AN ACCOUNT OF THE NATURE and EXTENT OF THE DIVINE DOMINION & GOODNESS Especially as they refer to the ORIGENIAN HYPOTHESIS Concerning the Preexistence of Souls TOGETHER With a special Account of the vanity and groundlesness of the Hypothesis itself Being a second Letter Written to his much Honoured Friend and Kinsman Mr. Nath. Bisbie By SAM PARKER A. M. C. T. And Fellow of the Royal Society OXFORD Printed by W. Hall for R. Davis 1666. Imprimatur ROBERTUS SAY VICE-CANCELLARIUS OXON SIR I Have now satisfied and perhaps surprised you too for I question not but these Papers will more prevent then answer your expectations For when you remitted me to my own leisure to satisfy your demands the true import of a Friends desires I am confident you believed I would as well use as acknowledge your Favour and I really thought my next to you should have been a Letter of thanks for your forbearance and not a final discharge of my Obligations But being shortly to bid adieu to my Retirements here and fearing I shall no where else enjoy so much Privacy and Leisure I could not satisfy myself till I had gratified your expectations and put myself past all hazard of disobeying your Commands For methinks Sir nothing concerns me so much as those designs that aspire to serve my dearest But my Business is not to compliment and I foresee how exceedingly I shall be straightened in time and therefore I must without the Ceremony of any farther Preface immediately apply myself to the serious discharge of my Task which I shall following the method your injunctions have prescribed me perform in three parts 1. By giving you an account of the true Nature and Extent of God's Dominion 2. By laying down a right Notion of his Goodness 3. By proving the Groundlesness and Vanity of the Origenian Hypothesis concerning the Preexistence of Souls Of each in their order OF THE NATURE and EXTENT OF God's Dominion BY God's Dominion I mean that Sovereign Right and Authority residing in Him in reference to his Creatures or that Power and Prerogative which he has to dispose of them according to his own goodwill and pleasure and this is indifferently expressed by these three terms of Ius Potestas and Dominium The minute and precise differences whereof seems to lie herein that Ius nakedly signifies a right or freedom to act whereas the two latter imply together with this a power or strength of acting And then that Power which God hath in himself antecedently to the Existence of any Created Being is in rigidness and propriety of speech called Potestas but that which he has and exercises since the Creation Dominium But not to insist upon such Niceties they all promiscuously import Dominion and Sovereignty Of which many definitions have been attempted but none of them seem to me more accurate and comprehensive then Mr. Hobs' when he defines it to be Libertas propriis facultatibus secundum rectam rationem utendi De Cive l. 1. c. 1. Though what Exercises of Power are consistent with right Reason and what not I shall discourse anon But if you fancy short definitions 't is the lawful use of Power and so implies two things first it supposes a power or strength to Act and then it imports the legitimate extent and use of it Now as for the Extent of this Power 't is Infinite and Unconfined as well as all the rest of the Divine Perfections and therefore it warrants God to do any thing that will comply with the Reputation of his other Attributes Whence 't is that the Being's and Subsistencies of all things are entirely at his disposal It was at his choice whether he would ever or never create any thing and it is still in his Power either to continue the frame of things in the same state they are in or to erect a new one and that better or worse than the present and any thing else that is not inconsistent with the perfection of his Nature and Attributes But for a fuller Evidence hereof it is necessary to observe that there is a twofold acceptation of Right either more loose when it signifies a Licence & Freedom to do any thing or more restrained when it signifies an Obligation to do any thing The difference between them is this that the former signifies Liberty and the latter Duty that is extended to any thing that is not unlawful this only extends to things due and required by Justice and Equity For instance there is a Right to demand Debts and a Right to pay them the former may be done because no equity forbids it but the latter must be done because Justice requires it Upon this account to give you this Notion by the way every man is bound to make good his Promises though not his threatenings and Punishments because promises make us Debtors but in reference to threatened Penalties we are Creditors for the Offender owes the punishment to the person Offended But though every man be bound to pay his Debts yet he is not bound to demand them for he has a Right to Relax as well as Challenge his due The Rewards therefore consequent upon promises being Debts due from me I am bound by the first sort of Right to pay them but the Penalties consequent upon threatenings being Debts owing to me I am permitted by the second sort of Right either to demand or remit them And thus there is a twofold Right in God the one whereof refers to his Sovereignty which is nothing but an absolute Liberty to act or not to act as Himself shall see cause the other to his Justice and Holiness whereby God is obliged to act suitably to the Essential Rules of Justice and Equity For the Divine Justice is exercised only about things Good and Just but his Dominion about all things that are not Evil or Unjust things therefore being the Objects of God's Dominion not because they are Just but because they are not Unjust it is extended to every thing that is not contrary to Justice i. e. to every thing that is not Evil. But I shall wave all general considerations and only consider the Extent of the Divine Prerogative in reference to Mankind not only because 't is most pertinent to our present design but also because what I shall discourse concerning the Extent and Latitude of God's Power over Men may by Analogy of Reason be applied to all other Creatures endued with Sense and Perception Now in Treating of this matter proposed I shall only consider 1. What God can do 2. What he can not do 1. First Then God has Power to take back from us all or part of what he has given us i e. He can either utterly destroy our Being's or take from us so many Comforts of life and inflict upon us so many Calamities as shall leave us in a condition only preferable to that of Nonexistence for all that we have to render our conditions more valuable than not Being is the free Product of the Divine Power But 't is a certain and undoubted truth that every Superior Authority has Power to Revoke all the free Issues of its own Power unless it have abridged itself from the Exercise thereof by some special compact or promise For compact and promise lay an obligation upon him that makes it and vests a Right in the Person to whom 't is made and therefore where Benefits are bestowed without these Instruments of conveying Right there the Donor has the same Right to withdraw as he had to give them and therefore that God who has given us our Being's has full Power arbitrariously to destroy them But here it will be Objected that destroying the life of a guiltless person is justly accounted the most savage and unmerciful piece of Injustice in the World that 't is almost the only Instance which carries in it an undeniable Iniquity antecedent to all Humane Laws and Sanctions So that when Mr. Hobbs asserts that in the State of Nature there could be no Injuries and Violences Acted amongst Men because they could not have a Right of Propriety in any thing before they had by mutual Compacts apportioned each man's share if he had limited his assertion to possessions of Lands and all other Proprieties Foreign to a man's own person it had been equally true and blameless for Nature doth not assign this Moiety to Tuius and that to Caius but leaves us to share the Earth among ourselves and to Enclose what she had left in Common into particular proprieties as we shall agree among ourselves But when he extends the forementioned assertion to the persons of Men his Error is as palpable as 't is mischievous because every man has a right and propriety in himself Antecedently to all Law and Compact There needs no Covenant to appoint that I shall have a propriety in my own person nay 't is as impossible it should be otherwise as that I should alienate myself from myself and all the grants of all the men in the world cannot Vest me in a greater propriety to myself then Nature has because they cannot make me to be more myself then I already am so that though I were in Mr. Hobs' Natural State of War if he or any other man should take away my life without just cause he would do me at least as evident an Injury as if he should now either by Fraud or Violence thrust me from mine Inheritance to which I have an unquestionable Right both by his own consent and the Laws of that Civil Society of which we are Members because he will Rob me of that in which I have as clear a Right and Propriety as 't is possible for me to have in any thing that depends upon Pact or Covenant Well then it being thus Evident that to take away the Life of an Innocent person is among men a most Enormous and Inhuman piece of Injustice and that antecedently to all positive Sanctions and Contracts why should it not be so in reference to God the Rules of Equity being the same to all Eternal Unalterable and abstract from all Persons States and Relations To which I answer that notwithstanding there are the same general Rules and Principles of Justice in reference to God as to Men that yet the particular Instances are not the same because God's Relation to the Creatures being infinitely different from that which they bear to each other the particular Actions and Displays of his Justice though measured by the same Rule must needs be of a widely different Nature not because the Measure is changeable but because the relation of the Persons suffers variety and alteration For God being the Supreme Sovereign and Cause of all has upon that Account power to deprive any or all of his Creatures of what Perfections and Endowments he pleases whereas the Creatures not having any natural Dominion over one another they cannot take away from their fellow creatures any thing which God has given them without manifest Robbery unless in such cases where the Supreme Lord has been pleased to communicate any part of his Power and Dominion And so in humane Societies though there are the same Laws of Justice in reference to all men yet there are not always the same Instances for though it be granted that every man has by right of Nature a power of punishing any one that injures him yet having entered into Societies either by God's Institution or their own consent or both the exercise of this power is devolved upon some peculiar persons whom we call Magistrates in whose hands every man has for the common good deposited his Authoritative Rights it 's upon that account just and lawful for the Magistrate to punish and take away Delinquents but unjust for the private person to do the same for that were to Usurp that Authority which I have granted away to them unless in cases of necessity as when I am assaulted by another and have no other way to preserve my own Life then by destroying my Assailants there the Commonwealth is presumed to allow me to exercise my natural right myself but where no such necessity urges there the Governors of the Society in which I am and to whom I have passed away the Exercises of my Original Right are to Execute Justice for me so that private persons not having power to punish Criminals as Magistrates have that action would be judged Murder in those which is accounted Justice in these notwithstanding that they are both subject to the same common Rules and Maxims of Equity Duo cum idem faciunt saepe ut possis dicere Hoc licet impune facere huic illi non licet Non quod dissimilis res est sed is qui facit And thus there being so manifest a disproportion between God and Men in reference to their propriety in and dominion over the life of man God may have a right to act that which no Creature can do without the grossest and most exorbitant Injustice for seeing that propriety which every Man has in himself is held from the free gift of our Supreme Lord and that not confined by any Promise or Covenant he may cancel and reverse it when he pleases only by taking back what he has given And if we could stand in the same relation to or dependence on any creature as we do to Him that creature would have as great a right to divest us of the propriety we have in our own Essences as God himself has but because the former can never be supposed that 's the reason the latter can never happen 2. This Power and Dominion which God has over an Innocent persons life and all its appendent privileges may be exercised by occasion of another man's sin for what God has a power to do absolutely he may certainly do upon any occasion for this is only to make use of the Instances of his Dominion to serve other designs of his Providence Exod. 20. ver 5. Thus God threatens to Visit the Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children unto the third and fourth Generation i. e. to punish the Impieties of wicked Parents by bringing their Posterity into those evil Circumstances into which he might have brought them by virtue of his Supreme Dominion though not only themselves but their Progenitors had been faultless The Posterity of Cham was consigned to slavery for their Father's Impiety Seventy thousand men expiated David's folly and Saul's sons were hanged for their Father's perfidiousness and the sin of Ahab was visited upon his Children Scripture supplies us with infinite more instances where God makes use of the Sons infelicity to punish the Father's sin in which cases God only makes his Sovereignty minister to the designs of Justice and if it be lawful as I have proved it is for God to exercise his Supreme Dominion absolutely surely it cannot be unlawful to do it with respect to other ends of Providence And such was the Origine of all the common miseries of mankind God created man at first in a more perfect and happy state but upon occasion of Adam's prevarication he devested all mankind of a great part of those privileges and perfections with which he had endued humane nature And all this God might have done though Adam had never sinned and therefore 't is no Injustice that God has made his Posterity the Heirs of his misfortunes The constitution of Adam's body was probably so regular and harmonious that it had no natural propensions contrary to those of his mind but was entirely subject to all the Dictates of his understanding his Organs clear and well-disposed his Spirits brisk and active his Humours spirituous and oily the ferments of his body regular and steady in their motions and not infected with those malignant tinctures that hurry us into all manner of exorbitant passions and appetites The Earth was fruitful and of its own accord brought forth all sorts of wholesome and pleasant Fruits Man was surrounded with pleasures and delights and had nothing else to do but to take his ease and enjoy them But when Adam fell God disrobed him of most of those great and happy Privileges and cast him into a condition of life uneasy and troublesome Now our bodies are unactive sickly and indisposed and instead of being Instruments to the actings of the mind are the greatest lets and hindrances Paradise is turned into a Wilderness the Earth is barren and accursed and man must earn his bread by the sweat of his brows and this has ever since been the condition of Mankind And though this be a sad story yet after all these losses our condition is still competently or rather extremely happy for besides that if we will but be considerate and live by the use of our rational faculties we may enjoy contentment enough in this world to render our lives pleasant and comfortable God has prepared for us most exquisite and ravishing delights in the next only if we will forbear to pursue our Buitish Appetites from which he hath affrighted us by the fearfullest threatenings and resolve to follow the dictates of Reason and Sobriety to which we are encouraged by the biggest Rewards and Promises so that notwithstanding all the present weaknesses and imperfections of our natures a man must be prodigiously absurd and sottish to make himself miserable And if men will choose to be wicked and miserable against all the Principles of Reason and Interest they have no Reason to blame the Condition of their Natures for that which proceeds purely from the choice of their Wills So that though God has punished the Prevarication of Adam by the evil Condition of all his posterity yet he has done nothing unjust because he might have placed us all in the same Condition though neither Adam nor ourselves had prevaricated his Sanctions And this is no more than what is in some instance or other practised in all Commonwealths As in England every man holding his Estate of the King and the right of all Tenors being derived from his Grant with certain Conditions if any of the Grants fail in the performance of the Conditions on their part the Grantor may justly disseise both them and their Heirs of their Estates Thus if any Person be convicted of Treason against the Crown he is thereupon attainted and not only his Estate esceats to the King as supreme Lord but his Blood too is corrupted so that his Posterity are not capable of Inheritance as deriving no inheritable blood and consequently no Right from him In which case he that should have been next Heir cannot justly think himself injured by being deprived of his Inheritance although himself had not by any misdemeanour forfeited it yet he having no right to it but what was derived from his Ancestors and that being rescinded by breach of those Conditions upon which it was suspended he can with no more equity claim a right in the Fee than he could though his Ancestors had never been vested in it And thus that Entail of Privileges which God of his free goodness had settled upon Adam and his Heirs for ever upon Condition of their Obedience to his Laws was by the disobedience of Adam cut off from himself and all his Posterity 3. The Rights of God's Dominion over sinless Creatures do not extend so far as to warrant his dooming them to a condition more wretched and forlorn than Nonexistence That he has power to reduce them into a state