflame our Love to that height towards our Maker that we shall not be troubled above measure though we behold the inconstancy of human Nature and the falshood and treachery of our dearest Friends though they deceive us and all the World forsake us nay Though the Earth be moved and though the hills be carried into the midst of the Sea We may wish perhaps but as much setledness of Affection and seeming constancy of Nature amongst our selves as in those poor Creatures which serve us and were created next to God's Glory for our use that we might find ground to trust each other here and lodge our Affection safe out of our selves for a time in any fellow-member since we can behold no better by our Sense nor comprehend what is above us by our Reason But his Wisdom is infinite and unsearchable and yet perhaps may appear to us herein that we should trust even while here in none but him who is for ever one and the same and Lord over all And who if we love him will withhold nothing he sees good for us and become himself our Comforter in all our Afflictions EPIST. VII Of the different vain pursuits of the Souls of Men wherein we are ready to accuse each other of Folly though not our selves and yet are all Fools in some degree That no pursuit of the Soul here is praise-worthy or commendable further than it intentionally advances God's Glory which is the mark set before us and which if we do not behold in all our travails our labour will not profit IN my Treatise of the Soul I made some glance at the various and different pursuits of it in man that is the affectionary or imbracing part of it but I could not but behold withal the several opinions that men seem to have of the pursuit of each others Affection how vain every man thinks that to be which he himself affects not or desires But the beholding the variety of opinions and judgments in the case with the folly and madness of all men would have conduced little to the present cure of any Soul diseased and therefore I needed not to insert my thoughts thereabout in such Treatise but have reserved and now sent them to you for your perusal Truth is all our courses as various as they are in any excess and not necessarily relating to some other end than what they seem to an ordinary Spectator to tend after are equally frivolous and vain and though we are every one of us very dimm-sighted towards any espial of our own follies and ridiculous eager and longing pursuits yet are we quick and apt enough to see and deride the same madness and folly in others and we never need with the Psalmist attribute laughter to him who dwelleth in the Heavens from his only or alone beholding our futile contrivances since we our selves are able to afford it one another from the weak inspection we do or are able to make into any mans madness or folly but our own I do think the Creator of all things who affords himself that blessed center of rest unto our Souls and to whom our best and chiefest Affections might from very gratitude rationally tend has of his abundant wisdom and gracious goodness permitted and allowed them not only a divers and innocent vagrancy towards various and several terrestrial objects but withal so framed the Intellect and Judgment as that each several person shall in some manner or measure approve and allow
be building of Babels to get himself a name We shall find in every brave Spirit so intitled something of the Roman temper It would leave some mark of its being here and never considers of any such saying as Thou fool this night c. much less that the world may be and continue when neither the word Roman nor the name of any one Family or People now being on the face of the Earth unless what is already registred in Scripture shall be used in mens mouths or so much as known Let no man too confidently think of immortalizing his name either from Writing or the Press It was a bold thought as well as a saying which proceeded from one when he had finished his work that it should live in despight of Iupiters anger We may well think notwithstanding his elegance he never rightly understood his Iupiter that is an eternal power who making all things out of nothing is able to reduce all things to nothing and cause things which have been as if they never were This bold saying with some of the like of his fellow Poets though it be not actually confuted in our days is not therefore to be received as Oracular Though I believe the Creation of the World with others I find no firm or just ground to believe it is so near an end as some others have accounted it from Prophecies which I much doubt whether any of us ever yet rightly understood And then we may as well believe in Reason the future oblivion of all present actions as the present oblivion of most past ones and that of Nations for ought we know or can reasonably imagine indowed with as brave Spirits and as industrious to preserve their memory and deliver it over to Posterity as we our selves A thing the whole race of human Nature for want of truly beholding a present Vanity and another manner of future felicity has is and ever will be prone unto And I my self am prone to think that before any imaginary fifth Monarchy takes place that is before the World have an end there may be yet fifteen or more successively take place and amongst these 't is not altogether irrational to conjecture that God to punish us for our Pride and self-conceit here or other secret purposes best known to himself may raise up one of such power that he may give Laws unto the World One who may make such a destruction as that in after ages Learning and Arts may seem chiefly beholding to some of his Successors for its rise And yet in this rage and tempest to shew his own power and might according to his promise preserve intire his Holy word Some have imagined the Turk may do as much as I have said Well! we have authority to say Of that day and hour knoweth no man We reckon and account upon time while we live but as time is nothing to God so time will quickly be no more with us but we shall be swallowed up in Eternity Indeed upon a call to repentance