A VINDICATION OF THE GLORY OF THE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES, IN THE QUESTION OF ORIGINAL SIN. 1. In order to which I will plainly describe the great lines of difference and danger, which are in the errors and mistakes about this question. 2. I will prove the truth and necessity of my own, together with the usefulness and reasonableness of it. 3. I will answer those little murmurs, by which (so far as I can yet learn) these men seek to invade the understandings of those, who have not leisure or will to examine the thing itself, in my own words and arguments. 4. And if any thing else falls in by and by, in which I can give satisfaction to a person of your great worthiness, I will not omit it, as being desirous to have this doctrine stand as fair in your eyes, as it is in all its own colours and proportions. But first, Madam, be pleased to remember, that the question is not, whether there be any such thing as original sin; for it is certain, and confessed on all hands almost. For my part, I cannot but confess that to be, which I feel, and groan under, and by which all the world is miserable. Adam turned his back upon the sun, and dwelt in the dark and the shadow; he sinned, and fell into God's displeasure, and was made naked of all his supernatural endowments, and was ashamed, and sentenced to death, and deprived of the means of long life, and of the sacrament and instrument of immortality, I mean the tree of life; he then fell under the evils of a sickly body, and a passionate, ignorant, uninstructed soul; his sin made him sickly, his sickness made him peevish, his sin left him ignorant, his ignorance made him foolish and unreasonable: his sin left him to his nature; and by his nature, whoever was to be born at all, was to be born a child, and to do before he could understand, and be bred under laws to which he was always bound, but which could not always be exacted; and he was to choose, when he could not reason, and had passions most strong, when he had his understanding most weak,-and was to ride a wild horse without a bridle, and the more need he had of curb, the less strength he had to use it; and this being the case of all the world, what was every man's evil, became all men's greater evil; and though alone it was very bad, yet when they came together it was made much worse; like ships in a storm, every one alone hath enough to do to outride it; but when they meet, besides the evils of the storm, they find the intolerable calamity of their mutual concussion, and every ship that is ready to be oppressed with the tempest, is a worse tempest to every vessel, against which it is violently dashed. So it is in mankind, every man hath evil enough of his own; and it is hard for a man to live soberly, temperately, and religiously; but when he hath parents and children, brothers and sisters, friends and enemies, buyers and sellers, lawyers and physicians, a family and a neighbourhood, a king over him, or tenants under him, a bishop to rule in matters of government spiritual, and a people to be ruled by him in the affairs of their souls; then it is that every man dashes against another, and one relation requires what another denies; and when one speaks, another will contradict him; and that which is well spoken, is sometimes innocently mistaken, and that upon a good cause produces an evil effect; and by these, and ten thousand other concurrent causes, man is made more than most miserable. But the main thing is this; when God was angry with Adam, the man fell from the state of grace; for God withdrew his grace, and we returned to the state of mere nature, of our prime creation. And although I am not of Petrus Diaconus's mind, who said, 'that when we all fell in Adam, we fell into the dirt, and not only so, but we fell also upon a heap of stones; so that we not only were made naked, but defiled also, and broken all in pieces;' yet this I believe to be certain,that we, by his fall, received evil enough to undo us, and ruin us all; but yet the evil did so descend upon us, that we were left in powers and capacities to serve and glorify God: God's service was made much harder, but not impossible; mankind were made miserable, but not desperate: we contracted an actual mortality, but we were redeemable from the power of death; sin was easy and ready at the door, but it was resistible; our will was abused, but yet not destroyed; our understanding was cozened, but yet still capable of the best instructions; and though the devil had wounded us, yet God sent his Son, who, like the good Samaritan, poured oil and wine into our wounds,—and we were cured before we felt the hurt, that might have ruined us upon that occasion. It is sad enough, but not altogether so intolerable, and decretory, as some would make it, which the Sibylline oracle describes to be the effect of Adam's sin. *Ανθρωπος πέπλαστο Θεοῦ παλαμαῖς ἐνὶ αὐταῖς, But to this we may superadd that, which Plutarch found to be experimentally true, " Mirum, quod pedes moverunt ad usum rationis,nullo autem fræno passiones:" "The foot moves at the command of the will and by the empire of reason, but the passions are stiff even then when the knee bends, and no bridle can make the passions regular and temperate." And indeed, Madam, this is, in a manner, the sum total of the evil of our abused and corrupted nature; our soul is in the body as a prison; it is there tanquam in