not worse than Not-being is already proved but farther he cannot go without transgressing all the lines of Goodness and Equity because if he should he would rob his Creatures of more than he had ever given them And if this would not be an injurious Cruelty I must challenge all the world to tell me what would This Assertion is levelled against those men who are so hardy as to say that God might to show the uncontrolableness of his Sovereignty have decreed infinite myriads of faultless Creatures to endless and insupportable Torments That ever such Thoughts could enter into the minds of men For what can we imagine more repugnant to all the notions of goodness and equity then to be the deliberate and sole Author of the biggest misery to an innocent and harmless Person What more Heavenly wide from the nature of true goodness 't is a malice so near and abstracted that it can reside no where but in the Breasts of Fiends and Devils nay 't is the blackest Part of their natures and that very ingredient which makes them what they are Besides how can God be glorified in the eternal miseries of guiltless Creatures How can their deserved damnation be conducive to his Interests How can their unmerited torments gratify infinite goodness or add to infinite happiness Could he promote his own Real Felicity by the Infelicities of an innocent Creature yet we cannot imagine him so selfish spirited as to effect it much less for the mere ostentation of his greatness If God can damn his Creatures to magnify the absoluteness of his Dominion why do we rail at Tyrants and Devils when they upon the same account take pleasures in the miseries of others God is supposed to delight in the advancement of his own glory but can we suppose him to delight in the eternal miseries of Innocents' Was there ever any Tyrant so savage as to please himself in the endless and most exquisite Tortures of an harmless Infant 'T is the property of Devils whose malice is boiled up to an infinite rancour and cruelty to make another's torment their pleasure and do mischief for mischiefs sake And shall we fasten that upon God which is the Devil's Reproach Shall he contrive Mischief feed and recreate upon Misery and glut his Vengeance with Innocent blood Shall he that delights not in the Death of Sinners seek Pleasure and Glory in the Eternal Miseries of Innocents' This is the very top and extremity of Cruelty so that were it thus we must add Cruelty to the Divine Attributes and believe him as Infinite in that as in any other Besides all this mere Existence without Perception carries in it no more Goodness or Happiness then Nonexistence and is only  before it in reference to those Perceptive Capacities which are founded in it 'T is all one not to be and to be in a state of senseless inactivity take away Perception and 't is indifferent whether the substance remain or utterly perish as suppose the Poet's Metamorphosis had been as great Realities as they were Fictions it had been indifferent to the Persons that suffered them whether they were changed into Trees Stones and Flowers or into nothing and it would have been the same thing to Niobe whether she were petrified or annihilated Upon this account arose that ancient Dispute Whether never to have been born had not been better then to be For they considering only the present Stage of affairs where these measures of good and evil seem to be dispensed in equal proportions were doubtful which way to determine but those of them who thought the world to be more replenished with ungrateful and displeasing objects then the contrary preferred Nonexistence the chief assertors whereof were some of the melancholy Philosophers such as Heraclitus and Empedocles together with the Tragedians who in the Persons of forlorn and miserable men are full of little sentences and discourses to this purpose and this opinion was so ancient ut Author & Initium illius prorsus ignoretur Ethic. l. 1. c. 1. as Gassendus asserts But they who with more truth counted the world was fuller of pleasures than miseries did with more satisfaction esteem their existence a privilege so that they preferred not existence before nonexistence upon its own score but upon the account of those pleasant perceptions which were founded in it Well then it being evident that existence is good or evil in order to the perceptions that are founded in it where 't is the basis of nothing but tormenting Perception and where the continuence of life is nothing else but the continuance of misery there 't is the greatest because 't is the fountain of all miseries So that if God can create a Being only to make it miserable and condemn it to the Regions of sadness and eternal darkness his creation would be so far from being any kind of benefit that it would be the greatest ill-turn or injury he could possibly act Nay this still raises the Cruelty in that rather than want an object for it he would make one and set infinite power on work only to exercise an infinite cruelty and manifest himself as absolute in Tyranny as he is almighty in Power From all this I suppose 't is unquestionably evident that for God to Create an innocent Creature to make it everlastingly miserable would be the highest act of cruelty imaginable It was long since observed that there was never any opinion so absurd which was not maintained by some of the ancient Philosophers but yet there are not to be found among them any such hateful sentiments concerning Gods transactions with his Creatures as this I am discoursing against which carries in it such apparent contradictions to the Divine Attributes that it could never have found entrance into the minds of men had they not thought it was suggested to them by Revelation for the only thing that is pleaded on its behalf is the grossly mistaken ninth Chapter of the Epistle to the Romans which they apply to God's eternal Decrees although nothing can be more apparent than that it treats of a quite different matter For Saint Paul having discoursed of the universal Apostasy of both Jews and Gentiles from the practice of true goodness and of God's merciful designments to pardon and receive them all into favour so they would be content to obtain it that way which he had made known to the world by Jesus Christ and not by the works of the Mosaic Law and also that many of the Gentiles had accepted of the conditions proposed to them in the Gospel and therefore that if the Jews should persevere in their obstinate adherence to the Mosaic dispensation God would cast them off and take in the Gentiles for his favourites Saint Paul having I say discoursed of these things in the foregoing Chapters he here supposes this would seem very strange and absurd to his Countrymen that God should cashier his peculiar darling Nation upon whom he had bestowed so many signal privileges To whom pertaineth the Adoption and the Glory and the Covenants etc. To which he answers that the supreme Sovereign was not tied to any peculiar Nation but that he could adopt whom he pleased to be his favourites and that though the Jews had been blessed with greater advantages than the Gentiles yet notwithstanding God might discard them and take in these as he had made the Israelites his peculiar People rather than the Edomites notwithstanding they were of the younger Family etc. And that this is the genuine scope of Saint Paul's discourse is unexceptionably evident from its conclusion verse 30 31 32. What shall we say then that the Gentiles which followed not after Righteousness have attained to the Righteousness which is of faith But Israel which followed after the Law of Righteousness hath not attained to the Law of Righteousness Wherefore because they sought it not by faith but as it were by the works of the Law Now what can be more clear then that he speaks of the rejecting of the Jews because of their obstinate adherence to the Mosaic Law and of the calling of the Gentiles because of their Faith and closing with the Gospel But if you would see this improved to the strength and evidence of a Demonstration you need only be at the pains to read over Episcopius his Paraphrase upon the Chapter Before I conclude I will endeavour a little more fully to illustrate and confirm my foregoing Propositions by a brief Arbitration of a late fiercely argued dispute viz. What is the True Ground of God's Sovereignty over man Episcopeus Curcellaeus etc. For some assert that it Bottoms upon the Benefit of Creation thereby the better to Control that horrid Opinion that asserts God might have made a creature to no other purpose than to make it Eternally miserable only to show the Almightiness of his Sovereignty for say they God cannot exercise more Sovereignty over his Creatures than he has but he cannot have Right to more than he has given and therefore the utmost of his Right is to destroy what he has made but if he should afflict an Innocent creature with Eternal punishments he would go beyond the Right he has acquired by its Creation because he would thereby take away more than he has given and place his Creature in a worse Condition then that of Nonexistence in which he found it Now because the benefits bestowed by God upon his Creatures are finite they infer that his Sovereignty resulting from them must be finite and limited and therefore that they have a Right of which God cannot Rob them without Violence and Injury Calvin and Mr. Hobs. But others ground the Divine Dominion upon the irresistibleness of his Power thereby to justify that Right or Tyranny they have fastened upon Him arbitrariously to Reprobate and Damn his Innocent Creatures For say they Power Irresistible justifies all actions really and properly in whomsoever it be found and therefore such Power being in God only it without other helps is sufficient Justification of any action He doth so that if He had from all Eternity consigned infinite Myriads of innocent Creatures to Eternal flames the uncontrouleableness of His Omnipotence would have made good the Equity of such a merciless Decree And therefore they resolve the Maxim that God cannot Sin not into his Holiness but Power His very doing a thing never so Injurious and Irregular and that antecedently to all Law making it just and consequently no sin But for my part I think both of them are evidently mistaken the former in their Principles and the latter in their Conclusions To the first therefore I reply that it is apparent that the Divine Right and Dominion over the Creatures could not be founded upon the Benefits of Creation but upon the absolute unlimitedness of his Power because God was from all Eternity invested with a Power of doing any thing that was not misbecoming his Divine Perfections and therefore He acquired not any new Right from his Creation but only made Objects to exercise his Eternal right upon I confess there is a Power acquired by benefits where there is none antecedently because they bestow an or Pre-eminence upon him that gives above him that receives them but God being always infinitely Perfect could not acquire any new Excellence from the World's Creation and therefore the collation of Benefits cannot beget any new Power in Him because the Power which He had antecedently to all his Benefits was not capable of being made greater for He always had a Power to Act any thing that lay within the bounds of just and lawful but his Power since the Creation is not more than so and therefore he acquired no new Prerogative by it And then if the Creatures should have a right to any thing of which God cannot deprive them they would have something of their own to which God has no Right But seeing every Creature is entirely Gods & can have nothing which is not His gift and can do nothing which is not His debt it cannot have a Right where God has none because He cannot but have an entire Right in his own Works And therefore if in any thing God's Supreme Sovereignty seems confined 't is not bounded by any Rights or Privileges in the Creature but only regulated by His own Perfections And this brings me to the latter sort who ground God's Dominion in the Almightiness of his Power and infer thence that He may do any thing though never so Injurious and Irregular I allow their Principle but deny their Inference because God is essentially Good and Just as well as Powerful take away his Justice and his Goodness and you take away his Divinity without them he would be but an Almighty Devil And therefore though the Rights of God's Power be not straightened by any External obligation because that is tied on by a Superior Authority and so cannot agree to him whose Prerogative is Supreme yet they are bounded by an Internal Principle for God's goodness may be said to tie and restrain him not to do any thing repugnant to itself Now this is not properly a Restraint or Confinement superinduced upon his Natural right but is rather a circumscription set and chose by himself which he cannot Transgress because he will not Neither does it limit the Divine Prerogative any more than his Omnipotence is limited because he cannot do any thing that is absurd & unworthy the Wisdom of his Understanding or sinful & repugnant to the Purity of his Will For as he can not do such things not because his Power is not Infinite but because his Wisdom and Holiness are so for it 's not from defect of Power but from the Infiniteness of his other Perfections that He cannot act any thing that 's either Sinful or Foolish so neither is it for want of Sovereignty that he cannot do any thing Indecent or Tyrannical but because he is infinitely Holy as well as Powerful he is thereby obliged to do nothing unbeseeming his Holiness And therefore that God cannot Tyrannise 't is not because his Power has limits but because his Goodness has none And so the Divine Will is the Measure of Justice not because it 's absolutely Sovereign but because it 's infinitely good and that whatsoever God will or does is therefore just because He will it derives not from the Sovereignty but from the goodness of his will For if this be taken away 't is all one whether you call him God or Devil he may lie and forswear and act all the Villainies in the world and then what a brave condition is mankind in so repugnant to all the principles of piety honesty and policy is that opinion that allows no essential Justice and Injustice but derives all goodness from arbitrary Power Of the Nature of the Divine Goodness HAving briefly explained the Nature and full Extent of God's Sovereign Prerogative we come in the next place to give an account of his Goodness and Benignity of which Attribute we must be careful to assign such a notion as is not inconsistent with the former Chiefly because the Idea of God consists mainly in Dominion and Sovereignty The notion of him in Scripture never refers to his Essence but always to his Power and Empire and the names by which he is there expressed do not so much denote his Nature as his Supreme and Almighty Prerogative for all his Appellatives except jah and jehovah which express his constancy and veracity import only a Supreme and Almighty Sovereign so that the Scripture represents God under no other notion then as the Supreme Lord and Sovereign of the Universe and therefore we must be wary of attributing any thing to him that either lessens or quite destroys the freedom and uncontroulableness of his Dominion and may withal conclude that no property which complies not with it can be attributed to him and consequently that that 's a false notion of his goodness that interferes with his Dominion And therefore they that assert God's goodness to be a necessary Agent that cannot but do that which is best and so make all the Divine actions the necessary results of his goodness directly supplant and destroy all the rights of his Power and Dominion For if all the effects of God's power be the natural Emanations of his goodness and depend not upon the free determinations of his will it will follow that God can have no liberty or dominion in relation to them because necessity is altogether inconsistent with the liberty or freedom of Sovereign power Sovereignty bottoming upon a liberty and freedom of acting For how can he that has no Power and Dominion over his own Actions have power over any one else for in that there can be no power without a liberty to use and exercise it nor any exercise of power but by acting it necessarily follows that that Agent that has no liberty or freedom of acting is utterly uncapable of any Power or Dominion And therefore if all God's actions were the necessary Emanations of his goodness it must necessarily destroy all the rights and liberties of his Sovereignty and Dominion The Platonists assert that God's infinite goodness necessitates him to do always that which is best In Timaeo says Plato and therefore that all the Divine works were produced by an irresistible necessity and that he had no more power not to do what he has done than the Sun has to withhold his influences or an overflowing fountain to keep back its streams And upon this foundation they erect any Hypotheses that suit with their own fancies but chiefly that of the Pre-existence of Souls Because say they 't is better they should Pre-exist and therefore Divine goodness which does always that which is best must of necessity have given them a better and happier state of life and self-enjoyment before they descended into these bodies But these men's minds are so excessively possessed with thoughts of God's goodness as to neglect all his other Attributes advancing it to such an exorbitant Pre-eminence as to make it not only Usurp upon and invade the Rights and Privileges of other Attributes but also to banish all other Perfections from the Divine nature and engross the Deity wholly to itself For this notion of God's goodness is most apparently inconsistent not only with his Power and Dominion but with all his other moral Perfections But in order to a further satisfaction herein I shall give you a brief account of the Divine goodness and show it to be not a necessary but a free and selfmoving Agent The Divine goodness then is of three sorts either as 't is taken for the perfection of his nature or for the sanctity and holiness of his mind or for the free bounty and beneficence of his will Though the two latter are properly but branches of the former Justice and Beneficence being absolutely necessary to the Infinite perfection of the Divine nature The first sort I shall omit to discourse of as being impertinent to our present purpose and only account for the two last and first of the former God's Sanctity or Holiness is that natural or essential Goodness