St. Iohn Baptist's words are true and necessary the kingdom of Heaven is at hand Our passage is quick and speedy and our Souls now Earthly Inhabitants must in short space know their doom And were it imaginable that they with our Bodies could sleep and become as 't were insensible till that last day though they should sleep together Myriads of ages yet upon sound of the last Trump and their then awaking it could seem no otherwise to them than as yesterday Here do we often hunt after we know not what and think to catch hold on something stable and permanent but when our very Bodies awake again through their very instruments of Sense our Souls may behold themselves to have been here but in a dream This inscription on all things here Vanity whereof Solomon seems to have had a full and clear view and was the man who first delivered the same over to us in writing is a very good and I may say too a gracious sight and prospect and a very ready one I think to point us to inquire after if not find out something which is free and clear from such inscription But it is a further most gracious and glorious donative if we ever behold it and we must never expect to behold it as of our selves and from our own strength our Opticks are naturally too weak There have been many as well Heathens as others who have obtained a pretty fair view of the vanity of all things here below from their very light of Reason what any of them saw farther I cannot say nor will go about to determine but I should have thought that tenth Satyr of Iuvenal to have proceeded from somewhat more than an ordinary poetical rapture or fancy had it not been for the conclusion therein monstro quod ipse tibi possis dare When once we think we behold that sight as of and from our selves our eyes become weak and dazled and from too intent a view of this World we are disabled to see and contemplate the glory of another that sight must be reached unto us upon our humility in beholding the other and of our selves we cannot reach it But this is a needless instruction for you and improper for this place We were minded in our search to inquire and behold what and how far worldly imployments of the Soul were necessary and commendable Whereabout I never thought it good to indeavour to hang clogs and fetters on any mans but rather add wings to it Neither is it good to amaze men with speculative Notions but rather to incourage all men to be up and doing provided a way be opened first to behold that mark which every Soul should chiefly aim at and that is God's Glory And therefore if a man can behold that and place it as the prime object and make it the main end and chief Scope and design of all his work and motion Let him go on though he expect and promise himself thereby Power Honour Riches c. besides The Heathen in setting forth and painting of Virtue covered her with fair and rich outward ornaments and trappings because they thought no man would take hold on and imbrace her naked And 't is no more than what usually are found belonging to her Yet these appurtenances should not be looked on but in transitu and esteemed a dowry of Grace after Marriage not of necessary compact before But besides a good primary intention in every Souls motion it will be very necessary and requisite for every Soul to keep a due and constant watch over her self lest at any time unawares she sacrifice to her own nets For though her good motions like Springs may seem to proceed out of the Earth yet they are in truth from the Sea and though as the Earth we receive fruit and increase thereby we ought at no time to dam them up within our bowels lest they become putrid and unwholesome but allow
fruition will often admit the entrance or intrusion of somewhat else not to fill it but to rake and tear it for a time and therefore it must be some gracious stop of the Souls craving rather than properly its satisfaction or content some blindfolding or hooding from the ordinary presentments of the World Some little diversion and way of exercise of all or at least its best faculties as it were out of our selves and that by the gracious warmth of that Sun of Happiness in duely beholding his Image first the earnest of Happiness since we cannot behold him as he is which is Happiness it self And how this may most commonly happen or readily come to pass I have indeavoured according to my ability to declare under that often happy prospect of true Charity Now give me leave here to speak a little of some things wherein we are often deceived To mention ought of Happiness like to arise from any bodily pleasures common to Beasts as eating drinking or the like wherein Man becomes as certainly deceived as any thing were below a manly Soul But I shall speak only of the Souls peculiar seeming satisfaction in hope according to that saying Soul take thine ease thou hast goods laid up Surely many men who have spent their years in turmoil as well as their days in Vanity about it may be said to have gathered much and tasted little some have had so many pleasant seats as that they could not take their pleasure in any and perhaps have entred Friendship with so many that they could never enjoy the Happiness of true Friendship with one On the other side any sedentary contemplative course of life will as soon deceive a man's expectation that seeming withdrawing a man's self out of the World while he is in it and a poetick fancy of some Earthly Elysium to be found here will never create that satura quies so much talked of it may prove a vale of rest unto the Body but not unto the Soul nor a Happiness to either The Imagination cannot be at rest one moment and whatsoever it brings in to the Affections if it appear not useful and necessary it will prove but unsavory to them and be so rendred now and then by it self and raises them trouble about trivial matters as quick and soon as about weighty The proper chief and peculiar pleasure or delight of the Soul from any cause that ever I could find or guess is the reverberation of some good works or a light or joy arising or springing from thence which in a retiredness