will be an unanswerable presumption against him. For what can he be thought to find out, or discern, more than so many millions of the subtlest and most improved wits, every one of which was perhaps of a quicker apprehension and a further reach than himself?

It is morally impossible for any falsity to be universally received and believed, both as to all times and places; and therefore an atheist appears in the world as a strange, unusual thing, as an irregularity, and exception from the standing rules of nature; like a man born without legs or arms, or, indeed, rather, without an head or an heart.

2dly, The folly of such a person appears in this, that he lays aside a principle easy and suitable to reason, and substitutes in the room of it one strange and harsh, and, at the best, highly improbable. For is it not most suitable to reason, there being a necessity of a first mover, a thing granted by all, that an intelligent nature of a substance above the grossness of body, infinite in wisdom, power, goodness, and all other perfections, should first of all contrive and give being to this fabric of the world, and afterwards preserve, govern, and order every thing in it to his wise and righteous purposes? Is there any thing, I say, in this, that an unprejudiced reason does not immediately close or fall in with, as that that is fairly consistent with all its principles, and grates upon none of them?

But the atheist that puffs at this, and lays it wholly aside, what does he resolve the phenomena of nature into? How come we by this world, according to his philosophy? Why, he either tells us, that it was from eternity; a strange (though much

the most rational) hypothesis that he can frame. For if it has existed from all eternity, whence is it that we have no history or record of any thing beyond a little above five thousand years? How come the transactions of so many myriads of years to be swallowed up in such deep silence and oblivion? And as for the story even of those five thousand years, we are beholding to the scriptures for it; for all profane histories set out from a much later date: so that this hypothesis is hugely improbable, and unfit for any rational man to build his discourse, much less to venture his salvation upon.

But if this will not do, we are told, that there was an infinite, innumerable company of little bodies, called atoms, from all eternity, flying and roving about in a void space, which at length hitched together and united; by which union and connection, they grew at length into this beautiful, curious, and most exact structure of the universe.

A conceit fitter for bedlam than a school or an academy; and took up, as it were, in direct opposition to common sense and experience. For, let any one take a vessel full of sand or dust, and shake it from one end of the year to the other, and see whether ever it will fall into the figure of an horse, an eagle, or a fish: or, let any one shake ten thousand letters together, till by some lucky shake they fall at length into an elegant poem or oration. That chance and blind accident, the usual parent of confusion and all deformity in men's actions, should yet in this outdo the greatest art and diligence in the production of such admirable, stupendous effects, is contrary to all the rules that human nature has been hitherto accustomed to judge by; and fit for

none to assert but for him, who with his God has also renounced his reason.

3dly, The folly of such a person appears from the causes and motives inducing him to take up this opinion; which, amongst others, are two.

1st, Great impiety, and disquiet of conscience consequent thereupon. Some have sinned their accounts so high, and debauched their consciences so far, that they dare not look the persuasion of a Deity in the face; and therefore they think to convey themselves from God, by hiding God from themselves; by suppressing, and, as much as they can possibly, extinguishing all belief and thought of him. They are so hardened in sin, and so far gone in the ways of sensuality, that to think of retreating by repentance is loathsome, and worse than death to them; and therefore they cut the work short, and take off all necessity of repentance by denying providence, and a future judgment of the lives and actions of men.

2dly, The second cause of this opinion is great ignorance of nature and natural causes. It is a saying of the lord Bacon, that a taste and smattering of philosophy inclines men to atheism, but a deep and a thorough knowledge of it directly leads men to religion. And if the assertor of the world's eternity, or of its emerging out of the forementioned coalition of atoms, would consider how impossible it is for a body to put itself into motion, without the impulse of some superior immaterial agent; and what an unactive, sluggish thing that is that the philosophers call matter, and how utterly unable to fashion itself into the several forms it bears, he

would quickly fly to a spiritual, intelligent mover, such an one as we affirm to be God.

4thly and lastly, The folly of such persons as say in their heart, There is no God, appears from those cases, in which such persons begin to doubt and waver, and fly off from their opinion. I shall instance in two.

1st, In the time of some great and imminent danger. As it is reported of the Persians in Eschylus, that were routed by the lake Strymon; and thereupon, being either to pass the ice then ready to thaw, or to be cut in pieces by the enemy; though before they held, or at least pretended to hold, that there was no God; yet then they fell upon their knees, and prayed to God, that the ice might bear them: nor is this to be wondered at, since all men by nature seem to have a secret acknowledgment of a certain invisible power, that is able either to help or to hurt them, which perhaps is the first rude draught and original seed of the persuasion of a Deity. And it is this secret acknowledgment that naturally makes men, in a great strait and extremity, willing to rely upon more assistances than they see, and to extend their hope further than their

sense.

But now, is not every such person most ridiculous, who shall owe his religion to the disturbances of his fear, which he cast off in the settlement of his reason? Shall a little danger and confusion make him quake out his atheism, and be able to enthrone God in his mind, who by his being and constant preservation, and the exact frame and order of the universe, could never yet be convinced of any such

thing? But this is an evident sign, that the judgment of such persons lies not in their understanding, but in the lower region of man's nature, their affections.

2dly, The other time in which the atheist usually deserts his opinion, is the time of approaching death. What a different way of reasoning and discoursing has the mind then, and needs must it have so! for atheism is not any real persuasion, but a vain pretence and affectation, by which some would seem to be greater wits and higher speculators than other

men.

But alas! affectation expires upon the death-bed. No man then has any designs to deceive or impose upon the reason of other men, much less upon his own. All his thought and desire then is, to be as safe as he can; he knows that it has been the judgment of all the wise men in the world, that there is a supreme judge, and a future estate for men's souls; and he perceives his reason too light and too little to lay in the balance against them.

But now it is a most righteous thing with God, to let such, as have striven to free themselves from this belief, be able to overrule and bind up their conscience so far, as to keep it down for a long time; and then, at length, to let conscience loose upon them, with this terrible persuasion quick and awakened upon it for God has not put it into any man's power to extinguish this witness that he has left of himself in the minds of men; he has not left men so much at their own disposal, as to obliterate and rase out what he has wrote in their hearts, and to be atheists when they please. And therefore, wheresoever I have hitherto made mention of atheists,