greatest indignities, and the most intense miseries for so doing. Him therefore I, as a plain rational creature, receive for my teacher and master, particularly as one who told me beforehand, that strait is the gate, and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it,' and who asked, when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?' Thus he hath prophetically prepared me (O that it were true of all other men) not to count his disciples in order to know, whether I should make one among them, that is whether I should follow a multitude, probably, to do evil,' or speak in a cause to decline after many; and not rather lay the cross of Christ, heavy as it may at first seem, on the shoulder of my abominable nature, as a faithful follower of him, who through much 'tribulation hath gone before to prepare a place for me, if I can but attain unto it. Welcome all the flouts thrown on this species of singularity! And welcome all those persecutions, which may give me the most distant similarity of Him, who died for my poor soul! O my God and Saviour, deliver me from that broad way of the many, that crowd into it, and strive, who shall go foremost in it. If I am not a reprobate fool, I must easily see, in what each of these ways is certainly to end. For the sake of that blood, which thou hast poured out on the cross for all men, cause me feelingly to see both, and cause thy grace to be sufficient for me. But, O my soul, what hast thou to do in the broad way? It is so crowded, that there is no room for thee. And why shouldst thou, a poor little creature, intrude among the great ones. Canst thou afford to go to hell? In speaking on this subject three sorts of men ought to be distinguished; they who have heard the gospel, and embraced it with both understanding and heart; they who have heard, and withheld both their understandings and hearts from it; and they who never had an opportunity of hearing it. Of the two first sorts of men I need say nothing, as every rational creature knows what to think of them. But of the last it must be said, that God is the - Saviour of all men, though especially of them that believe ;' let me add, of them who would have believed, had it been in their power. No man will be called to an account for more than he hath received. As the sin of the first Adam hath passed upon all men, so the righteousness and sacrifice of the second Adam is imputed to all men, who make the best use of the lights they have received. God is not a respecter of men, but of his own justice and goodness. However, as in the house of Christ there are many mansions, all seats of happiness, but one differing from another in glory, as stars do in splendour, infinite wisdom will find it easy to place every one where he ought to be. If some texts of Scripture seem to limit the divine mercy towards men who never could have heard of Christ, within narrower bounds, than I have here assigned, either I must have mistaken the meaning of those texts, or of that which I have just quoted, and of others, wherein Christ is set forth to us as the Saviour of all men. 22. About half a century ago, our philosophical infidels had found out, that they were of the same nature with God, and governed by the same eternal law which governs, in their opinion, the actions of the Deity himself. In a violent stretch of their benevolence, they were pleased to impart a modicum of this their own dignity to all the rest of our species, down to the poorest labourer, and, lower still, to the most flagitious villain on earth. But now these, so lately self-deified infidels, as if humbled far below what Christ requires, are adopting the notions of materialism, and sinking themselves to mere machines. Locke, in asserting, that matter may possibly think, and Des Cartes by maintaining, that brutes have no souls, though they certainly do think, have encouraged our modern philosophers in the opinion, held by Epicureans and Sadducees of old, that matter may be so modified, as to think, nay, that in men it is so modified. The frightful principles of the soul's immortality and future accountability must, somehow or other, be got rid of. The persuasion, if it can be entertained, that a man is nothing more than a lump of matter, or a mere body, would carry the infidel more than half way to his relief, for, if the whole man dies at once, and rots, conclamatum est; and then there will be little or no fear left of a reviviscence. With a certain bishop, a presbyterian minister, and their disciples, materialism is only a specious cover for that degree of Atheism, which consists in parrying the dread of a judgment to come, and, in regard to their sins and fears, its sole horrible consequence. We distinguish the species of things by their essential properties, when known, and those properties are not known to us so well by any other means, as by their invariable effects. What matter is, we know by our sight and feeling; what soul or spirit is, by our perception of its thinking in ourselves and others. By wishing, choosing, willing, and moving as we please, in consequence of thinking, we are still farther enabled to distinguish soul or spirit from matter, wherein, after its utmost rarification, we never discover any one of these effects, nor any thing like them. It is true, there may be properties in matter, or impressed on matter per se, whereof we know nothing, nor can know. But from that which is unknown, and utterly unknowable, it is most idle to infer any thing. Men, in regard to property, character, health, or life, that is, in regard to any thing they value, admit not of arguments, founded on mere reveries and suppositions, and those too the most improbable in the nature of things. From all we know of matter, there is no one proposition more absolutely certain to human understanding, than this, that matter, per se, cannot think, will, nor choose. But why, saith a great philosopher, may not God endow matter with a power of thinking, &c.? That he hath not so endowed it, is as clearly evident, as any other negative concerning the nature of things. He hath made matter indifferent, as to rest or motion. Therefore it cannot choose whether it shall do either; indeed can do neither, but as it is influenced by some cause or power extrinsical to itself. It can never act of itself, and therefore its grand advocate, the presbyterian minister, hath judiciously denied the possibility of moral, or any other sort of freedom in mankind, whom he considers as nothing better