alienâ domo,' ' it is a sojourner,' and lives by the body's measures, and loves and hates by the body's interests and inclinations; that which is pleasing and nourishing to the body, the soul chooses and delights in that which is vexatious and troublesome, it abhors and hath motions accordingly; for passions are nothing else but acts of the will, carried to or from material objects, and effects and impresses upon the man, made by such acts; consequent motions and productions from the will. It is a useless and a groundless proposition in philosophy, to make the passions to be the emanations of distinct faculties, and seated in a differing region; for as the reasonable soul is both sensitive and vegetative, so is the will elective and passionate, the region both of choice and passions, that is, when the object is immaterial, or the motives such, the act of the will is so merely intellectual, that it is then spiritual, and the acts are proper and symbolical, and the act of it we call election or volition; but if the object is material or corporal, the acts of the will are passion, that is, adhesion and aversation, and these it receives by the needs and inclinations of the body; an object can diversify an act, but never distinguish faculties: and if we make it one faculty that chooses a reasonable object, and another that chooses the sensual; we may as well assign a third faculty for the supernatural and religious; and when to choose a sensual object is always either reasonable or unreasonable, and every adherence to pleasure, and mortification or refusing of it, is subject to a command and the matter of duty, it will follow, that even the passions also are the issues of the will: by passions' meaning the actions of prosecution or refusal of sensitive objects, the acts of the concupiscible and irascible appetite, not the impresses made by these upon the body, as trembling, redness, paleness, heaviness, and the like: and therefore to say, the passions rule the will, is an improper saying; but it hath no truth in its meaning but this; that the will is more passionate than wise; it is more delighted with bodily pleasures than spiritual: but as the understanding considers both, and the disputation about them is in that faculty alone; so the choice of both is in the will alone: now because many of the body's needs are naturally necessary, and the rest are made so by being thought needs, and by being so naturally pleasant, and that this is the body's day, and it rules here in its own place and time, therefore it is that the will is so great a scene of passion, and we so great servants of our bodies. 6 This was the great effect of Adam's sin, which became therefore to us a punishment, because of the appendant infirmity, that went along with it; for Adam being spoiled of all the rectitudes and supernatural heights of grace, and thrust back to the form of nature, and left to derive grace to himself by a new economy, or to be without it; and his posterity left just so as he was left himself;-he was permitted to the power of his enemy, that betrayed him, and put under the power of his body, whose appetites would govern him; and when they would grow irregular, could not be mastered by any thing that was about him, or born with him; so that his case was miserable and naked, and his state of things was imperfect, and would be disordered. But now, Madam, things, being thus bad, are made worse by the superinduced doctrines of men, which when I have represented to your Ladyship, and told upon what accounts I have reproved them, you will find that I have reason. There are one sort of Calvin's scholars, whom we for distinction's sake call Supralapsarians, who are so fierce in their sentences of predestination and reprobation, that they say God looked upon mankind, only as his creation and his slaves, over whom he having absolute power, was very gracious, that he was pleased to take some few, and save them absolutely; and to the other greater part he did no wrong, though he was pleased to damn them eternally, only because he pleased; for they were his own; and Qui jure suo utitur, nemini facit injuriam,' says the law of reason; Every one may do what he please with his own.' But this bloody and horrible opinion is held but by a few; as tending directly to the dishonour of God, charging on him alone, that he is the cause of men's sins on earth, and of men's eternal torments in hell; it makes God to be powerful, but his power not to be good; it makes him more cruel to men, than good men can be to dogs and sheep; it makes him give the final sentence of hell without any pretence or colour of justice; it represents him to be that which all the world must naturally fear, and naturally hate, as being a God delighting in the death of innocents; for so they are, when he resolves to damn them and then most tyrannically cruel, and unreasonable; for it says, that to make a postnate pretence of justice, it decrees that men inevitably shall sin, that they may inevitably, but justly, be damned; like the Roman lictors, who because they could not put to death Sejanus's daughters as being virgins, deflowered them after sentence, that, by that barbarity, they might be capable of the utmost cruelty; it makes God to be all that for which any other thing or person is or can be hated; for it makes him neither to be good, nor just, nor reasonable; but a mighty enemy to the biggest part |