from the World will miss of many objects to act upon from which this Happiness might redound I know there was a great Emperor and a wise who after he had tasted what Fruits busy greatness but perhaps not good works could afford voluntarily surrendred up his Scepter and could not be prevailed with upon the greatest invitation and most urgent Reason to accept it again but feelingly said 't is likely He took more true delight in the growth of the Lettice in his Gardens than the increase of his Dominions And doubtless there are many more would give up their Verdict for that state of life as most of all tending towards Happiness which God appointed Adam in the state of his Innocency But I who have had some taste of the pleasure of it and perhaps better understand it than some who admire it will not recommend it as a station wholly exempt from disquiet Even since our first Trespass we are subject to be afraid if we hear but a voice in the Garden and the very withering of any gourd we have there is enough to raise our anger especially if before like Ionah we rejoyced or were exceeding glad at the growing of it though we made it not to grow I do not think but there are and have been many of late days as well as in Davids time both publick and private men who while they lived counted themselves happy men nay some who have lived all their days in the Sun-shine of the World and set at last too in brightness and though their pomp has not followed them yet have escaped that Prophet's prediction of never seeing light and are now at rest and happy but these are but rare Largesses of Gods bounty and goodness Such a condition there might be and they might be contented in it but yet they could not be so happy as to cross Solon's observation of Ante obitum nemo supremaque funera c. since they could never be secured from danger of misery or the thoughts of it And therefore in our search after some proper way and means to reduce the Soul to a quiet state which effected is some degree of Happiness we must reject what are called the goods of the Body and Fortune and have recourse to what will enlighten or improve that which is eternal in us and is truly our selves Amongst which what we call Learning may deservedly be ranked But yet I think the multiplicity even of that which is rather the treasure than the goods of the mind doth more distract than instruct us more burden than ease and satisfy the mind Of this I take St. Paul to speak when he saith knowledge pusseth up and that Solomon meant no other when he tells us He that increaseth knowledge increases sorrow as appears by his foregoing confession that he had given his heart to seek and search out by Wisdom concerning all things that are done under Heaven which he found a sore travel Surely it is acquired and adventitious knowledge not the power to know and discern so far as may concern our future safety that molests us for of that Solomon saith It is pleasant to the Soul The bringing in of Foreign Plants and setting them in a man 's own Soil provided he have a judgment to distinguish good from evil may be good and in some measure pleasant but to have his own Soil improved to such a degree as to raise or produce as wholesom and as savory and such as may nourish and heal as well as delight him or others which every man may do in some measure by digging at home is better and will prove more cordial to him He who takes in too much of this Foreign kind of Lading will find it though light yet cumbersom and troublesome and neither please his Pilot nor his Passengers his Intellect or his Affections I cannot but think that many originally excellent brave Souls like clear Springs might of themselves and from themselves have afforded pure and curious Waters which by receiving in so many inlets and imagining thereby with a rapid stream to carry all before them have become not only useless but troubled and muddy and withal not seldom lost as well their original name as their Virtue Repute and Estimation Truth is a blessed thing and happy is he I will affirm that finds her but there are few of our high-flown learned men I
often call for and place that no beautiful nor pleasant thing Suspicion as a Centinel in the Soul I do believe there is a righteous and good God in Heaven continually beholding all human actions and a rewarder and punisher thereof according to demerit and since I do believe so much I may conjecture that he would not frame human Nature capable of any bodily affliction or suffering but what by his gift of patience and contentedness might be born with some kind of pleasure or delight The Mind or Soul distinct and of it self is not vulnerable in any part but where it yields of it self and I am sure pleasure which is the health of the Soul will sooner arise in being deceived from a good and innocent intent and meaning than in deceiving from a bad and evil one and therein the deceived has the advantage and therefore I do not nor dare not recommend that thought to any one Wise or Prudent we would all be whether we know when we are so or not It is a very pleasant prospect some have said sitting on the side of an hill to behold the Errors in the vale below but then a man had need be very well seated and fixed left that through some mist arising from thence or some giddiness or inadvertency in himself he rowl down into the same or the like Errors he beholds If I could espy out or find a ground for this kind of sedency that it ever were or could be possibly obtained and held while we remain here on Earth I would presently grant that man might be happy here whatever became of him hereafter and that a wise man in no other notion than the Heathen took him were certainly an happy man In case of Prudence as I define it I will agree with him who says that while she is present a Deity is seldom absent at least there is a Deity ready at hand to assist and help but I do not agree with him that she I mean Prudence was ever yet within the power of any Mortal or at his beck or call or that I am able to shew her to any man in such manner as that he may lay hold on her and detain