whereby he cannot but act suitably to the excellence and dignity of his Rational nature For the dignity of the Divine nature consisting in Reason and Wisdom this is preferred the measure and rule of his Actions and therefore 't is nothing else but that natural Justice Equity and Rectitude which is the measure of all God's transactions with his Creatures and consists in doing every thing that right Reason requires and not doing any thing that it forbids Now the Relation this Goodness has to the Divine Dominion is to bond and regulate it in the exercise of its Rights and Liberties because God has power to do any thing not inconsistent with it so that the true way to find out how far the Divine Prerogative extends is to discover what is repugnant to the Nature of goodness and equity for every thing beside is subject to the free disposal of the Divine Will. Thus God cannot delight in the eternal miseries and calamities of Innocent Creatures he cannot secretly resolve and take care that his creatures shall act those Impieties which himself openly hates forbids and threatens he cannot lay upon us Impossible Commandments he cannot violate his Faith and not perform his Promises Oaths and Covenants because they are all of them essentially evil and contrary to the Natural and Eternal Laws of Equity and Right Reason But Goodness as its Equivalent with Benignity Bounty or Beneficence is a free constant and habitual propension of will to do Good And being seated in the Divine Will as one of its main Properties it must not be supposed to destroy the freedom of its Nature but rather to participate of it For the Divine will is endued with the highest kind of Liberty as it imports a freedom not only from Foreign Violence but also from inward necessity For spontaneity or immunity from coaction without indifferency carries in it as great necessity as those motions that proceed from violence or mechanism and a Beast that of its own accord goes to Pasture would have as much Freedom as God has if his actions were only spontaneous and proceeded not from a choosing and self-determining Principle And therefore when I assert the Divine will to be Free I mean that it is a Rational and Active Faculty that has Power and Dominion over its own actions and that can be determined only by its own intrinsic energy in so much that all the external incentives requisite to its acting being supposed it yet remains so indifferent and undetermined in itself as that it is able either to exert or suspend its action For unless the divine will enjoy this kind of freedom it had as good have none at all all other sorts of Liberty being fettered and determined by fatal Necessities And the Fatalist do but lose their Labour when they endeavour to invent ways of reconciling Liberty with Necessity unless they can also make Indifferency consistent with it because all necessity of what nature soever implies a detemined and unavoidable Fatality which apparently destroys all the foundations of Religion and Morality For necessity is not inconsistent with moral Goodness because 't is of this or that sort but simply because 't is necessity for the only cause why a necessary Agent is not capable of Morality is because 't is not able to determine itself to Good or Evil and consequently not capable of being directed and governed by Laws Rewards and Punishments For what other reason can there be imagined why any Agent is incapable of being thus governed then that it has no power and command over its own Actions the Office of Laws being to enjoin them to whom they are prescribed that they determine themselves to act according to their Prescriptions But to require this of a principle void of any such power of self-determination is as absurd as to require it of Stones & Trees because the absurdity of both consists in requiring obedience where there is no principle or capacity able to render it And therefore unless they can reconcile necessity & indifferency so as that the same Principle shall be necessarily determined to one extreme and yet remain so indifferent as to be able if i● please to determine itself to the other it will be altogether fruitless to make other sorts of liberty not inconsistent with necessity But this they can never do unless they can bring the extremes of a contradiction together and make it all one to be determined and undetermined in reference to the same Action Thus for Instance that Principle that is endued with no other Liberty than what consists in mere spontaneity and immunity from violence is without indifferency and a power of self-determination at as great a distance from moral Good or Evil as it would be if it were acted merely by external force and violence because the reason why that which is moved only by force is not a principle capable of morality is because it has no power at all over its own motion and so is moved with a fatal and unalterable necessity but a spontaneus or unforced Action if it proceed not from an indifferent but necessary Agent is as fatal and as necessary as if it were forced and as little subject to the determination of the Principle from whence it flows as it would though it proceeded from a foreign and violent one and by consequence is equally incapable of morality And so that principle which is not only at liberty from Co-action but is also endued with Reason and Understanding is without indifferency and a power of self-determination not less uncapable of moral Good and Evil then that which is quite devoid of Rational faculties because 't is acted by an equal necessity For if the Judgement and definitive sentence of the understanding be natural and necessary as it not only is but is also unanimously acknowledged to be and if the wills following this Judgement be as natural and as necessary as its self then 't is as extravagant to command the will not to embrace the object commended to it by the understanding as 't is to command the understanding to judge otherwise of it than it does which is the same absurdity as to command the eye to see an object after another manner then it 's represented to it because they are both determined by an equal necessity From all which it follows by all the Laws of Inference that if God's goodness should take away the Indifferency of his will it would certainly destroy not only his Freedom but all his moral Perfections and Accomplishments which is my first Argument 2. If the Divine goodness or Beneficence were a necessary Agent it would not only destroy the nature of the subject in which it resides but also what is more absurd it 's own for 't is absolutely necessary to the nature of Beneficence and Goodness that it proceed from a free and elective principle No courtesy can oblige but what is free and chosen and the obligation of benefits is only then acknowledged when they are received from one that had a power not to bestow them for otherwise they are owing not to his favour and goodwill but to chance or necessity We make no returns of gratitude to the Sun for his kind visits and benign Influences because his emanations flow from a bare necessity of Nature And joshuah thanked him not for standing still at his request and interest I should think it a strange Solecism in Courtship if any one should make me retributions for a favour that proceeded only from some necessity of nature & not from choice of will Because the reason of the obligingness of benefits is that they argue Benevolence and good Intentions in the donor towards the person on whom he bestows them but when they are the Issues of a necessary and unelective cause they flow not from  and argue no benevolence in their Principle but are the pure Results of Nature And therefore if all the Communications of God's goodness be necessary they may argue the fullness of his nature but cannot the goodness of his will because that is founded upon choice and freedom I have in my former reason endeavoured to evince that a necessity of acting of what sort soever is not capable of moral Good or Evil because 't is inconsistent with a Dominion over ones own actions in which all morality is founded for an Agent that has no power and command over its own Actions and that acts because it must whatsoever excellent and commendable effects it may produce is as uncapable of morality as those senseless Machines' that move by the Laws of matter and motion because it produces its effects after the same manner as mechanical causes do namely by a necessity of nature And if any artificial Automata were endued with deliberative elective and selfmoving Principles so as to have power over their own motions they would in degrees of proportion be capable of doing well or ill but because they have no elective and selfmoving power that 's the Reason why their motions are uncapable of being good or evil and consequently all causes whose effects result from the same necessity of Nature and that have no power to restrain their emanations are as uncapable of morality as these liveless Engines because they lie under the same incapacity Now then Beneficence being a moral Excellency it must lose its morality and consequently its nature when 't is natural and necessary and therefore if all the emanations of the Divine Bounty be such it will unavoidably follow that there is no such virtue or Beneficence and Goodness in God so that we may safely conclude that though the Communications of God's Goodness to his Creatures be exceedingly agreeable to his Nature yet to make them necessary and natural Results is by denying their being free to deny their being Good 3. God can never act contrary to his necessary and essential properties as because he is essentially wise just & holy he can do nothing that is foolish unjust and wicked And therefore if God's Beneficence and Bounty were so natural as that all its exertions were necessary he could never act otherwise but that he frequently does as is evident in all the Instances of his Anger and Severity which not only Reason but Scripture opposes to Benignity Rom. 11. 22. Behold therefore the Goodness and Severity of God on them which fell severity but towards thee Goodness And Rom. 9 13. jocob have I loved but Esau have I hated The reason whereof is v. 15. Because I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion The sole cause then why God showed greater bounty to jacob then to Esau was a free determination of his own will without the intervention of any extrinsique motive to incline it For v. 11. the Children were yet unborn and had done neither good nor evil that the purpose of God according to Election or choice might stand The Argument suggested by the Apostles Discourse beside his express resolving God's Beneficence into his freewill is this that if the flow forth of God's Goodness were necessary then Esau must have been blessed with as great expressions of favour as jacob because there could be no cause that could make a difference Not God's Goodness for its exertions being necessary it would stream forth equally into equal Capacities and therefore if they were equally capable the emanations of the divine Goodness must have been equal so that there was nothing could put a difference unless the Persons themselves but the difference was made before they could make it viz. before they were born or had done any good or evil but were in all respects equal The Spirit of God has recorded in Scripture almost as many instances of his severity as of his clemency because the exercise of these contrary virtues depends on his free will which being indifferent to either sometimes displays the one and sometimes the other whereas those attributes that are Physical and Necessary are determined one way antecedently to the determinations of his Will. From all which premises we see 1. that God's benignity goodness and beneficence consist in a gracious Propensity to let forth the Communications of his fullness to his Creatures which being lodged in the Divine will does not only suppose its freedom but is also subject to its determinations so that though it may incline yet it cannot either command or destroy its liberty because if it should it would not only interfere with God's moral accomplishmets but would withal be inconsistent with itself And therefore it rather approaches to the nature of a habit seated in the Divine will then to the condition of an Essential faculty whence a habit and custom of goodness and clemency are frequently attributed to God in Scripture but only acts and single instances of severity for though contrary habits cannot lodge together in the same faculty yet single actions of the one may sometimes issue from that Power in which its contrary is entertained and therefore though the expressions of God's bounty be his usual and constant work yet he sometimes le 's forth the eruptions of anger and severity though with some unwillingness and reluctancy for Lament 3. 33. He does not willingly or from his heart afflict the children of men and therefore the holy Ghost Esa. 21. 21. styles it his strange work as if by reason of its seldom exercise he were unacquainted with it so that though God's inclinations to acts of Beneficence and Goodness be vastly great and vigorous yet they are free and depending upon the determinations of his will and are upon this score consistent with Gods dealing sometime with us by more severe and rigorous measures which God is pleased at certain seasons to dispense according to the unsearchable Counsels of his own will 2. That the Communications of God's goodness consist in the use and exercise of his Dominion for the good and benefit of his Creatures for they being all originally nothing all the advantages they enjoy to render their condition more desirable than Nonexistence are the free gifts and effects of Divine goodness which being free and unconstrained has distributed its favours with an infinite variety having made innumerable kinds of Being's and endued them all with perceptive faculties and capacities proportioned to their respective natures and provided suitable objects in order to their gratification so that although he has according to the free pleasure of his own will created some in a more imperfect state than others yet he has provided liberally for the happiness of them all having furnished each order with objects agreeable to their respective faculties in the perception and enjoyment of which consists all pleasure and satisfaction Now if we will measure how large and ample the communications of Divine goodness are they are as vast as free Psal. 145. 9 The Lord is good to all and his tender Mercies are over all his Works Psal. 38. 5 6. Thy goodness O Lord reacheth to the Heavens and thy faithfulness to the clouds Thy Righteousness is like the great Mountains thy judgements or works of Providence are a great deep thou preservest man and beast etc. i.e. God's goodness is of equal extent with his works as vast and wide as the Universe running through all parts of the Creation But to speak only of that goodness which concerns ourselves how free and unstreitned have been the expressions of God's bounty to mankind Not to mention the pleasures and enjoyments of life itself in which the Divine munificence has made provision not only for our necessity but for our delight and curiosity too nor the great variety of perceptive faculties he has endued us with nor the innumerable instancies of his Mercy Clemency Patience Long-suffering towards the sons of men his slowness and unwillingness to punish and his readiness to pardon our Impieties nor his demanding only such homage and service from us as cannot be more our duty then 't is our happiness with infinite more inestimable vouchsafements and expressions of his tenderness and good inclinations towards mankind I will only instance in his rewarding that obedience that is our debt with such great and inestimable blessings viz. not only earthly and secular but spiritual and eternal pleasures He might have sent us into the world to act our parts a while and have endeared our duty to us only by its own appendent delights and then have remanded us back into our pre-existent state of not being But that he should recompense the bare discharge of our duties with the rewards of Heaven and Eternity is such a stupendious height of goodness as not only puzzles conceit but outreaches wonder and admiration And yet that which enhances the value of the Reward is not more its greatness than its freeness though some are so arrogant as to challenge a natural and necessary right in it Arrogant I say because if it were our due we must derive it not from God's goodness but from our own desert for nothing beside God's goodness can create us a right to future happiness but our own Merits which from a Creature to its Maker implies the greatest contradiction And if in any respect Heaven be our due God would be obliged by the natural measures of Equity to bestow it and so our happiness would not derive from the free grant of Divine goodness but from the prime and intrinsique Laws of Justice For if there were any natural and eternal necessity that Happiness should wait on Virtue that the Virtuous are happy would be no thanks to the Divine favour because that cannot be an act of favour which is demanded by Justice and natural Right And therefore those passages in Scripture that seem to make our future reward just and due speak upon supposition of God's gracious Promise and Covenant with mankind as Heb. 6. 10. For God is not unrighteous to forget your work & labour of love which ye have showed towards his Name 2 Tim. 4. 8. Henceforth is laid up for me a Crown of Righteousness which the Lord the righteous judge shall give me at that day and not unto me only but unto all them also that love his appearing In which and other passages the assured hope of our future reward is therefore argued from God's Justice because 't is essentially just that he should perform his Promises and therefore although Gods Promise or Covenant were not an act of Justice but of Grace for 't is impossible for God to enter into any Covenant with his creatures but a Covenant of Grace yet its performance when made is absolutely just and necessary and that in which God cannot fail without gross deceit and falseness he having engaged his Veracity to discharge all the debts of his Grace And therefore as some learned Men have noted this Justice in Scripture is promiscuously expressed by Justice Truth and Faithfulness Rom. 3. 3 4 5. they are all used to express the same thing And 1 joh. 1. 