concerned to defend the truth which I have published, to acquit it from the suspicion of evil appendages, to demonstrate not only the truth but the piety of it, and the necessity, and those great advantages which by this doctrine so understood may be reaped, if men will be quiet and patient, void of prejudice, and not void of charity. + This, Madam, is reason sufficient why I offer so many justifications of my doctrine, before any man appears in public against it; but because there are many who do enter into the houses of the rich and the honourable, and whisper secret oppositions and accusations rather than arguments against my doctrine; the good women that are zealous for religion, and make up in the passions of one faculty what is not so visible in the actions and operations of another, are sure to be affrighted before they be instructed, and men enter caveats in that court before they try the cause: but that is not all; for I have found, that some men, to whom I gave and designed my labours, and for whose sake I was willing to suffer the persecution of a suspected truth, have been so unjust to me, and so unserviceable to yourself, Madam, and to some other excellent and rare personages, as to tell stories, and give names to my proposition, and by secret murmurs hinder you from receiving that good which your wisdom and your piety would have discerned there, if they had not affrighted you with telling, that a snake lay under the plantain, and that this doctrine, which is as whole some as the fruits of Paradise, was enwrapped with the infoldings of a serpent, subtile and fallacious. A Madam, I know the arts of these men; and they often put me in mind of what was told me by Mr. Sackville, the late Earl of Dorset's uncle; that the cunning sects of the world (he named the Jesuits and the Presbyterians) did more prevail by whispering to ladies, than all the church of England and the more sober Protestants could do by fine force and strength of argument. For they, by prejudice or fears, terrible things and zealous nothings, confident sayings and little stories, governing the ladies' consciences, who can persuade their lords, their lords will convert their tenants, and so the world is all their own. I should wish them all good of their profits and purchases, if the case were otherwise than it is: but because they are questions of souls, of their interest and advantages; I cannot wish they may prevail with the more religious and zealous personages and therefore, Madam, I have taken the boldness to write this tedious letter to you, that I may give you a right understanding and an easy explication of this great question; as conceiving myself the more bound to do it to your satisfaction, not only because you are zealous for the religion of this church, and are a person as well of reason as of religion, but also because you have passed divers obligations upon me, for which all my services are too little a return. 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 ás 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 a 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 moyes 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 in 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 |