her He with others who seems to undertake so much has done no more than what Solomon had done before him endeavoured to shew us the vanity of all things which indeed is a prospect from Prudence and which most sober men see by fits and yet often court those things they beheld as deceitful and which usually carry repentance and sorrow as their attendants So as to see vanity do's not amount to a clear sight of all things conducing to Happiness Prudence is a flitting companion of human Nature if she rise with us she may hap not to lye down with us and if she lye down with us she may hap not to rise with us If the Spaniard had his wish and the World should be able to rise wise one morning it is to be doubted or feared above half of it would go to bed foolish So much is a man apt to differ from himself and that from causes sometimes appearing and sometimes not A great and wise Statesman was wont to say from some experience 't is like that that was seldom or never good and sound Counsel which was given soon after dinner and surely there may be found many other and far greater obstructions to Prudence than fumes arising from a full stomach The Soul is subject to many imperfections as long as 't is subjected to work in a Body and to become tired as well as stifled or blinded If Alexander could always behold sleep as the earnest of death a man of a meaner capacity may see it and term it the emblem of folly and find that his Intellect that is the better part of his Intellect for I do not mean his Imagination but his Reason is not able sometime to watch for his will one hour nay one moment We may sometimes find Reason or Prudence in the Soul that is Reason in her best native dress and behold her as an handmaid to Happiness and quiet and she may often prove no less and so we claim and challenge her to be under our jurisdiction when ever we find her but yet still she is often out of the way when we want her and would have her nay when we have most need of her We may think to borrow her or lend her and indeavour to shew her to another but if we do we must lend the party our eyes too at the same instant and season for he who is Prudent himself if at any time he will take upon him to make another so had need be as well able to infuse his own or some discerning Spirit into him as afford him his rules and documents to walk by We are too ignorant and blind I fear in finding out or discerning the manner of conveyance of very human Prudence as we call it whence it is and by what ways and methods 't is attained Prescriptions or directions for Prudence in the Soul are good and yet may be compared to our Physicians methodus medendi towards recovery or health of the Body the method may be orderly observed and a man never the better it may be somewhat worse The best and most prudential saying is no otherwise to be looked upon than a Recipe which works on several Subjects several Effects and several Effects on the same Subject at several Times and Seasons We may grant Solomon to be as great a Doctor as any in that case but none of his precepts are so far approved as to be Universally infallible and without exception It is generally true indeed which he says as for instance in this A soft answer turneth away wrath but we meet sometimes or at particular seasons with tempers and constitutions where a rough blustring or bold answer shall soonest work that effect Though he generally tells us there is a time for all things he could never prefix that time to particular occasions or particulars to time that must be left to every mans Prudence or rather to God That may be Prudence to day which will not prove so to morrow For though we are able sometimes to judge rightly of anothers disease we are apt to be deceived in the secret inclination or suddain alteration of tempers with which we deal And therefore he himself is forced to leave us at large with some such excellent general sayings as these The preparations of the heart are in man but the answer of the tongue is of the Lord. Commit thy works unto the Lord and thy thoughts shall be directed The heart of man purposeth his way but the Lord directeth his steps The lot is cast into the lap but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord. Mans goings are of the Lord how can a man then understand his own way And that power to a please a mans very Sense at
through it take the advice of their Affections and so soonest believe that which they have in desire or a ready Will to Which thing Will is ever attendant on the Affections Now there are very few men but would be wise or so accounted wiser than their brethren though they are not so And thereupon if a man in the least estimation for Wisdom and withall reputed a sober godly man shall but begin to pity their Errors with a seeming sorrow and modestly acquaint them how long they have been led in darkness by others their liberty of Conscience for so it must be intitled enthralled and that it is high time to awake and become wiser and more discerning and that wiser they are or shall be if they will believe him That man shall not want a favourable attention at first and that usually terminates in a simple credit in the end That the Soul of man while it is conjoyned to a body here is a Prisoner and in a kind of Thraldom we all agree who believe it to be celestial and a substance of it self We naturally affect liberty and therefore upon the very sound of that one world Libertas Reason which is or should be Mistress in the Soul and free of it self though not so free as perhaps it might be out of the Body is apt to stir and move But I wish to God it were his blessed will before it moved in every man or in the beginning of its motion it might through his grace consider a little this common plausible Doctrine to the Affections of liberty of conscience The Affections indeed according to my definition of Conscience are therein included and 't is their liberty we would that they should not be in subjection to Reason but our best part we enthral usually by this very hearkening and compliance Our Reason and what proceeds from that