9 If we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins Because if he be just and faithful he will perform his Promise If I were to prove the necessity of future Rewards and Punishment from the nature of any of the Divine Attributes I should rather fetch my Arguments from the Attributes of Wisdom than any else because they are as might easily be evinced so hugely useful and well-nigh necessary to the Government of the World whence the Rabins reckon Paradise and Hell among those seven Pillars upon which they say God founded the world supposing it could not subsist without them But yet no one sort of means being absolutely necessary to Almighty Power and Wisdom in order to any end God could have found out in finite ways to engage us to obedience though he had never acquainted us with future Rewards and Punishments So that whatsoever Rationalities may be drawn from the Divine Attributes to prove a future state yet it depending wholly on the Divine will and the Divine will being absolutely free we can have no rational inducements to bring us to any sufficient knowledge of it but by a clear Revelation of the Divine will and therefore God to complete the Instances of his Goodness sent the blessed Jesus into the world to bring life and immortality to light and to encourage us to Virtue and Goodness by greater Rewards than were before proposed to mankind So that though we could enhance the expressions of God's love and bounty to mankind to their utmost pitch and value yet we have just reason to conclude that the peculiar and unequalled eminency of the Divine benignity consists not so much in the greatness as in the freeness of its Emanations as streaming forth from a fountain of free and selfmoving Goodness Of the Preexistence of Souls THough the foregoing Discourses are as useful and important Theories as any in Divinity there being not any other Articles so universally interested in Theological Speculations as these nor any thing that has occasioned so much Error and Ignorance in other points as false and confused conceits concerning these two grand Attributes of Dominion and Goodness Yet they cannot be more important and concerning in themselves than they will be useful and necessary for the successful management of this ensuing discourse against Preexistence because the most plausible Argument alleged on behalf of this Hypothesis is grounded upon such mistaken notions of the Divine goodness as I have already I think evidently enough disproved in what I have discoursed concerning that Attribute so that I am so far before hand in the Dispute as to have prevented the strongest Objection I am liable to be Assaulted with This premised I immediately proceed 1. to give an account of the Hypothesis itself and the grounds on which it bottoms and then 2. to give in my exceptions both against it and them And that you may be sure of my faithfulness in the first I will perform it as near as I can in the very words of its most Peremptory assertors Their account then is this That the Souls of men are not then first produced when they are united to the Bodies prepared for them by generation but were created all at first in an incomparably more Blessed and Divine Condition of Life then that they are now condemned to in this sad Region of sin and misery but that at several times and occasions by their Revolt from God & his righteous laws they forfeited their better life and condition and so were thrust down into these terrestrial Bodies partly to be punished for their former prevarications and partly that by acting their parts well here they might recover that more happy state from which they lapsed into this And this they endeavour to prove 1. from the nature of Divine Goodness which say they is constrained always to do what is best for the Souls of men being capable of eternal existence and happiness backward as well as forward and it being much better that they should have enjoyed the pleasure of their life and actions from eternal Ages then either to have lain so long in the comfortless night of nothing or to have been at first created in so mean and wretched a condition as that is which they suffer in this Region of Death and Misery and than God being infinitely good and gracious and infinite Goodness doing by the same necessity that which is best as infinite fire will necessarily burn whatever is combustible if put to it it clearly and unavoidably follows say they that they must have existed of old before they came into these Bodies 2. From the Actions of Providence which will not otherwise correspond to those holy Attributes in the Deity Righteousness and Benignity according to which he Governs and Orders the affairs of all the World And this Argument they make use of two ways viz. in respect of the place and time wherein we are born and of the temper and disposition of the body wherewith we are born As to the first of these there is no man doubts but that education institution and company are of such wonderful moment to the making us good or bad as that where vice and wickedness are in use and practise there seems little less than a necessity of swimming down in the stream of our Countries Vices And then the greatest part of the World having been always overrun with all manner of Lust and Barbarity for God to send out of his pure and holy hands an immaculate soul capable of living elsewhere and fit for all virtue and heavenly Wisdom into an habitation in such parts of the Earth where reigns nothing but gross Ignorance and Vice by which she cannot fail without a miracle to be overborn what is this say they but to betray his own offspring unto unavoidable miseries As to the second of these they argue thus seeing there are in mankind strange & fatal propensities to all manner of vice & wickedness that flow from the very intrinsic constitution of their Bodies how can it be consistent with the Goodness and Righteousness of God the blessed spring of all virtue and Holiness and tender lover of all his Creatures to put innocent souls into such foul and untamed bodies which so fatally and necessarily hurry them to that which alone of all things in the world he disapproves of and which he knows will be their utter bane and miserable ruin And here some of them argue more particularly from the absurdity of the two opinions of the souls immediate creation or seminal traduction for if it begins neither of these ways it must have pre-existed therefore 1 against the first of them they use the forementioned Argument viz. that it seems inconsistent with the Goodness and Benignity of God to put pure and immaculate spirits into such bodies as will presently defile them pervert all their powers and faculties and incline them to all manner of vice and impiety And then 2 against the second viz. seminal Propagation of souls they argue from the nature of the soul itself for say they if the soul be generated than it must be made of the soul of the Parent which is against the nature of an immaterial Being the chief property of which is to be indiscerpable These are the most material considerations urged in behalf of Preexistence others that either depend on these or are less considerable I shall have occasion to mention as I proceed and withal to reply to a few passages of Scripture that for the better countenance of the business they press to serve in the cause of this Controversy Having given you this brief but comprehensive account of the Hypothesis itself I now proceed to give in my Exceptions First then although I am not obliged by virtue of what I have discoursed in my fifth exception against the Platonic Philosophy to oppose this Hypothesis by Counter-arguings because 't is out of the sphere of Humane knowledge and to be ranked among Epicurus' things merely possible and merely contingent and so is sufficiently confuted by destroying the grounds on which it stands yet to render my Triumph over it more full and entire I shall make my first onset from an objection drawn from its ill corresponding with the divine Attributes of Wisdom Justice and Goodness and that upon a twofold account 1. In that it supposes God to inflict the severities of his Justice without attaining the ends thereof for to what purpose is it to inflict penalties upon any Person for offences of which he is as ignorant as he could have been though they had never been committed For assign they what ends of Justice they please this is most undeniably certain that to punish a guilty Person that is invinvincibly ignorant of his sins is as far from attaining the ends of Justice as to inflict the same Punishments upon one that 's guiltless for if he has no knowledge of his miscarriages he has the same reason to be faultless in his own esteem as he that is really so But for God to chastise with the rods of his vengeance any Creature that is in the same condition with the Innocent and guiltless in reference to the ends of Justice and Punishment bids not a less defiance to the Reputation of his Attributes then to inflict the same Punishments upon one that never deserved it I conclude therefore that if the calamities of this life were inflicted upon us only as punishments of sins committed in another Providence would have provided some effectual means to preserve them in our Memories and therefore because we find no remainders of any such Records in our minds 't is I think sufficient evidence to all sober and impartial enquirers that our living and sinning in a former state is as false as inevident 2. In that it would be an invincible Temptation to mankind to have hard and jealous thoughts of God's dealings with them For when they see themselves environed with miseries and punishments and feel the heavy strokes of divine Anger and yet are utterly ignorant that they have offended him what more just and reasonable grounds can they have not only to call in question but flatly to deny his Goodness and Equity For if it will not comport with God's Righteousness and Benignity to place us in these sad Circumstances we are in unless thereby to punish us for our former prevarications as the patrons of Preexistence fiercely and clamarously contest when we know ourselves to be in this sad plight and yet are utterly destitute of all knowledge how we deserved it what can we more naturally infer then that God has contrary to all the Laws of Justice and Equity made us Wretched and Miserable Should he take the most lewd and debauched Villain upon Earth and thrust him into the Dungeons of endless misery but withal take away all sense and memory of his former state and wickedness would not that miserable wretch have just reason to exclaim against the Cruelty of his Maker as supposing himself created in that sad & deplorable state And suppose it possible for God to have produced any being in the same miserable condition the damned in Hell are supposed to suffer that wretched Creature might as well argue for a state of Preexistence in which it had deserved the Torments it endures as any other being that finds itself in that forlorn condition but is deprived of all knowledge of any former scene of Life Now God cannot in Reason expect we should acknowledge his Justice and Righteousness contrary to his actings and therefore if he has inflicted upon us those Calamities that cannot justly be inflicted upon any but sinners and yet not let us know we are such what else can we conclude but that we innocents' are unjustly doomed to the sad and miserable Portion of the Wicked Perhaps it would not be difficult to invent many other not inconsiderable Objections but these are all that occur to my thoughts at present & all those I have met with in Authors are most lamentably frivolous and impertinent And therefore I shall immediately pass on to the main and only needful part of my Task viz. to evince the Groundlesness of this Hypothesis I oppose for if I can show the Ratiocinations from whence they conclude its Truth and Reality to be apparently vain and frivolous I shall thereby sufficiently evidence the vanity of the Hypothesis itself as being built upon vain and trifling Pretences But before I descend to their particular Examination it will not be impertinent to observe 1. That it would be no difficult task to erect other much different or quite contrary Hypotheses Methinks that purely Phisical account which Porphiry some where gives of the Souls descent into these Terrestrial Bodies is as neat and handsome as the Origenian or Moral one for as this derives our lapse Originally from our voluntary and chosen Immoralities that other derives them merely from a Physical necessity which it illustrates by this similitude As a fruitful field though it may for a certain period of years yield good Grain yet at length it is exhausted and grows barren and then if sit be laid fallow though it brings forth nothing but weeds and tares yet it thereby recovers its ancient vigour and fruitfulness so our Souls having been for many ages impregnated with the seed of Divine Ideas by degrees spent themselves in bringing forth large returns of contemplation till at length their Intellectual powers decaying the higher part falls into a swoon and they can exert no acts but of Imagination whence spring forth the powers of the Vegetal life which cause in them strong and irresistible propensities to an union with these inferior and terrestrial Bodies in order to the awaking of the higher Powers for because every thing in the Etherial Regions is too calm and serene to awake them they are therefore conveyed into this place of noises and disturbance and invesseled in a body full of rude and impetuous passions by which they may be chafed into life and sensation again Or what if I would out of a perverse humour of contradiction assign a quite contrary Hypothesis of Pre-existence and as they will have this world a place of Punishment and maintain the Soul came into it by lapsing from a happier and more excellent condition so why may not I assert that 't is a place of Reward and that God sends us hither to reward our virtuous actions in a lower and less happy condition of life or that they that had miscarried in a weaker and less advantageous state might once more try their fortunes in better and more advantageous circumstances Which Hypothesis would be as much and perhaps more consistent with itself than the contrary For seeing they will needs have it the design of Providence in thrusting the Soul down into this Region of Misery to amend and reform as well as chastise it it seems much more consonant to effect this by raising it to a more perfect state then dooming it to a worse for 't is a very preposterous way to Reformation to put the soul into such fatal propensities of sinning as they say 't is in here this being the directest course utterly and irrecoverably to undo it And now had I a mind to set up for a Maker of Hypotheses which you see is but an easy trade I might so trim and adorn this with artificial and affected Phrases and so support it with a set of Theorems Pillars and Fundamental Principles as to make it appear a competently handsome and well built Structure And withal I think it would be able to stand the shock of those Objections and Counter-evidences that would shrewdly shake if not utterly demolish the Origenian Hypothesis But if any Origenist shall disapprove my Hypothesis I only challenge him to confute it for I am sure the like arguments will confute his own and therefore to show him the Vanity of inventing groundless and imaginary Hypotheses I will be so cross-grained as not to abandon mine as long as he shall persist peremptory in his 2. The second thing I am to observe is that they which is the usual oversight of unwary disputants dispute not more against their Adversaries then themselves in that the Arguments they use to destroy all other Hypotheses and confirm their own do as evidently oppose it as them For their own account of our descent into this world is that 't is only a merciful provision and contrivance of the infinite Wisdom and Goodness of God the end of all whose Councils is his Creatures Happiness to put lost and delinquent Souls into a capacity of acting their parts anew Lux. Orient p. 41. that so so many of his excellent creatures might not be lost and undone irrecoverably but that they might be in a condition to recover the old happiness of their Celestial state Now is it not highly derogatory to the infinite and unbounded Wisdom of God that he should detrude those souls which he so seriously designs to make happy into a state so hazardous wherein he seeth it to be ten thousand to one but that they will corrupt and defile themselves and so make themselves more miserable here and to Eternity hereafter A strange method of Recovery this to put them into such a fatal necessity of perishing 'T is but an odd contrivance for their Restauration to happiness to use such means to compass it which 't is ten thousand to one but will make them infinitely more miserable This is such a contrivance of Mercy that puts us in a worse condition than it abandons the Devils to for if the conditions of our Recovery be so near being impossible our state is as bad as theirs and if the non-performance of these conditions be punished with greater penalties 't is worse Better be abandoned to an eternal despair then have hopes to be rescued only by such means as 't is ten thousand to one but will exceedingly increase our Torment and Misery The Account of Orig. etc. pag. 27. Again If we call to mind the sad accounts we have met withal in History of times and places almost all the world over overrun with all manner of barbarity and lust adopted even into their Laws and practised in their most solemn Religions how can we but think that the Soul then and there born and living is inevitably condemned to all Iniquity and Impiety But can we imagine that infinite Wisdom seriously purposes to restore us to our ancient Holiness and Purity when it places us in such a state in which we are inevitably condemned to all Iniquity and Impiety If God had contrived to betray us into all manner of vice and wickedness how could he more effectually have accomplished it then by putting us into such a condition as should inevitably condemn us to all Iniquity and Impiety That Father would take a strange course to reform a debauched and wretchless Child that should go about to effect it by abandoning him to the Society of Rogues and Villains Pag. 28. For God therefore to send an immortal Soul whose happiness is his greatest design and contrivance into an habitation in such parts of the Earth where reigns nothing but gross ignorance and vice by which she cannot fail without a miracle to be overborn what is this but to betray his own offspring for