than purely material machines. If they are in no sense free, they can never be judged, nor rewarded as good men, or punished as wicked. If they are but material machines, they can have no degree of freedom, and never can act, but as they are acted upon. All men, in their senses, know what matter is, so far, I mean, as it is of use to them to know it, but no man farther. The philosophers indeed talk of it, as if they knew a great deal more, but talk very idly, as they do on all other subjects, a little beyond the verge of utility. Aristotle confesses, that he knows not what it is, how much it is, or what sort of thing it is. Thus he speaks of it, as a philosopher; though he and the meanest Athenian, perfectly well knew this or that quantity of it, what it was in its distinguishing properties, how great or small this or that parcel of it was, and what sort of a thing that parcel was. Our modern philosophers, Newton among the rest, have been bolder with it; but talked, all of them, such nonsense on the subject, on the substratum of its accidents, on the inherence of those accidents in the substratum, as reduces it as absolutely to nothing in earnest, as Berkeley does in ridicule. But, after their handling, if it can think, it is well, and certainly, as a mere nonentity, it can do nothing else. If people of all sorts, especially philosophers, would talk on subjects only so far as they understand them, it would certainly save a great deal of trouble, and probably tend more to the advancement of science than will be readily believed, Cartesius stuffed infinite space so full of matter, as not to leave therein the smallest interstice. Newton very happily cleared so much of it as to leave convenient room for the solar system, wherein planets and comets have been carried round in excellent order ever since, by centrifugal and centripetal powers. But unhappily he afterward, relapses into matter, adopts an ether, subtile enough to penetrate gold and adamant almost as easily as a vacuum, and sets this at work to whirl the planets about in different planes, intersecting one another in different angles, without seeming to remember, that a fluid so exceedingly rare could not possibly lay hold of, or carry with it, such prodigious masses of matter, through which it could so freely pass, and without asking leave of the centrifugals and centripetals, in possession of his prior patent. How this may do among the stars, I know not, but it makes wild confusion in the heads of his implicit disciples. Perhaps this weakness of their master imboldens them to make free with the vis inertia, made by him essential to matter, so as to ascribe to it a locomotive power, a power of thinking and choosing, or of acting as if it could really think and choose. Many, were they to read this, would say, I do not understand Sir Isaac, and it is just as easy for me to reply, that I am not single in charging him as I have done; that thousands, even philosophers, understand him no better than I do; and that his admirers are too slavishly addicted to all he says, howsoever contradictory, to recall the dictates of a master, held infallible, to the test of common sense. If the vast capacity of Newton was no better able to guide him through the mazes of matter, let the minuter tribe of philosophers take care how they launch out beyond him into an opinion, that matter, howsoever modified, may have a faculty of thinking. They pretend to say, that electrical fire is instantaneous, and quick enough for thought. Now, not to insist, as may be reasonably done, that thought requires a great deal more than quickness to produce it, I deny that the electrical vapour moves faster than the light of the sun, which requires seven minutes to arrive at this world; whereas I, without being a philosopher, can in a single instant outstrip the light, and think of a star a million times farther off, than the most distant twinkler ever seen by Newton or Halley. But the materialists urge, that, if it were not the body, or bodily organs, which think, how should it come to pass, that a violent blow on the head of a wise man should instantly turn him into a fool or madman? Or (kill him? Should be added), may it not be true, that the soul, while closely united to the body, cannot duly exercise its proper functions, but by the organical instrumentality of the brain, nerves, or animal spirits, insomuch, that as often as they are greatly disordered, its faculties, for the time, are proportionably thrown into confusion. An able musician, sitting at his harpsichord, does justice to the composition of a Corelli, a Purcel, or a Handel, until a rude fellow, with a club, dashed against the instrument, puts it extremely out of order. Does it follow that the musician is annihilated? Or that there neither was, nor is, any such person as a musician? Or that the harpsichord, of itself, performed the tune before it was shattered? None but the deaf, or one wholly destitute of a harmonic nerve, can draw such a consequence. What mere matter may be made to do, should, I think, be carefully distinguished from what she can of herself do, which will be found to be little, or absolutely nothing at all. Des Cartes, her greatest votary, filled infinite space with her. Newton fairly confined her to a small part of it, I mean, at first, and, for some time, seemed to do her more justice than the Frenchman, who had enlarged her into a sort of goddess; and, in favour of her, degraded into mere clockwork Montaigne's cat, and Agrippa's dog, though honoured by some with the high title of a devil; and yet, after returning to her with a grand train of attractions, operating at small distances, he charged her with such repulsions at a greater, and so great a degree of subtility, that, with all those powers of thinking, ascribed to her by some, she knew not what to do, whether to go backward or forward, indeed, whether she had so much as a being or not. He kept her busy in a proximity of attractions, then in distant repulsions; and nevertheless, without so much as letting her know, how long, and how far she might continue to repel, hooked her to the sun by a chain long enough to reach her beyond the orbit of Saturn. Forced into this fickleness of conduct by her great prime minister, her gravity, long celebrated, was brought into shrewd suspicion. In this distress she hath been induced to represent her case to the French philosophers of the present time by a memorial, nearly to the following purport, Humbly shewing, |