though we are under some clouds of the Body is freer than we imagine neither can any man restrain it without our assent and that is the only way of slavery it is subject to in surrendring and yielding it self up to another mans and therefore to preach up liberty of Conscience is to me a strange Doctrine I dare challenge all the Potentates or mighty men of the World to deprive me of my liberty of Conscience that is a free consult of my faculties alone and by my self or to believe what I list which is the result of Reason it self Indeed they may by some hard usage of my Body hinder the free operation of my Soul while it is in the Body and they may separate them at last but that is the utmost they can do And they do often hinder the gratification of our Affections because to the gratifying of them there is necessarily some bodily act or motion and that it is to be doubted is the liberty most men aim at and catching at that shadow they lose the substance enslave their Reason to let their Affections reign and thus are men taken in a snare while they think to creep from under a net This is that medicine for cure of Souls which some men have found out that like some sort of poison tickles the heart till it stupify the brain pleases the affections so far on the suddain as that they insensibly attract Reason's consent make their own Reason submit to that of others because others have best pleased them and so possessed them Thus is that excellent gift Reason deluded which God has bestowed on every particular man in some measure for the government of his Affections and which every man may and ought to make use of alone and apart by it self and is a thing that seldom leads a man right when it moves by consent or Sympathy and is perswaded and stirs not but according to Chancellor More 's story in company They who thus readily lay aside their scale of Reason to make use of other mens for their Affections may be thought to have it of so weak a make and size as that it would prove a fruitless endeavour to advise them not to receive any thing for currant at any time but what they likewise well try and weigh alone by their own It would break some say it is so slight and this is the badge of the generality of mankind under the notion of the vulgar Well I do not think many men under that notion so weak but that they might very well and very safely do it and that it is a restiveness in Reason and a contracted rustiness rather than a weakness which a man might wipe off and that every man might of himself become able God assisting him to direct and govern himself and with more ease and surer peace work out his own salvation with fear and trembling At least if he made any use of his Reason he would soon discern the danger of this Foreign assistance towards his present peace especially voluntary aids without Authority of their Prince who seldom aim so much at others Spiritual advancement as their own temporal But for the present we will suppose the generality of mankind thus weak under the notion of the Vulgar and thereupon instead of advice to them we will deliver our thoughts by way of remonstrance to you who seem a man of a clear discerning judgment out of that rank and have taken upon you the care and cure of Souls and that is only That you continue ever careful as I verily think you are of your self at present not to impose on us any thing you have not first very well ruminated and digested by your Reason and besides that you advise others of your degree over whom you have any influence to use the like care There is envying and strife and divisions amongst us and we are carnal and shall be carnal But that gift of Reason in us hath nothing of carnality in it as of it self but is able to inform us that as God has no need of our quarrelling or contending for or about him so neither can such doings please him or be acceptable unto him And therefore it may be somewhat of wonder that Reason can assent or be transformed into a belief that the Deity whom we adore should be invocated in any such case or made partaker or Patron on either side Surely when some mens Affections have once deluded their own Reason there follows a necessary consequence that that Reason should alledge the tendency of such Affections towards God who is the protector of all that love and fear him to delude others too or else we could never believe at any time we fought for God or persecuted any man for God's sake Indeed he is strangely represented to us by some men somewhile the God of peace at other times the Lord of Hosts sometimes of Unity and Concord and making men to be of one mind in one house sometimes of division and discord and setting the brother against the brother according as it suits with their several Affections
we see hear or feel the Effects As concerning any such like future motion the cause of the Wind whence it comes or whither it goes which the Text tells us we know not that is Reason's inquiry and it must be Reason's eye that beholds ought thereabout And what is from thence brought into the Soul is of some continuance a thing no ways incident to Beasts and that which we call belief which whatever it be continues the same till Reason be consulted again and inform otherwise If I believe the Wind to be fluent air If I believe it to be caused by some fermentation like that in our Bodies upon meeting of divers humors upon the concourse of several Atoms If I believe it is sent out of the caverns of the Earth c my belief in each case continues all the while the same till Reason frame another in my Soul Nay Sense shall not alter a belief without some consult of Reason and therefore a belief once raised or framed do's upon every touch of Sense make a kind of resort to Reason for its allowance or disallowance for its continuance as it is or its change For instance if I once believe that you love me or have a kindness for me If after I hear otherwise from others or see a strangeness in your countenance or feel some hard usage from you before the alteration of this first setled opinion or belief there will necessarily be some