he is the Father of Spirits unto unavoidable misery whilst he pretends to plot and contrive their happiness and so govern the world with less prudence than an ordinary discreet man would do Once more in their own words Pag. 35. I would ask them whether or no the condition of our nature considered the strong inclinations naturally to that which is evil and those strengthened and further confirmed for several years before we can come to have any considerable use of our Reason or arrive to any command over ourselves Lastly the way and manner how the Elections of our will are performed which we never find free where there is a custom or passion against it and how corporeal motions determine the thoughts and passions of our minds I ask them whether these things being considered it be not hundreds to one odds that we shall choose the ways of Vice rather than Virtue Or let the proportion be as little as they can with any colour pretend they cannot clear the Wisdom and Discretion of Divine Providence by their Hypothesis which thrusts the Spirits it intends to make for ever happy into so great a danger of being defiled and corrupted by the passions of the Body and of sound smarting for it hereafter Thus you see what strong Objections the Arguments they urge with most noise and clamour are against themselves if therefore these Phaenomena be inexplicable without the Origenian Hypothesis they are so too with it and if so than the result of all is that they are not so much Arguments of Preexistence as Aspersions of Providence For whatever Hypothesis is true they charge Gods Transactions with mankind either of Injustice or Folly and therefore I shall attempt their solution not so much to oppose the Hypothesis of Preexistence as to vindicate the Divine Providence from so many contumelious and unworthy Reproaches After these more general considerations against the Hypothesis itself I come now to a particular Examination of the Arguments on which 't is founded First then as for that strong Demonstration as they style it taken from the Nature of God's goodness which they suppose constrained to do always that which is best 't is so fully not only answered but confuted in what I have already discoursed of the nature and extent of God's Goodness and Dominion that to subjoin any formal Reply would be but a needless and troublesome Repetition For having made it apparently evident that any state better than that of Nonexistence may be the object of God's Dominion and the effect of his Goodness every condition of Being preferable to that of Not-being is not only consistent with the Divine Goodness but a Product of it and therefore if they will make good this Argument drawn from the Divine Goodness for their Hypothesis they must first either disprove the Truth and Validity of my preceding discourses or else make it appear that the condition of Souls in this life is more deplorable and less desirable than the state of Annihilation And when they shall have done either they will deserve a farther reply but not till then And yet I cannot forbear to supper add this one Consideration more viz. that the boundless Infinity of the Divine Goodness is consistent with the existence of different Ranks and Orders of Creatures God being not constrained to make every Creature the most Perfect he can for then there would have been but one sort of Being's viz. the highest and most consuminate Rank of all whereas we see the World replenished with divers species of Creatures some more some less perfect Now if notwithstanding the Infiniteness of the Divine Goodness there may be various kinds of Creatures of various and unequal Perfections then what necessity or Reason imaginable is there the Divine Goodness should be constrained to let forth its largest Emanations to mankind for why may not our species be of an inferior Rank in the Order of Being's And if so then what necessity is there we should be endued with all possible Perfections Are there not several Ranks of Spirits or Immaterial Being's And are not the Assertors of Preexistence the most Zealous Patrons thereof And do they not Marshal the Souls of Men in one of the lowest and most imperfect Orders as being united to the grossest and most ignoble Body viz. Terrestrial matter whilst all the rest reside in Bodies of Air or Aether and therefore for men to deem the Divine Goodness less infinite because its Communications are not so great to them as they are to others is as absurd as it was for the Figs in the Fable that complained to jupiter because he had not made them Grapes Again why might not all these several Ranks of immaterial Being's be at first created in the same estate they are in at present without lapsing from a higher to a lower condition of life as well as several sorts of material creatures which were at first disposed in the same order they still hold If God could his Goodness notwithstanding create such an innumerable variety of Infects which are but imperfect and half Animals then why might he not also notwithstanding the same Goodness create among spiritual Essences a species not more perfect than humane Souls For if the boundlesness of God's goodness does not hinder but that some Creatures may exist in a much more imperfect Condition than others than neither can it hinder but that the Souls of men might be placed in a much less perfect condition then other immaterial Being's From all which it follows that it cannot with the least pretence of Reason be argued from the Nature of God's Goodness that the Souls of men did once preexist in the happiest state which Being's of their Nature are possibly capable of enjoying As for their Arguments taken from the Providence of God their whole force Centres in this one difficulty that God has not taken sufficient care for the happiness of his Creatures but has left them too obnoxious to Sin and Misery now to assoil and clear this Objection I need only evince that the Divine Providence has made not only sufficient but large provisions for the Happiness of Mankind But I shall not be content nakedly to answer their Objections unless I can confute them too In order to which I shall undertake to do these two things 1. To propose a plain and easy Hypothesis that gives a rational and satisfactory account of all the forementioned Phaenomina of Providence And then 2. To show that Mankind is not only endued with such Faculties by the use whereof he may arrive at the highest degrees of Virtue and Happiness but also that we have the greatest Endearments and Advantages in the world to engage and assist us in a diligent and vigorous prosecution thereof My Hypothesis is this That it has pleased Providence to place mankind here in an immature and more imperfect state that so we might in a way congruous to free and rational Agents by degrees be fitted for and at length arrive at a better and more raised condition of life As in nature all things commence their Being's in a rude and immature state and make orderly progressions to farther degrees of maturity till they arrive at the utmost perfections their Being's are capable of so is mankind Created and born into the World as it were in the Spring in a Budding and Blossoming season that so we may by proceeding forward in the differing Periods of our lives grow up to higher and more excellent Capacities till at length we ripen into a state of maturity and perfection Our natures are at first somewhat rough-cast to the end that they might be refined and polished by Virtue and Religion so that 't is the main and perhaps only design of Religion to perfect and advance our Natures and make us capable of a higher and more noble condition of life Now I need not declaim and expatiate upon the neatness and consistency of this Hypothesis when we know by experience that 't is the way and method pitched upon by Providence to conduct mankind to its Perfection it being an Oeconomy hugely agreeable to all the designs and purposes of Religion the Natural tendency whereof is to raise us to higher Capacities and nearer approaches to the Divine Nature This gives a more general Reason of the present low and imperfect condition of mankind but that I may give a more certain and perspicuous account thereof and more close to the main Origenian objection viz. why God should put pure and immaculate Souls into these disorderly Brutish Bodies I shall make my Hypothesis more distinct and particular Mankind then is an order of Being's placed in a middle state between Angels and Brutes made up of contrary principles viz. Matter and Spirit endued with contrary Faculties viz. Animal and Rational and encompassed with contrary Objects proportioned to their respective faculties that so they may be in a capacity to exercise the Virtue's proper and peculiar to their compounded and heterogenial Natures For the perfection of humane Souls does not consist in an effeminate Beauty and Physical proportions but in a manly courage and moral accomplishments as at the Olympic Games there was no regard had to Beauty and Neatness they only were capable of honour and reputation who had courage and patience enough to combat And the life of man in this world is nothing else but an Olympic exercise God having placed us here not to admire the native Beauty and Perfection of our Being's but to exercise ourselves in the conflicts and difficulties of Virtue therefore the worth and praise of the Soul consists in a Braveness and Gallantry of Spirit when it scorns to be usurped upon by those faculties that ought to obey her and checks and controls all their unruly and tumultuous exorbitances by her own sovereign and imperial Laws and resolutely defends its own Authority and Prerogative against all the furious and rebellious attempts of Passion and Concupiscence And therefore though humane Souls be capable of subsisting by themselves yet God has placed them in Bodies full of brutish and unreasonable Propensions that they might be capable of exercising many choice and excellent Virtues which otherwise could never have been at all such as Temperance Sobriety Chastity Patience Meekness Equanimity and all other Virtues that consist in the Empire of Reason over Passion & Appetite Religion is common to Men and Angels appertaining to them purely as Spirits but Virtue is proper to man alone and belongs to him as a Being made up of contrary principles whence spring contrary desires and inclinations in the good or bad Government whereof consists the Nature of Virtue and Vice & upon this score 't is that Virtue is never attributed to God because being of a simple & purely spiritual nature he has no unruly passions and sensual Appetites to Govern. And therefore the Platonists though they place all Intellectual Virtue's in the abstracted Soul yet they will have all moral ones reside in the Composition denying the naked Soul to be capable of moral Good or Evil these belonging only to the whole which results from Soul and Body says Plotinus And this by the way is their meaning when they unanimously resolve that grand perplexing enquiry into the terrestrial Hyle because our material Principle by reason of its intrinsique dulness and stupidity naturally hinders and obstructs the intellectual efforts of the mind and inclines it to the love of material and sensual objects which if it suffer itself to be so far immersed into matter as to pursue only or chiefly the satisfaction of its gross and sottish Propersities thence naturally spring all those Irregularities that pass under the name of Moral Vices And this account of the Origine of Evil is not so devoid of Reason as some Learned men would persuade us For 1 it does not as is objected make matter to be essentially evil but rather the occasion thereof from its extra essential union with the soul. Nor 2 does it make the existence of evil natural and necessary for it does not assert that it results from the nature of matter as they would make us believe but only an accidental effect thereof after its union with the soul in that from the sluggishness of its nature it inclines the soul to the love of gross and material objects and if the soul be so careless as to yield to its inclinations it becomes the voluntary cause of its own evil But you will think my Pen very unruly if it be so apt to fly out into Digressions when 't is in so great speed and therefore I return Now because the nature of Virtue consists in the minds governing the Brutish and Animal appetites and motions of the body Providence has furnished it with instruments convenient for that purpose for having its principal and commanding residence where the Nerves that convey all motions and impressions backward and forward have their Original 't is able by its immediate influence upon them to command and bridle all the Animal motions of the Body Thus because all excess of Passion consists in an irregular motion of the blood the Nerves which the soul uses as its reins are twisted about the veins and arteries that so by contracting them it may be able to refrain and check the Impetuosity of the Blood's motion and consequently curb the eager and unruly passion as when for example such an object is presented to us that naturally provokes to anger which mainly consists in a violent ebullition and fervour of the blood about the Region of the Heart which violently hurrying from thence into the Brain disorders the motions of the Spirits there and so by confounding the phautasms that lodge therein disturb all its conceptions and operations then does it concern the Soul to abate and cool this unruly heat which is effected by restraining the violence of the Torrent which is effected by its influence upon those Nerves that are the passage and high way from the Brain to the Heart And therefore the Providence of nature has made a peculiar passage for commerce between the Head and the Heart in Man V. Willis Cereb Anat. cap. 26. where it has made none in Beasts viz. whereas the Praecordia of Beasts are furnished with nervous branches only from the Par vagum to supply the vital functions with spirits in man there are peculiar large branches derived from the Intercostal Nerve into the same region only for a way of commerce between the Brain and the Heart and passage of the Animal spirits from the one to the other as need shall require In so much that we may define Prudence and Virtue to be nothing else but a due commerce between the Brain & the Heart which Plotinus only expresses more abstractedly when he describes it to be of which the forecited machless Author supplies us with a clear Example viz. that dissecting a Changeling or Natural Fool the chief defect he could discover in him was that this Plexus of the Intercostal Nerve which is proper to the body of Man and is the way of commerce for the Animal spirits between the Heart and the Brain was exceeding small and its branches very thin By reason whereof his Soul could have but very little command over his Passions and Appeties in the impotency and irregularity whereof consists the nature of Folly The result of all is this that mankind is compounded of contrary Principles endued with contrary desires and inclinations to the end that there might be an order of Being's in the world without which there would perhaps have been one Species wanting to complete the Universe capable of all those Heroic Virtues which consist in the Empire of Reason over the brutish and sensual Faculties As also that by the right use and improvement of our superior Powers we might be raised to greater Capacities and qualified for higher and more divine Accomplishments So that man seems to differ from the Angels only in this that he must by conquest and industry win the happiness which is entailed on their Natures for when we become in our dispositions we shall be made so too in our enjoyments the Divine Goodness having graciously appointed that when the Soul is so far advanced in Virtue as to live above the reach of all its Passions and Desires that then it shall be translated into a more free and disintangled state where it shall be neither enticed nor vexed with the importunity of these lower and brutish Appetites but shall enjoy the Serenity and Pleasures of a pure and intellectual Being as the Reward of its former Pains and Industry As on the contrary when any man suffers his Passions and Brutish Appetites to beat Reason out of its Throne and to run headlong into an ungovernable Anarchy he degenerates from humanity grows incorrigible in sin and sinks so deep into the Animal life as to be made uncapable of acting Virtuously and suitably to the ends of his Being and thence is congruously doomed to the Portion of degenerate and apostate Spirits as being fit for nothing else So that the whole design of Providence in sending us into this world is only that we may in a way congruous to rational Agents prepare ourselves for another and therefore the Souls of men shall at their departure hence be stated in a condition proportioned to their good or bad Qualifications I am apt to be positive and dogmatical in this Hypothesis not so much because it gives a rational and satisfactory account of Gods sending pure and innocent Souls into Bodies full of brutish and irregular Inclinations as because it exactly agrees with the Condition of our Natures with the natural tendency of Virtue and Religion and with the whole Oeconomy of Providence in conducting mankind to their future happiness Not to mention its consonancy with Saint Paul's Hypothesis in his Account of the Civil and Intestine War between the law of the Mind and the law of the Members And now having laid my Hypothesis I come to show 1. that mankind is endued with such faculties by the use whereof he may attain to the highest degrees of Virtue and Happiness 2 that we have the greatest endearments and advantages in the world to push us forward to a diligent and vigorous Prosecution thereof And if Virtue and Happiness be in our own power and if we are invited to pursue and endeavour after them by the greatest endearments and persuasions then certainly Providence has placed us in a sufficient capacity of being happy and if it happen that we should at last be abandoned to Misery we must owe it to our own choice and prodigious folly 1. First then Mankind is furnished with such faculties by the use whereof he may arrive at Virtue and Happiness To evidence this I require no other Postulatum then that which is the great foundation of all Religion and Morality viz. that the Mind of man is endued with Reason and Understanding able to discern the essential differences of Good and Evil and with Liberty and Election able to choose and