nured those first practical notions and dictates of right reason, which the nature of man is originally furnished with; there being not any one of them, but what is naturally productive of many more. But they quickly stifled and overlaid those infant principles, those seeds of piety and virtue sown by God and nature in their own hearts; so that they brought a voluntary darkness and stupidity upon their minds; and, by not exercising their senses to discern between good and evil, came at length to lose all sense and discernment of either: whereupon, as the apostle says of them in the 21st verse of this chapter to the Romans, their foolish heart was darkened: and that, not only by the just judgment of God, but also by the very course of nature; nothing being more evident from experience, than that the not using or employing any faculty or power, either of body or soul, does insensibly weaken and impair that faculty; as a sword by long lying still will contract a rust, which shall not only deface its brightness, but by degrees also consume its very substance. Doing nothing, naturally ends in being nothing.

It holds in all operative principles whatsoever, but especially in such as relate to morality; in which, not to proceed, is certainly to go backward; there being no third estate between not advancing and retreating in a virtuous course. Growth is of the very essence and nature of some things. To be, and to thrive, is all one with them; and they know no middle season between their spring and their fall.

And therefore, as it is said in Matt. xiii. 12. that from him who hath not, shall be taken away even

that which he hath: so he, who neglects the practice, shall, in the end also, lose the very power and faculty of doing well. (That which stops a man's actual breathing very long, will, in the issue, take away his very power of breathing too.) To hide one's talent in the ground is to bury it; and the burial of a thing either finds it dead, or will quickly make it so.

3dly, These men held the truth in unrighteousness, by concealing what they knew. For how rightly soever they might conceive of God and of virtue, yet the illiterate multitude, who, in such things, must see with better eyes than their own, or see not at all, were never the wiser for it. Whatsoever the inward sentiments of those sophisters were, they kept them wholly to themselves; hiding all those important truths, all those useful notions from the people, and teaching the world much otherwise from what they judged themselves. Though I think a greater truth than this cannot well be uttered; That never any thing or person was really good, which was good only to itself. But from hence it was, that, even in a literal sense, sin came to be established by a law. For amongst the Gentiles, the laws themselves were the greatest offenders. They made little or no provision for virtue, but very much for vice: for the early and universal practice of sin had turned it into a custom, and custom, especially in sin, quickly passed into common law.

Socrates was the only martyr for the testimony of any truth that we read of amongst the heathens, who chose rather to be condemned, and to die, than either to renounce or conceal his judgment touching the

unity of the Godhead. even Zeno and Chrysippus, Plato and Aristotle, and generally all those heroes in philosophy, they swam with the stream, (as foul as it ran,) leaving the poor vulgar as ignorant and sottish, as vicious and idolatrous, as they first found them.

But as for the rest of them,

But it has been always the practice of the governing cheats of all religions, to keep the people in as gross ignorance as possibly they could; for, we see, the heathen impostors used it before the Christian impostors took it up and improved it. Si populus decipi vult, decipiatur, was ever a gold and silver rule amongst them all; though the pope's legate first turned it into a benediction: and a very strange one it was, and enough, one would think, to have made all that heard it look about them, and begin to bless themselves. For as Demetrius, a great master in such arts, told his fellow-artists, Acts xix. 25. it was by this craft that they got their wealth: so long experience has found it true of the unthinking mobile; that the closer they shut their eyes, the wider they open their hands. But this base trade the church of England always abhorred; and for that cause, as to its temporal advantages, has fared accordingly; and, by this time, may be thought fit for another reformation.

And thus I have shewn three notable ways, by which the philosophers and learned men amongst the Gentiles held the truth in unrighteousness: as first, That they did not practise up to it: 2dly, That they did not improve it: and 3dly and lastly, That they concealed and dissembled it. And this was that which prepared and disposed them to greater enor

mities: for, changing the truth of God into a lie, they became like those, who, by often repeating a lie to others, came at length to believe it themselves. They owned the idolatrous worship of God so long, till, by degrees, even in spite of reason and nature, they thought that he ought so to be worshipped. But this stopped not here: for as one wickedness is naturally a step and introduction to another; so, from absurd and senseless devotions, they passed into vile affections, practising vices against nature, and that in such strange and abominable instances of sin, that nothing could equal the corruption of their manners, but the delusion of their judgments; both of them the true and proper causes of one another.

The consideration of which, one would think, should make men cautious, and fearful, how they suppress or debauch that spark of natural light, which God has set up in their souls. When nature is in the dark, it will venture to do any thing. And God knows how far the spirit of infatuation may prevail upon the heart, when it comes once to court and love a delusion. Some men hug an error, because it gratifies them in a freer enjoyment of their sensuality and for that reason, God in judgment suffers them to be plunged into fouler and grosser errors; such as even unman, and strip them of the very principles of reason and sober discourse. For surely it could be no ordinary declension of nature, that could bring some men, after an ingenuous education in arts and philosophy, to place their summum bonum upon their trenchers, and their utmost felicity in wine and women, and those lusts and

pleasures, which a swine or a goat has as full and quick a sense of, as the greatest statesman or the best philosopher in the world.

Yet this was the custom, this the known voice of most of the Gentiles; Dum vivimus vivamus ; Let us eat and drink to-day, for to-morrow we must die. That soul which God had given them comprehensive of both worlds, and capable of looking into the great mysteries of nature, of diving into the depths beneath, and of understanding the motions and influences of the stars above; even this glorious, active thing did they confine within the pitiful compass of the present fruition; forbidding it to take a prospect, so far as into the morrow; as if to think, to contemplate, or be serious, had been high treason against the empire and prerogative of sense, usurping the throne of their baffled and deposed reason.

And how comes it to pass, that even nowadays there is often seen such a vast difference between the former and the latter part of some men's lives? that those who first stepped forth into the world with high and promising abilities, vigorous intellectuals, and clear morals, come at length to grow sots and epicures, mean in their discourses, and dirty in their practices; but that, as by degrees, they remitted of their industry, loathed their business, and gave way to their pleasures, they let fall those generous principles, which, in their youthful days, had borne them upon the wing, and raised them to worthy and great thoughts; which thoughts and principles not being kept up and cherished, but smothered in sensual delights, God, for that cause, suffered them to flag and sink into low and inglorious satisfactions, and to enjoy themselves more in a revel or a