consult of Reason whether this or that may not be and yet your Affection continue firm Now if Reason do not weigh things by it self but listens only to the introduction of Sense so far forth as to change my belief without due examination this is the thing which I call Credulity and for which Reason is negligent and to blame Though I allow a Will in Brutes Imagination or Cogitation Memory and such a kind of Reason as by and through Sense co-operating with those faculties guides them in a regular motion and may be said to create a knowledge in them yet without Sense it is idle and nothing And can neither put a stop to the Affections in opposition to Sense nor create any such thing as a belief which is a matter effected above and beyond Sense though not clean contrary to Sense as some would have us to believe and through human Reason and is the consequent in such a Soul only as shall be able to work when the windows of Sense shall be shut up or Sense shall be no more Many Beasts are quick of Sense and so of knowledge I grant and may be said to be sensibly rational but not rationally sensible or so much as to consider their Sense or raise any belief about it And this is the utmost I am able to judge of their capacity for I must confess and acknowledge that could I discern more or could any man discover to me some certain indubitable sign of any such rational motion in them at any time as to give a check to their Affections which is the thing I call Conscience or create a light in them out of the reach of Sense and raise an evidence of things not seen which is the thing I adjudge to be Faith or Belief and which the weakest human Soul is in some measure capable of and I doubt not but Divine Grace does sometimes shine upon such beyond our inspection It would overthrow my opinion of their annihilation or else much shake and batter my belief of our own Immortality The Fowls of the Heaven are of so quick Sense as that thereby perceiving the alteration of the Air by a kind of adjunct Reason accompanying that Sense they know their appointed time as 't is said of the Stork and move accordingly yet being uncapable to foresee or judge of any cause thereof they cannot be said to believe ought thereabout before or after Undoubtedly the Ox may know his Feeder from another man as sure as the Feeder knows the Ox from another Beast but the Ox cannot believe any thing of the Feeder that he may or will hurt him upon a displeasure as the Feeder may of the Ox for that must proceed from Reason's inquiry or information above or beyond Sense Many Creatures when they feel pain or are sick and sensible thereof have such a kind of Reason ready attendant as often effectually works their cure without inquiry into natural causes and so may be said to know the cure but yet without an inspect into natural causes 't is impossible to believe it and therefore 't is that rational sight only that creates a belief and is in no wise the sight of Sense Now when from Reason there is raised in the Soul of man especially with concurrence of some Sense collateral as I may say to the thing believed a firm and indubitable belief of any thing we make use of the word knowledge and say we know and yet in truth there is no more than a belief in the case For instance I know I shall dye Now if I had never seen man dy or heard of death I should by my Reason observing my decay and waxing old as a garment verily believe some such thing but withal seeing and hearing continually of the death of others I rest assured I shall dy and so say I know But my own death being absolutely out of the reach of Sense I cannot properly be said to know so much neither does what I say therein amount to any more than a belief And so it is in many like cases where we say We know as where Iob says as we translate it I know that my redeemer liveth there is no more to be understood than a firm strong Faith the like of St. Iohn Baptist giving knowledge of salvation And so I think is St. Paul to be understood in that Chapter where he mentions knowledge so often Now a Beast neither knows or believes any thing of his own death for that as the causes and symptoms of death are out of the reach of his Reason which only accompanies Sense and is nought without it So his very death is out of the reach of Sense it self and he cannot know it For this reason perhaps some may think them the more happy Creature but if we consider it and make good use of our Reason we shall find that over and above that superlative prerogative of beholding in a manner and so believing future happiness we have here a great benefit and advantage by it above other Creatures and are enabled from hence to quit the Affections which otherwise would be disturbed by the often false alarms of Sense to which they are subject and so keep our Soul from being wounded by any thing from without Knowledge I say is a thing of the meaner extract the product of Sense and in no wise of Reason neither is Reason the parent thereof in any case unless in some case of Conscience a thing so much talked of and which I
the like nature with that breath it proceeded from and so be immaterial and immortal And we shall find this difference further confirmed by the same Authority For whereas Moses gives no other Life or Spirit different from the bloud to other creatures but saith the bloud is their life or Soul and their Soul in the bloud when he speaks of that of man he calls it the bloud of their lives signifying by this variety of phrase the difference of the thing and that in man the bloud has rather its motion from the Soul than the Soul its origine from the bloud And in the ensuing verse where he forbiddeth the shedding mans bloud by a retaliative Law he adds again the words used in the Creation For in the image of God made he man So that the Souls of Brutes only appear as the Tongues mentioned in the Acts as it were of fire but that of Man as a spark of that Eternal Light real and durable and as Solomon says after the dust returns to Earth as it was the Spirit shall return to God that gave it SECT III. The Immortality of the Soul