pursue the one and eschew the other This I say is a Postulatum so just and evident as that it cannot be denied without destroying not only the Nature of Good and Evil but of Man himself For if in any thing we differ from Brutes 't is in the Reason and Liberty of our minds all our other faculties we have in common with them 't is these alone that are the peculiar Prerogatives of humane Nature and therefore without them we may be Sheep or Oxen but not Men. Separate haec nos A grege mutorum atque ideo venerabile soli Sortiti Ingenium divinorumque capaces Atque exercendis capiendisque Artibus apti Sensum à caelesti demissum traximus Arce However these are the efficient Causes and necessary Foundations of all Morality for no Action can be morally Good or Evil but what we can choose and concerning which we can deliberate because without them all our Actions would be either Casual or Fatal and the mere Issues of Chance or Necessity and by consequence as uncapable of being moral as those motions that result purely from Mechanical Powers as I have already I think demonstrated in what I have discoursed concerning the Freedom of the Divine Goodness And now if the mind of man be a deliberative and elective Principle able to discern between Good and Evil Happiness and Misery and to choose the one and refuse the other then 't is at its own choice and in its own power to be Virtuous and Happy for no body questions but that Goodness and Happiness are much more eligible than Vice and Misery and therefore if men are able to discern and choose that which is best their Happiness and Misery depend upon their own wills and their Portion whether good or bad is the result of their own choice and certainly they that can be virtuous and happy if they will are in a fair capacity of being so From hence it follows that the mind and rational part of man is Superior and Predominant not only endued with Power but also invested with Authority to Govern the inferior and brutish part which is of a slavish and servile nature and made to obey Reason is uppermost and has the bridle in its own hands and is strong enough to manage the wildest and most untractable Passions There 's no appetite within us  no inclinations so strong and fatal which reason cannot master natural Propensities can only tempt but not command our Souls they may incline but cannot force them and our minds are never vanquished but when they betray themselves Briefly none of the charms of Concupiscence are so powerful and irresistible but that Wisdom and Discretion can easily dissolve and disenchant them The Truth and Reality whereof I thus Argue Either the rational Part of man is able to command the lower Appetites or 't is not if it is then is he sufficiently able to live well and happily because Virtue and Happiness are obtained by living up to Reason and being conducted by its Laws and measures and therefore if our superior Powers are able to give check and control to our brutish Lusts and Passions 't is in our own Power to attain to virtue & happiness But if the Superior part be not strong enough to Govern the Inferior it destroys the very Being and Existence of Good and Evil and renders mankind utterly uncapable of Goodness and Morality For 1. our Irrational faculties are unanimously acknowledged to be uncapable of Moral goodness because they are acted purely by a necessity of Nature and their Exertions like the Appetites of Brutes and the Motions of Artificial Engines result merely from the Mechanical Powers of Matter And hence 't is that our Imperate Actions i.e. those that do not issue immediately from the Will itself but are exerted at its command by some of the inferior faculties that owe it subjection are devoid of all moral Capacities as considered abstractedly in themselves or as proceeding from their immediate Cause and without respect to the wills Authority because when so considered they are not free and voluntary and therefore their being Morally good or evil is entirely derived from the Will because they act only in obedience to its Commands Nor 2. would our Rational faculties in this case be capable of Morality as being fatally determined by the stronger and irresistible motions of Lust and Passion But the Actions that proceed merely from force and foreign Violence are of all others lest capable of being moral because they do not only not issue from a free and self-determining Principle which is the greatest and most necessary foundation of all Morality but also because they are not at all determined from their own Principle but are forced thence barely by the Power of an exterior Agent Besides this the moral Goodness our Superior faculties are capable of would consist in their Commanding and Governing the Inferior but if they are not able to master and rule them they cannot be supposed to be enjoined to govern them because nothing can be obliged to impossibilities and therefore if our Superior Powers are commanded to govern the Inferior they must have strength enough to do it Wherefore howsoever fatal and boisterous our Bruitist propensions are if there be any such thing as Religion and Moral goodness in the world they must be subject to the command and discipline of our Superior and Governing faculties From all which 't is evident by a plain and undeniable deduction that mankind notwithstanding the force of their brutish Inclinations is placed in a fair capacity of living well & happily which utterly destroys all the forementioned Arguments alleged from this Phaenomenon of Providence on the behalf of Preexistence As for the other part of their Argument taken from the customary Vices and Impieties of the World viz. seeing that Custom and Education have a great influence upon the manners of men to make them good or bad as also that the greatest part of the world has been always overrun with all manner of lust and barbarity for God to send an Immaculate Soul into an habitation into such parts of the Earth where reigns nothing but Vice and Wickedness by which she cannot fail without a Miracle to be overborn is to betray his own offspring unto unavoidable Misery 'T is an objection sets too mean a value upon humane Nature and supposes mankind no better than Mushrooms as if all men were but so many Engines moved by the wheels of Custom and had not faculties within them able to discern of the good and evil of Customs as well as of other things I confess custom has acquired great Power and Authority over the life of Man because the lives of most men are disposed of by chance and casual Principles they pursue those things with which custom presents their Fancies without ever deliberating of their Goodness and Decency You know who has Pictured mankind coming into the World upon Hobby-horses and truly Sir the Emblem would perhaps have been as true if he had represented most of them going out so Seneca long since complained that the World was not governed so much by Reason as by Custom Men accounting that most Honest which is most in Practice and Error when it becomes Public becomes Truth Custom is almost every where so confident as to outface Reason and charge it of singularity as indeed the Wisest men are the greatest Rebels to her Usurped Empire whilst she rides upon the shoulders of the People who are almost universally not only her Slaves but her Idolaters For the rude and vulgar sort of people every where judge of things barely by their conformity to the Modes and Fashions of their own Country and esteem all foreign Customs and Usages inept and barbarous purely for their disagreement with their own Domestic manners and therefore I account the Boors of Attica and the common people of Greece in its most refined age not less barbarous than the wild and unpolished Scythian because they were equally Idiotical and lived by no other Rule then Prescription preferring the Customs of Greece as the Standard of Decency and judging of the goodness of things by their Correspondence with the Manners and Fashions of their own Country and condemning all strange and foreign usages of barbarity because they agreed not with the Municipial laws and customs of the Town they lived in But the plain and evident Reason of all this is because the Idiotical sort of Mankind are Fools and live below the dignity of their Natures For certainly Reason ought to take the upper hand of prescription & men that are wise & considerate i.e. those that live as becomes men will examine the nature & reasonableness of customs & not rely upon their Warranty till they are satisfied of their Goodness and adopt only those which they judge to be innocent and laudable Opinion is the guide of Fools and to yield one's self up to the Government of Custom is one of the the grossest instances of Folly and 't is but a silly Apology for fond or vicious Practices to plead that 't is the Custom of the World For no man can tamely resign up the Authority of his Judgement to the power of this little Monosyllable Tyrant as Erasmus according to the quibbling wit of his age terms Mos unless he renounce his allegiance to his Reason & live the life of brutes that always follow one another for company And therefore if Custom be the Empress of the world 't is because men delight in slavery and abandon their Liberty to live in Chains for if they would continue faithful to their own faculties and own no other guide but their Reasons which doubtlessly is the prime and fundamental duty of mankind they would scorn to suffer themselves to be oppressed and imposed upon by so silly a thing as Custom So that if men would but live suitably to their Rational Natures the corrupted and vicious manners of the Age and Place they live in could have no Influence upon their Practices for Custom is a thing without us of the good or evil whereof we are as well able to judge as of other things for we are not Parrots but men born with rational Faculties and therefore if we impotently permit ourselves to be seduced by it we act unworthy the Faculties God has given us and so deservedly forfeit the Happiness that is due to our Rational Nature Here I might argue that if men's Reasons were not able to bear them up against the Torrent of their Country's Vices it could be no crime to be borne down by the violence of the stream but I have already prevented myself in this in what I have argued concerning the predominancy of our Rational Part over our lower Appetites for how great soever the power of Custom may be it cannot be more forcible than natural Inclinations and 't is much more easy to divest ourselves of superinduced habits then to alter that which is radicated in our Natures and therefore if we are able to correct the Vicious inclinations that flow from the structure and composition of our Bodies we are much more able to reclaim or quit those vicious habits we have contracted only by casual and accidental usages We esteem it indeed a mighty business for any man to discharge his mind from the prepossessions of Custom and Education because 't is so rarely practised but if we consider the nature of the thing itself nothing can appear more easy and practicable in that all men are endued with rational and reflecting Faculties and no action costs less pains than a reflecting thought and nothing more obvious and palpable than the different Natures and Consequences of Virtue and Vice and therefore every man that does not choose a stupid In-advertency may with an ordinary diligence disabuse himself from all the false and groundless Preconceptions of a customary Belief Superinduced disciplines may corrupt but cannot evacuate our natural Faculties and therefore though they may delude and inveigle our Infant Reasons yet when we are grown to an Age capable of Relishing morality 't is then as easy to cashier all absurd Customs as it was before to be cajoled by them As the Earth may steam forth vapours gross enough to cloud the Sun and for awhile check the radiations of his light yet the energy of his Rays will at length vanquish and in spite of all their Resistance break through the thickest of those benighting clouds and enlighten that Globe which endeavoured to darken him And thus though Custom Prejudice and Education may for a while cloud our Understandings and intercept the displays of our Reasons yet so prevailing is their innate Brightness and Vigour that unless we ourselves stifle their emanations they will both discover and dispel the grossest delusions Having hitherto treated of the Forces within us I come now to discover our Auxiliaries without and to show that as we are endued with Faculties by the use whereof we may attain at Virtue and Happiness so also that we are aided and assisted herein by the greatest endearments and encouragements in the world which is the next Theme I proposed to discourse of As Pleasure then is man's chiefest good so Virtue is his highest Pleasure the Divine Goodness has made it our duty to be happy all the restraints that God has tied upon Mankind are so many engagements to confine them within the compass of their own Happiness and whatsoever lies beyond the lines of our liberty lies beyond the limits of our content and to transgress them is to step into continual hazards & disquietudes The divine Wisdom has made the Portions of Virtue & Vice to be as distant as their Natures having entailed on the one nothing but Sorrow and Calamity and on the other nothing but Joy and Satisfaction The evil effects of evil Practices are so spontaneous and natural that though there were no superinduced Penalties Wickedness would be its own Executioner Malitia ipsa maximam partem veneni sui bibit every vice exacts the Penance of its own folly All Criminal Pleasures conclude in Repentance and if men would but resolve to pursue only pleasures that expire not in Repenting which is all that Socrates prescribed for the making men both virtuous and happy we should soon see wonderful alterations in the lives of Men in spite of all those fatal Propensities concerning which the Patrons of Preexistence make such Tragical Declamations Tranquillity of mind and Indolency of body are the most natural most easy and most durable pleasures in the world these two combined together compose the most sovereign and standing delight of the life of man And that man that is so expert in moral Wisdom as to be able out of the Mass of all his transient delights to extract health and contentedness is as happy as this world can make him And yet 't is the very design of all moral Virtues first to render us capable of this state and then to procure it Whereas they that intemperately indulge to their transient delights because they are more sensual do but exchange constant stable Pleasures for perishing uncertain ones and such as conspire to create lasting and permanent miseries And therefore Epicurus who having cashiered Providence and the Souls Immortality was consequently obliged to discard all moral Goodness yet set as high an estimate upon Virtue as any Philosopher of them all because he apprehended it so highly conducive to Indolency of Body and Tranquillity of Mind in which alone he expected his sovereign Felicity so big a lie is it that he placed man's supreme Happiness in Brutish Pleasures If in any respect Virtue and Religion entrench upon the liberty of our Natures 't is in the Instances of sensuality and yet in these there is no other restraint laid upon us then that we live by the Rules and Measures of nature and the Natural Appetites of a Man are temperate and reasonable Nature desires nothing but what 's useful and convenient and its satisfactions are as innocent as necessary So that whilst we follow the dictates and appetites of humane nature we do nothing contrary to Virtue and Religion But when the Man is divided from the Beast and his Reason separated from the inferior and Brutish Appetites then arise irregular and unreasonable desires but these proceed merely from the brutish part and are preternatural and violent to the man so that till we abandon Reason and the better part of ourselves Lust is a violence to our Natures and so far from gratifying our natural Propensities that 't is their greatest contradiction But if we should suppose that Virtue consisted in a perpetual Violence to all our Appetites and Inclinations yet its future reward being so great and glorious there is no advised and reflecting man but would exchange a short satisfaction of his present desires for the hopes and assurance of Infinite felicities hereafter It must be a strange piece of Folly and Indiscretion to prefer the enjoyment of a short cheap imperfect delight before the hopes of the Joys of Heaven and Eternity For sensual gratifications are so low & unsatisfying that to want them can amount but to an inconsiderable misery whereas the future pleasures that entertain our hopes are as great as endless and therefore to miss them must needs be the saddest disaster man can suffer So that though I should grant the object of our hopes to be inevident & uncertain yet any man that acts beyond the Indiscretion of a Child will rather choose to forego the present Enjoyment of cheap and little pleasures than the probable hopes of the greatest and most satisfying Felicities For the naked hope and expectation of so great a Blessedness is more pregnant with present content and satisfaction to the mind of man than the enjoyment of the highest and most exquisite delights of sense But when the ways of Virtue are so pleasant reasonable and advantageous in themselves as though they procure yet they need not promise the Blessings of another world and yet are so endeared to us by their inesteemable appendent rewards as to make them delightful though they were unpleasant in themselves then certainly are they recommended to our choice by the strongest motives and allurements that can work upon a Ramotional Nature Though the Prosecution of this Argument be as pleasant as 't is copious yet beside that I have not now leisure to pursue it through all its particular instances the Pulpit has of late afforded enough excellent discourses upon this Theme to supersede the necessity of any farther Performance of it But if you desire to see it discoursed of in a more Philosophic way I refer you to Tully's Books de Finibus where 't is as Rationally as Largely asserted by Torquatus the Epicurean And now If Humane Nature be endued with Rational and reflecting Faculties if it be most natural and easy for these Faculties to choose and pursue those objects that are most agreeable to their own Natures and most conducive to Humane Felicity If Virtue be most natural easy and reasonable if it be endeared to us by