of man maintained and illustrated from its obstruction in its operation NOw though this Earthly rarified Spirit of Brutes may to sense often outshine the other and several other creatures may outstrip some such particular men as we call Naturals in knowledge that diminishes nothing from nor renders the Soul of man to be of a less noble extract than in truth it is but that the one still remains Divine and the other Natural For although real Fire may by hid and by reason of some obstruction impediment or interposition dart forth little or no light to the senses and an ignis fatuus may shew it self and appear more lucid and bright to them yet Fire is no less Fire when covered and the nature and quality of them still remains different The outward appearance does never infallibly demonstrate the inward excellency of things and there may be a change of our common Proverb and Gold found that glisters not It seems to me rather some Argument of the immortality of mans Soul that it sometimes remains so darkly as it were inclosed in some one particular trunk or carcass without any the least symptom of its being there more than outward heat and motion as well as that in some others it shews forth its wonderful capacity and faculties beyond that of all other creatures For if it did arise naturally or had its production from the flesh or the more fluid substance of that flesh the Bloud as that of Beasts there never could happen or be such a disparity such a distance and disproportion in its effects as now and then there appears The faculties of the Souls of Beasts wherein they are similar to those of Man do not much exceed or outshine one another of the same species For although one Horse may be more docible than another more lively quick or better spirited as we term it than another yet there never was that or any other kind of Brute so brutish as I may say but had some knowledge of his Feeder and like the Ox and the Ass none of the wisest Animals could know its Owner and its Master's Crib none that would not shew some endeavour to nourish and preserve it self be sensible of what was noxious and destructive to it self careful to avoid Fire and Water or the like know its Young if Female and love and nourish them and be somewhat useful in its kind to man and other creatures as if the Souls of Beasts only dwelt in their native and proper Country and were at liberty and ours were here Prisoners in Chains and Fetters and sometimes in a Dungeon waiting for their deliverance I knew a man born in a Village near me living to the age of twenty years very heathful of a good stature of perfect outward lineaments and features endowed with the senses of Hearing and Seeing of a sage countenance if at any time without motion and yet never as I or others could discern knowing any one person about him more than another never making any signs for meat or drink though greedily swallowing them when put to his mouth never could he be made sensible of the passage of his own ordure or of Fire or Water and yet might be kept at any time from the danger of those Elements by the interposition of Stools or a Line or Cord and within that circumscribed Sphere would move all day ridiculously Certainly if this inclosed Soul had its being from the Bloud and not the Bloud its motion from it whatever Physicians may alledge and however they may guess at some obstructions or defect in some part of the Brain and they can but guess at the one more then I do at the other for they can shew me nothing in a dissection it must in some degree equal that of Brutes in outward appearance But seeing there is such a disproportion in degree of knowledge as well by comparing the most stupid Man with the most stupid Animal as the wisest Man with the wisest Animal and Man is found to exceed both ways that very excess on our parts does more demonstrate the immediate work of God in our creation and somewhat different from Natures ordinary course which though his working too usually produces the same effects in all individuals of the same species and might prove a Medicine to allay our fears on the one hand and our spiritual pride on the other and shew what the Soul of man is capable of and yet how obscure it may be here on Earth till it shall please that Inspirer to receive it into Glory I do not look on knowledge in the Soul of man as a bare remembrance or that the mind of man is at present and while in the Body merely thereby let and hindred from the knowledge of all things yet some such notion may not seem to arise and be fixed now and then in our conceptions altogether without the allowance of Reason since as often as we attain to any intellectual knowledge of things that is from causes whereof we were or seemed before ignorant and that either from the bare labour and search of our intellective faculty or from others information through sense with its attention it will seem to us rather a recovery from some disease than any new being or existence in the Soul rather a dissipation of some Cloud than any new Light and that we knew as much before if we had but minded it as we are wont to say And besides the usual native weakness or blindness in the Soul of man which is a thing almost perpetually labouring and working in some men as it were for a cure if it recovers in some sort and measure yet it 's afterward very incident to a relapse and subject to an adventitious weakness or blindness doth contract infirmities and often lives long in the Body blinded with a