present and future delights If vice be contrary to the Nature Interest and Reason of men if men have all the inducements and Persuasions in the World to pursue Virtue and Goodness and as great discouragements to scare and deter them from the Prosecution of Vice and Impiety if I say these things are so than I appeal to all Mankind whether the Divine Providence can be justly charged for leaving them too obnoxious to sin and misery But I easily foresee that you will inquire if all men have such pregnant engagements to Virtue what is the Reason of the almost unanimous viciousness of mankind and that when they have all the Reason in the world to engage them in an indefatigable pursuit of Goodness whence comes it to pass that they should with so much eagerness thwart both their Reason & their Interests for the love of Vice and Wickedness I answer that though sensual Inclinations false Principles vicious Examples and wicked Customs may be inducements and occasions of it yet the only proper cause is the wilful or stupid Inadvertency of men Inconsiderateness is that as the Rabins speak the root whence all mischiefs grow 't is the spring & head of that torrent of wickedness that has always overflown the greatest part of the world For if men would but look to the end of all criminal Pleasures they would easily discover in them much more to avert then to entice and court their Passions but when their Appetites are passionately set upon them they grow wild and impatient and will enjoy though they know 't is death and misery they embrace That no man miscarries but by bruitishness and inconsideration I might demonstrate out of my precedent discourse for if every man be endued with Rational faculties if he can reflect upon the Essential differences of good and evil together with their natural Products if he can observe what things tend to his damage and what minister to his advantage And if it be most apparent that virtuous Practices are infinitely more conducive to the interests and happiness of man then Vice and Luxury then what other Reason can possibly be assigned why men are so unanimously vicious but only because they are wilfully or carelessly unreasonable But I need not put myself to the Charge of an Elaborate Dispute to prove a thing that is evidenced by the surest and most obvious of Demonstrations viz. an Induction of particular Instances For if we consider the single Obliquities of every Individual man 't is not only easy to observe how they descended from carelessness and inadvertency but also to convince the man himself that had he but reflected upon the natural results and events of his Criminal actions he would never have committed them Take the pevishest Humorist in his hottest and most transported fits and ask him whether it was not in his own power to have refrained the folly of his Impatience I never yet met with any person so unreasonable whom I could not at length force to own them as avoidable Indiscretions but if any person should be so cross-grained as to plead a brutish necessity it were very easy by laying afore him the circumstances upon which his Anger kindled to convince him that the Provocation was not irresistible How few are so wise as to avoid a fruitless grief and anxiety for past and therefore not avoidable disasters And yet what proposition in Euclid more pregnant with conviction than this that 't is the absurdest folly in the world to grieve for losses and misfortunes in that nothing can be more evidently irrational then by labouring in matters gone and irrecoverable to double our miseries to no purpose And what Council can be more unquestionably rational than the Advice of the Son of Syrach about Mourning for Deceased Friends Take no grief to heart for there is no turning again thou shalt not do him good but hurt thyself Eccles. 38. 17. And yet all men are so foolishly inconsiderate as upon such contingencies to afflict themselves with a grief equally fruitless and troublesome What Vice assaults us with more peremptory and importunate Temptations than Intemperance yet any man that will be but at the pains of a Thought to represent to himself its unpleasant and direful consequences cannot but confess that its invitations are so far from being irresistible that no man can comply with them without the imputation of the most apparent Madness and Folly For who but Madmen can be enamoured of Gouts Dropsies Catarrhs Consumptions broken Sleeps restless Nights loathing Stomaches and every thing that is destructive of health or life And that these uneasy Symptoms are the natural Appendages of Intemperance both Philosophy and Experience assure us Whereas Temperance is a healthful and delicious Virtue moderate diet creates no indisposition either to the Body or the Mind the Temperate man rises from the Table light and cheerful and truly relishes the pleasures that the Epicure designs But Luxury as it adds nothing to the pleasures of Temperance so it both afflicts us with a present dulness by loading the Brain with crudities and lays up materials for future diseases by loading the blood with raw and indigested humours Though I am not so Stoically vain as to vie Power and Majesty with Kings and Emperors yet sure am I that all the sumptuous Entertainments of Palaces afford not such exquisite dainties as are served up by Temperance Constant satiety makes us loathe the most refined delicates whilst hunger prepares such sauces as Apicius with all his witty Gluttony could never taste of and therefore Epicurus that great Exemplar of a Philosophic Temperance was wont to say that give him but Hunger Pulse and Water and he would vie delicates with jove himself Now certainly if men would but represent to themselves the troublesome Appendages of intemperate eating and drinking no morsel could appear so delicious or wine so pleasant which they could not with much less trouble forbear then suffer all the uneasy symptoms of a tired and overloaded Appetite And although this is obvious from every days experience to every man's observation yet how few are they that can stint their Appetites at the necessities of Nature though they are certain that all they devour beyond the satisfaction thereof ends in surfeit and oppression only because most men are so bruitishly sottish as to sacrifice all the contents of their lives to a moments tickling of their Palates and like Beasts grow wild and impatient to enjoy a trifling pleasure which they know will expire in loathing and restlessness The Mass and Community of Mankind is but an Aggregate of Individual men of whom the common and mechanical sort of people a word of a vast extent are incomparably the greater number who yet are utterly senseless and inconsiderate and suffer themselves to be disposed of purely by chance and accidental Principles and are so prodigiously regardless that they will not put themselves to the trouble of thinking whether the usages Custom has taught them are wise and rational And hence it is that they are always floating between contrary Vices and are not a less contradiction to themselves then to Virtue one while they are base and servile another proud and insolent now stubborn and refractory anon inconstant and changeable envious and malicious yet sordid and senseless to honour credulous and talkative yet morose and sullen ignorant and stupid yet censorious and scornful Idolaters of custom yet Seditious and desirous of novelties and hence as they chance to be swayed by custom or any accidental emergencies they roll to any extreme without setting bounds to their unruly progress and if they be suffered to run without restraint they will break down all the banks of Law & Government and therefore 't is the main wisdom and policy of Governors who are deputed by Divine Providence to understand and consider for them to check the violence of the Tide by swaying them backwards by contrary laws & to keep them fluctuating between both Extremes & so by alternate Fluxes & Refluxes to preserve the Commonwealth from popular Inundations Thus they must be kept from sinking into too much ignorance or rising to too much knowledge in matters of for the former renders them savage which is apparently destructive to Government the latter makes them proud conceited and zealous that breeds contempt of Governors and sets them upon headless plots and designs of Reformation that usually proceed to Rebellion and end in a deluge of civil Wars as the experience of all ages sufficiently attests and our own too sadly demonstrates But the Reason of all this and much more is because they are unreasonably wilful and inconsiderate for nothing but inadvertency distinguishes them from the wise and understanding part of mankind To conclude therefore if a sottish and regardless stupidity be the proper cause of every single obliquity of which every man will be satisfied that shall consider of every actions particular circumstances 't is evident by a very easy Inference that all the wickedness in the world must be its effect For the cause of every Individual and the whole species is the same and therefore if every particular sin be the effect of Inadvertency all sin must be its issue Of which the wisest and most experienced of men was long since eminently sensible whence it was that he has so earnestly recommended to mankind consideration and advertency for the wisdom he parabolically represents in his Book of Proverbs imports nothing but consideration discretion and weighing of things in opposition to that folly and stupidity which betrays men to those immoralities from which he there so assiduously dehorts the sons of men And that this is the only true and genuine sense of that Book any one that shall but read it over with a mind clear of those rash and unwarrantable glosses Commentators have fastened upon it will easily acknowledge both by the Tenor of the discourse and by the original signification of those terms by which he expresses the wisdom there Celebrated and chiefly by those peculiar Properties he attributes to it many whereof can very hardly be applied to any thing else And now if folly and inconsiderateness be the Origine of the general and unanimous Apostasy of mankind than judge whether their crime be not of all others not excepting even Peevishness and moroseness themselves the heinousest and most inexcusable for beside that 't is aggravated by all the circumstances that can enhance its guilt nothing can be base and more unworthy of a man for if the dignity of humane nature consists in Reason then certainly nothing can be more brutish and unmanly then to abandon its use and thereby to disrobe ourselves of our highest Prerogative to renounce the Glory and Privilege of our Natures and in difiance of our Creators' Goodness who made us Men to prefer the condition of Bruits and unreasonable Creatures and in a word to dismount our Reasons that Providence has placed in the Saddle that the Bruit might Ride the Man Thus Sir have I replied to and cleared off the main Ratiocinations urged on behalf off Preexistence and have not declined or shuffled of any Argument for its difficulty but have been careful that the Account I have given you might be as faithful as satisfactory If therefore I have omitted any objections 't was not because I could not but because I need not answer them either upon the score of their being too inconsiderable or of their entire dependence on the Arguing I have here encountered and therefore having undermined and ruined their Foundation I suppose it would be but a fruitless and impertinent piece of service to beleaguer them by a particular onset I have Sir so strong an antipathy against all Impertinency that in all inquiries I have the patience only to examine the most weighty and considerable reflections after which the less concerning matters will as little want as merit Consideration and therefore I have not only waved all their pretty gay Probabilities apprehending them subjects too frivolous for serious and rational discourses but have also forborn all Duels or Personal Combats having all along only opposed the Hypothesis not its Patrons for I have taken no notice of the particular miscarriages of any Adversary and have no where objected the Inconsistency either of any Author with himself or of more of them with one another unless where it is apparently the fault of the Hypothesis and not the oversight of the Men. For I must confess Sir I am so far from quarrelling either with the Ancient or Modern Patrons of Preexistence that I peculiarly esteem and honour them as Persons more than ordinarily Learned and Ingenious and therefore though I might perhaps have triumphed over some weak passages of particular Authors yet I have scarce been less careful to pass by their weakest than I have been to assault their strongest objections The most remarkable things I have purposely omitted are those conclusions they draw from the Nature and Substance of the Soul all which I have slighted because we are so utterly ignorant of the nature of the Soul that 't is impossible to deduce any sure & solid Speculations from it 'T is I know as easy a business to imagine Hypotheses concerning things whose natures are placed beyond the Reach of Humane Inquisition as 't is for the Rosicrucians for the confirmation of their Frenzies to tell us of strange Books Monuments Inscriptions found in the inmost and remotest parts of China japan and Tartary because in such stories they are secure from all Contradiction But the difficulty is to give us evidence of the Truth and reality of their Conjectures For when they have contrived and polished a neat and ingenious Idea of the Soul how can they assure either me or themselves of its agreement with the thing itself And therefore of them that pretend to acquaint the world with true and real notions of its Nature I demand by what means or methods they attained their knowledge for if they came by it in a Rational way they are able to show by what steps and Ratiocinations they arrived at it but because this they have never performed they must give us leave to look upon their Hypotheses as the mere Issues and contrivances of their own Fancies 'T is not therefore enough to coin Ideas of the Soul and stamp it with what essential Characters and Properties they please unless they can assure us of their real Conformity to the thing itself it being otherwise precarious and uncertain but as no such assurancew as as yet ever given so when I consider the ways and methods of gaining acquaintance with the Natures of things I despair that it ever will For though I may by Rationacination obtain a clear and certain evidence of the Real Existence of many things of the Essential Ideas whereof I am utterly ignorant yet am I assured by diligent and impartial Trials that all the Objects and Ideas I could ever with all my Industry understand were conveyed to my mind through the Organs of sense But whether any certain knowledge of the Nature and Substance of the Soul be attainable or not I am sure 't is as yet undiscovered and so altogether unqualified to be the Ground of any true and certain Knowledge in that where the first and Fundamental Principles are inevident all the Ratiocinations depending on them how coherent soever in themselves must of necessity be so too And therefore for Instance when they conclude against the seminal Propagation of Souls because 't is one of the prime and chiefest Properties of a Spiritual essence to be indiscerpible they argue at a high rate of confidence and impertinency because though perhaps the soul may be indivisible yet they are not able to produce the least tolerable Evidence thereof being utterly unacquainted with its Nature and Essence and than though perchance it may be indiscerpible in its primary and central substance yet who knows but it may as well as the Body have its seminal Excrescencies I am not more concerned for the Hypothesis of seminal Traduction then for the other of Immediate Creation for they are both to me equally uncertain and consequently indifferent For as the only material objection they assault the former with is that groundless one I but now mentioned so they object nothing singly against the latter but its inconsistency with the Divine Goodness to place pure and spotless souls in such evil and sad Circumstances as environ us in this life but this objection as it equally concerns all the Adversaries of Preexistence what other soever particular Hypothesis they adopt so 't is already abundantly answered So that 't is not at all material whether the reality of either or neither of the forementioned Hypotheses be sure or evident for notwithstanding all that is objected either of them may and therefore 't is of no concernment which is And now Sir though both my Patience and my Pen begin to fail me yet am I obliged as well by my Promise as my Method to consider the most plausible passages of Scripture the Patrons of Preexistence allege on behalf of their Hypothesis but the application of the Texts they produce to their design is so lamentably forced & frivolous that it will scarce excuse a serious answer from being useless and impertiment I know not any one Theological speculation that cannot boast of more Favour and Countenance from Scripture than this pretends to And if you will but parallel the periods of Scripture made use of in a small Pamphlet you have to prove Mulieres non esse Homines I am confident you will discern so vast a disproportion in their evidence as to acknowledge that if the latter may be accounted probable inducements the former will amount to Demonstrations And therefore perhaps I may render myself not less ridiculous by encountering them with a serious Reply than that grave Dutch Doctor who has with mighty transports of zeal opposed himself to that waggish Pamphlet and has conjured up all his Dutch or Systematick Orthodoxy to confound that blasphemous Heresy as himself styles it But having begun I must to avoid all suspicion of shuffling plunge through And though their Scipture-evidences do not merit a refutation yet through some men's Ignorance and others Partiality they need it Had I been left to my own choice I should not have at all concerned the Authority of the Divine Oracles in this dispute For so sensible am I of that violence and injury they suffer from our presumptuous forcing them to be parties in our own trivial and imaginary speculations that I am exceedingly averse from making any use of their suffrage unless it be in matters of grand importance and with all very evident and consonant to its main intendment 'T is the fashion amongst Opinionists to Argue in a reversed order first they contrive Opinions and then Arguments they adopt Hypotheses and then suborn Testimonies out of the sacred Volume to vouch them like Chrysippus who as Laertius records was wont to say that he only wanted opinions to vent but would never want Arguments to defend his opinions And thus the Assertors of Preexistence seem first to be enamoured with the Prettiness of their Hypothesis and then to seek our for Scripture expressions to countenance it For all the testimonies they allege would never have afforded the least intimation of it had it not first prepossessed their Fancies Of which some of them are so sensible as to confess that though they do not persuade their Hypothesis yet they are applicable to it But I wish they could name any opinion howsoever vain and unwarrantable that cannot boast as much what 's more easy then for Fancy to make pretty applications of Scripture to purposes vastly distant from its own especially if we consider how large and miscellaneous a composure the Holy Volume is They who are acquainted with the Customs and Tenets of the Modern Jews know what pretty Analogies they fetch from Scripture to abet their fond and ridiculous usages indeed their prettiness is so odd and surprising that were it in any other matter they would be as delightful as impertiment But 't is time to advance to a closer and more particular engagement the few hours that remain obliging me to a quick and I fear overhasty dispatch but before I clear off the Texts they object I will represent a passage or two on my own behalf And first methinks that 's a shrewd one Rom. 9 11. For the Children being not yet born neither having done either good or evil that the purpose of God according to election might stand not of works but of him that calleth They that were not in a Capacity of doing either good or evil before they were born neither existed nor sinned before But neither jacob nor Esau were in a capacity of acting well or ill before they were born into this life and therefore nor they nor by consequence any others preexisted For 1. 