residence or future habitation of these Souls when the body leaves them or they leave the body We shall scarce allow them any heavenly vision and though they are the work of God's hand as well as we and work to his glory and set forth his glory here on Earth we shall hardly admit them to do it locally in Heaven To what place shall we convey them or for what work or use shall we assign them in our thoughts If we leave them as thin aiery bodies wandring up and down in the Air or we know not where or whither neither animating or moving other bodies nor doing good or harm to man or ought else I think we derogate from the wisdom of that first cause wich can no more be thought to continue a thing altogether useless and unnecessary than to create a thing useless from the beginning which reason will not allow us to think If upon the separation of these Souls from the body we can imagine they forthwith enter into animate and reside in other bodies we must forthwith make enquiry whether such bodies only as are of the same Nature Quality and Species with those they inhabited before or else promiscuously of any kind or degree whatever Either of which will prove absurd to imagine with reason But before we come to view that absurdity in its particulars All living and moving Creatures would be a little considered together in their several Faculties or Intellects from which notion Intellect we raise our doubts of their Mortality or perishing Though the wisdom of the Almighty be apparent and imbraced by the reason he has given us in his willing the production of a more fine and subtle spirit for moving bodies than those fixed to the Earth touched before we cannot reasonably conjecture any vast disproportion of Intellect though some we find between living moving Creatures themselves whose voluntary operation seems to be and tend only towards acquiring Food and Sustenance to each particular individual and perpetuating it self by generation For our more immediate acquaintance or conversation with some of them more proper and fit for our use make the difference in their Intellect seem greater to us than in reality it is And we are apt to place the excellency generally in those creatures which necessarily depending on us next under God the Preserver and Feeder of all for preservation and sustenance do by that their dependance and familiarity with us shew their Intellect more apparently to us than other Brute Creatures But why we should hereupon imagine that there is not as much of Intellect in some Fishes of the Sea as either in Fowls of the Air or four-footed Beasts which we better know I find no reason since by their Intellect they both acquire their food and preserve themselves from danger equally with the others Nay I see no ground to deprive Insects from as large a share of Intellect in some cases as either By Insects I mean not only those reptilia and volatilia without parts and blood to us discernible but all creaturs whatsoever bred of heat and putrefaction as it may be Mice some kinds of Serpents Frogs and the like whereof some years seem to produce more and far greater numbers than can be thought to proceed from generation though I believe most Creatures bred of putrefaction at first do after generate These together do undoubtedly far exceed in number all quadrupedes and flying Fowls upon the face of the Earth Now some of these have already obtained from us the repute of very wise and provident Animals and we are apt to extol their Intellect sometimes beyond that of other Creatures of far greater bulk and dimension Truly it may be adequate in many cases Intellect we know no more how absolutely to deny them than other Creatures Certainly we cannot deny any sense to most of them for instance the Bee undoubtedly they see and hear too as may be observed and collected from their being stayed or allured with whistling or the ringing of a Bason And since we observe how they will find and know their way to a Field of Thyme or the like some Miles distant from their Hives and return directly to them again we cannot deny them voluntary motion and by consequence Imagination and further I am somewhat assured upon Experiment they will in few days certainly know and distinguish a person conversant about them and not at any time molesting him though he somewhat molest and disturb them and forthwith strike at any Stranger upon his or her approach And truly were Wasps and Hornets equally beneficial to man with them I doubt not but some who have wrote the Common-wealth of the one would soon have espied a Kingdom in the other more than Agur could discern in the Locusts and found as much of sense and Intellect in the one as in the other Since they are no less political creatures and work in select numbers and with no less order and it may be government than the other the like may be said of many other kinds of Insects The numerous excess of Insects beyond that of other creatures granted and likewise that there is in many of them which I know not well how it can be denyed as great a measure of knowledge as in some other creatures which thing Knowledg or Intellect in any or all is our ground to think why such their Spirit resolves not into Earth or Air but rather continues in some airy thin body or transmigrates into some other body for the animation thereof It will follow that the spirits of these insects cannot transmigrate into specifick quadrupede bodies or Fowls because it may be made almost apparent that there often are in one or two days space more of them in number destroyed and mortified than there are probably four-footed Beasts and Fowls upon the face of the whole earth But we must of necessity find out in our imagination some place for the spirits of these insects to rest in for a time or where they work or wander up and down for a certain space Or else conclude they do forthwith animate or transmigrate into bodies of the same or the like species with themselves to wit insects only Which to hold and maintain would be equally absurd to our reason unless we can rest convinced withall of some World in the Moon or at least a most accurate Antipodes to our selves and a Continent of land so placed where the Sun shall have a most lively vivifying influence too at that very time or instant we shall first feel our sharp Autumm frosts For besides the innumerable millions of divers kinds of our ordinary Flies whose spirits from thence cease to work any more in the same bodies between which and those Insects we attribute so much of prudence to it would be difficult to define any certain bounds in point of prudence or Intellect How many thousand millions of that sage provident creature the Ant do's one winter destroy