't is too pitiful a shift to say that all other men jacob and Esau only excepted were in Being before their Appearance upon this stage of life And 2. 't is most expressly against the whole design of the Apostles Argument the Purpose of whose Discourse is to show that Gods vouchsafing greater Instances of his Favour to jacob then to Esau proceeded not from any extrinsique motive of greater merit in him but purely from the free determination and beneplaciture of his own will but Now this he proves because the Choice was pitched upon before they were born and so before they had done either good or evil But if the souls of men had been in a capacity of acting morally before their descent into this life then has the Apostle argued at a strange rate of inconsequence when he concludes that God's different dealing with jacob and Esau depended not on their own Actions because the difference was resolved on before they were born and consequently before they had done good or evil If therefore the Apostles conclusion be consonant to the Laws of Inference it must be unquestionably certain that the Souls of men never acted before they were born into these Bodies There are a brace of Texts more that I conceived would without any torturing give in evidence against Preexistence but I find that its Patrons have already suborned them to speak in their Cause and therefore I that am a modest man must be content to give up my Right in their Testimony and to Encounter them as objections The first is our Saviour's reply to his Disciples enquiry about the man born blind joh. 9 3. Neither has this man sinned nor his Parents but that the works of God should be made manifest in him In which words he expressly affirms that that mishap was not inflicted upon the man as a Penalty for any miscarriages he had been guilty of in any former state but that it was designed by the Divine Providence upon a special score namely that he might be a fit object to evidence our Saviour's miraculous Power And yet from this very passage they argue with no small confidence against us in that the question supposes the man might have sinned before his Terrestrial Birth and that the Hypothesis of Preexistence was an Opinion much in Vogue among the Jews and therefore when our Saviour had so fair an occasion of rectifying the common belief and yet said nothing against it his silence is almost as argumentative in favour of it as a positive Approbation I answer 1. 't is far from being evident that the Disciples question supposes him capable of sinning before his birth for might they not if they had any notions of the Divine Prescience suppose that God foreknowing what kind of person this blind man would prove had antedated his punishment Or why might they not intend his Original sin which the Jews supposed to be the in every individual man so that when they enquired whether the man was born blind for his own or his Parent's sin they might only ask whether that particular Judgement was the effect of any miscarriage in his Parents or of his own original Pravity 2. It was not the Pre-existence but the Metemphychosis or Transmigration of Souls that was the common Opinion of the Jews 't is styled by the Rabins the Revolution of Souls in opposition to their Revolution of the Dead whereby they meant the Rolling of the Carcases of Jews that happen to be Interred in the polluted Earth of the Gentiles through the secret Caverns of the Earth to Palestine where they believe all Jews shall arise at the last Resurrection and hence some of them have in their old age traveled to the Holy Land to lay their Bones there to avoid the disturbance of their Subterraneous Pilgrimage and R. Solomon tells us the Reason why jacob charged his Son joseph to convey his Corpse from Egypt to Canaan was partly that his dust might not afterwards be turned into Lice a cleanly old man and partly to escape the trouble of this posthumous Journey But their impertinencies tempt me to be so too Now that the opinion of Transanimation obtained among the Jews is proved from the testimony of josephus lib. 2. de Bello jud. cap. 7. where he relates among the dogmata of the Pharisees that the souls of good men did not perish but did and Tisbi relates that 't is the common opinion of the Circumcised Doctors that every Soul animates three Bodies which they after their usual rare of arguing prove from that passage in job. 33. 29. All these things God worketh with man tribus vicibus And by virtue of this Vicissitude they assert the Soul of Adam to have informed the Body of King David and that the Soul of David will by secret Revolutions wind itself into the Messiah which they think is clearly intimated by the word being compounded of the Initial Letters of Adam David Messiah As also that those two mighty zealots Phinees & Elias were animated with the same spirit because of the resemblance of their Zeal and that Laban's Soul was translated into Balaams Abel's into Seth and Abravanel that bold Jew asserts that it was Esau's Soul that possessed our Saviour Manasse Ben Israel citys several of their old Books and Authors to this purpose And therefore if this passage proves any thing it proves too much viz. not only the Preexistence but also the or perpetual revolution of Souls For if they can infer any thing in favour of Preexistence from our Saviour's silence in so apt an occasion to have rectified the common Error concerning it they may with the same reason conclude his Approbation of the Transmigration of Souls this being the common Opinion of the Jews and so as probably employed in the Disciples Quere 3. It was not our Saviour's custom to take notice of every impertinent Question much less the suppositions on which they relied Thus when his Apostles asked him Acts 1. 6. Lord wilt thou at this time restore again the Kingdom to Israel Though it was an important Question and bottomed upon a grand and dangerous mistake he makes no reply to it but only takes occasion thence to discourse of matters of a widely distant nature but that more closely touched their concerns And therefore nothing can be fairly inferred from our Saviour's silence especially when he had replied so fully to the direct scope of the Question there was not any necessity he should take notice of the Theories it collaterally implied And if the Hypothesis of Preexistence were so principally implied in the main scope of the question as is pretended then is it expressly enough destroyed by our Saviour's plain and unlimited Negation To conclude he had as good ground to take occasion from their Enquiry to discourse of the Equity of punishing Posterity for their Ancestors sins it being one of the main Phaenomena of Providence and of as grand importance as they can presume the Hypothesis of Pre-existence to be and yet notwithstanding the fairness of the opportunity and the weightiness of the subject 't is evident he took no notice of it The other Resembling Passage I meet with in job 38. 4. where the Almighty undertakes to pose job through all the Phaenomena of Nature and among other particulars of the true Origine of things and to convince him of his ignorance he tells him he was so far from being acquainted with it that he was then shut up in the dark state of Nonexistence Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth etc. Now if all Spirits had been in Being when the foundations of the Earth were laid as our Adversaries conclude from the ensuing words When the morning Stars sang together and all the Sons of God shouted for joy. By the former whereof say they is intended the Angels by the latter the blessed untainted Souls But if this gloss were as true as 't is precarious then job might have justly replied to the Almighty that himself was present among the Sons of God at the laying the Foundations of the earth and joined in that great and unanimous Acclamation And then the Almighty having discoursed of each particular mystery and contrivance of Nature he concludes with this bafling Irony Knowest thou them because thou wast then born because the number of thy days is great And yet they conclude from hence for Preexistence because the 70 render it without the Interrogation I know that thou wast then born for the number of thy days is many A various Reading may serve for a subterfuge to escape the force of an objected Testimony but certainly 't is a pitiful Argument that relies barely on the Authority of a Version when it not only contradicts the Original but the plain design of its own Context For if job had then been born how could God have convinced him of his unacquaintedness with the Origine of things because he was not then in Being so that unless Reason itself be out in its Logic our Adversaries are Having thus gained back these Texts to our side I pass on to the rest of their objections And first as for that pasage jer. 1. 5. urged with so much Jewish confidence by Manasse Ben Israel Before I formed thee in the Belly I knew thee and before thou camest forth out of the Womb I sanctified thee and I ordained thee a Prophet unto the Nations It implies nothing else but God's designment of jeremy to the Prophetic Office for his knowing of him imports in its native and most unstrained sense merely his foreordaining him to that employment and then his sanctifying of him signifies in its genuine and most proper use only the separating or devoting of him to that peculiar Office which is exegetically expressed in the last branch of the Period I ordained thee to be a Prophet Besides this passage is peculiarly applied to the Prophet jeremy in opposition to any other but should it have referred to his Pre-existence there had been no peculiarity forasmuch as God would not only have known him but the whole Mass of mankind before they were form in the Belly And now what shadow of favour do these words cast upon the Origenian Hypothesis No man could ever have discerned the least colour for Preexistence here whose mind was not aforehand tinctured with its belief Here 's not the least foundation for an Argument unless this supposition were first laid viz. That God cannot fore-ordain a Person to any special employment before he exists And therefore to conclude that because God had consigned jeremy to the Prophetic Office before he was born that therefore he preexisted is an Inference fit for none but a Rabbi and upon that score I have taken notice of it only as his though other men have urged it with as great a grace as he And for that passage Phil. 2. 5. Let this mind be in you which was in Christ jesus who being in the form of God did not think equality with God a prey or spoil but made himself of no Reputation and took upon him the form of a Servant and was made in the likeness of men etc. It 's plain and palpable meaning is only this That though the Blessed Jesus was invested with the Divine Power and Authority and sustained the person of a Deity being made Sovereign Lord of all in which alone consists the Scripture notion of God yet he did not boast and triumph in his Greatness but made his appearance to the world only in a servile condition of Poverty and made himself so subject to those that seemed his Superiors that in obedience to their Authority he yielded himself up to a most reproachful death not opposing his Almighty and Irresistible Power to rescue himself from their equally ignominious and merciless Decrees And what 's all this to Preexistence In the next place they urge us with some passages out of Saint john And now O Father Glorify me with thine own self with the Glory I had with thee before the world was I come forth from the Father and am come into the world Again I leave the world and go to the Father etc. Whence they argue that the Glory our Saviour prays to be restored to seems to concern his Humane nature only for the Divine could never be disrobed of it and therefore it supposeth that he existed in his Humanity before and that his Soul was of old before its appearance in a Terrestrial Body Ans. 1. The most these places can pretend to prove is barely our Saviour's Preexistence but to conclude thence the Preexistence of all mankind is a very wide and gaping Inference and we may as well prove we were all born of Virgin-mothers' because he was Our Saviour was a singular person designed for an extraordinary Employment and therefore may be supposed to have transacted with his Father about it before he undertook it and therefore we may as well Attribute all his personal Properties to Mankind in general as argue for their Preexistence from his 2. Those Predicates that in a strict and rigorous Acceptation agreed only to his Divine Nature might by a communication of Idioms as they phrase it be attributed to his humane or at least to the whole Person compounded of them both Then which nothing is more ordinary in things of a mixed and heterogeneous Nature as the whole man is styled immortal from the deathlesness of his soul. We ought not therefore to understand these and the like passages in a nice and metaphisical rigour of this or that nature but in a familiar sense of the Person of Jesus Christ The instances hereof in Scripture are so frequent that few texts concerning our Saviour supposing his double nature can well be understood without it 3. Methinks Grotius' sense is very easy and natural viz. that the Glory he had with his Father before the world began was only in the intendment of the Divine decree as 1 Pet. 1. 20. Revel 13. 8. he is said to be a Lamb slain from the foundations of the world not that he was really slaughtered but because he was then marked out in the divine decree to be a sacrifice for Mankind It being a Proverbial from of speech among the Jews to express matters of great moment only resolved upon in the Divine Decree as if they were really existing thus they say the Messias is ancienter than the Sun and the Mosaic law older than the world not as if they apprehended them really so but only to express their absolute usefulness and necessity Now Scriptures are not to be interpreted in an exact and strictly literal sense but in a familiar manner suitably to the Idiom and manner of speaking used in the Age and Place in which they were written This therefore being a vulgar form of speech to express the Important usefulness of a thing existing only in decree as if it had been as long in actual existence as it was in Futurity the glory our Saviour here prays for and which he had before the world was as it could not so it need not be his essential lustre but was that honour with which God had from all eternity designed to dignisie the Messias Thus have I satisfied all their Scripture Objections that can need an answer but as for their Applications of Parables and Cabalistical interpretations they are too impertinent to bear one And now Sir having evinced the Precariousness of the Origenian Hypothesis from the Nature of the thing itself and its uncouthness from some of the Divine Attributes having shown the apparent and lamentable defiency of that evidence they produce for it having engaged the suffrage of the Divine Oracles against it and having given a handsome rational and certain account of the Phaenomina of providence without it I hope 't is sufficient to convince yourself or any other ingenious and unpossessed inquirer that for any thing we are able to know this is the first Stage upon which the Souls of men ever appeared and that there is no need of recurring to a former scene to solve the perplexed difficulties of Providence and to make the plot thereof seem neat and consistent enough to be a contrivance not unworthy the Divine Wisdom And now Sir methinks I ought not bluntly to conclude this tedious Discourse and it would be but good manners to compliment you with unnecessary excuses or some other little pieces of Courtship but you know I have long since remonstrated to these common ceremonies of the world And though I had a mind to trouble you with Apologies or News or anyother impertinencies yet I have not time being just now upon the very point of my departure for London to add any more then that I am as much as I ought or can be My Dearest Coz. Your &c. From Trin. Coll. Oxon. May 1. ERRATA PAge 12. l. 21. for Buitish r. Brutish p. 13. l. 17. for Grants r. Grantees l. 22. for esceats r. escheats p. 15. l. 7. for near r. mere l. 13. for deserved r. undeserved p. 30. l. 22. for Fatalist r. Fatalists p. 61. l. 12 for Phaenomina r. Phaenomena & alias p. 84. l. 5. for ramotional r. rational p. 90. l. 25. headless r. endless p. 95. l. 13. for assurancew as r. assurance was FINIS