obedient; or that he should damn the wicked rather than the just; but it is only necessitas respectus et denominationis; a necessity that whatever law he make, were it to punish men for well-doing, should have the respect and denomination of a righteous law, because he makes it. But this is false. Not as some say, because right and wrong, good and bad, in this sense, are eternal; but because God first makes the differing natures of good and bad, right and wrong, in the nature of things in creation and disposition, before he makes any further particular laws much more before execution.

2. But if the latter be the assertor's sense, that God necessarily doth that which is first considerable as good and just, ex natura rei, then I grant it, and from that concession shall prove what is denied; for what is it that is meant by justness in threatening, judging, and punishing? If it be only that he go not above men's desert, and lay not too much on them, this is but a negation of injustice; it is not justum, but non injustum ; but if they mean any thing positive, 1. Then will it essentially contain the punishment itself; 2. And by what reason they will prove that God must threaten, judge, and punish justly, by the same will I prove that he must threaten, judge, and punish.

Particularly, the most wise and righteous Governor of the world must needs make wise and righteous laws, and pass a wise and righteous sentence, and wisely and justly execute it. Thus must we conclude de modo; but de reipsa the conclusion is as necessary as de modo. God is, upon creation, by necessary resultancy, the only Sovereign Ruler of the world or if they have a mind to make this a free act of his own after creation, let them take their own way. He that is the Governor of the world, must needs govern it; he that governeth man, must need give him laws: for that is the most essential act of government, taking laws in the full sense, as signifying any sign of the rec tor's will, making due or right to or from the subject. He that makes laws for government must needs oblige the subject to obedience, or to punishment in case of disobedience; for these are in the general nature of a law; or, if the last be denied, he that obligeth to duty must needs make punishment to be due to the disobedient: nay, by a natural resultancy it is so due. He hath put out the eye of the natural light, so far, that denieth that sin deserveth punishment ex natura rei, if no law but that of nature did threaten it. He that will restrain man from sin, and so govern effectually according to the nature of man, must

restrain him by fears, which is his natural passion to such ends; and that by the apprehension of danger, and that by the threatening of danger. He that must govern by threatening laws, must judge and sentence by those laws; for judgment is a part of government, and the law is norma judicii; so that to have governors and laws, and yet for judgment to be unnecessary to mortal man, is a contradiction. He that must judge according to his laws, must execute his judgment, except upon a valuable consideration the ends of government may be obtained by relaxing them. If it be said that God could have attained those ends without punishment or satisfaction, I answer: Not without miracles, or destruction, or alteration of the very frame of nature itself, which was not to be expected, for it would have been a contradiction.

As to the two reasons of their opinion, I answer: To the first, God, who is Rector, is also Dominus Absolutus; but he executeth no sentence as Dominus, but as Rector; for it belongeth not to him in that relation, punishment being a part of governing justice; and God's relations contradict not each other in their works.

To the second I answer: Though God's threatenings, as such, or directly, bind him not to punish us, yet, 1. His assumed relation of Rectorship, 2. And his making that law to be norma judicii, do declare that to be his proper work to execute them ; and that he is, as it were, obliged, in point of wisdom and governing justice, to do it, except as afore excepted.

Thus I have, in more words than I hoped to have despatched it when I began, explained my meaning in several passages, and given in my thoughts, somewhat rudely, on that great controversy, which I did, 1. Because of the great weight of it, especially to the present business of confirming our Christianity; 2. Because, having there spoken somewhat sharply, and less explicitly on this point, I was afraid lest by one I should offend those whom I intended not in that speech, and by the other become more liable to misunderstanding.

August 20th, 1655.

THE PREFACE.

I CANNOT but expect that so slender a discourse, on so weighty a subject, should seem to some judicious men unnecessary; and that I owe them satisfaction concerning the reasons of this attempt. I confess I have many a time privately wished, and sometimes publicly expressed my desires, that some of the ablest teachers in the church would purposely undertake this weighty task of drawing out the chiefest arguments, for the defence of the christian cause and truth of Scripture, which lie scattered so wide in the writings of the ancients, and might afford much light to shame the cause of unbelievers. I know Marsilius Ficinus, Lodovicus Vives, the Lord du Plessis, especially Grotius, and others have done much already this way; but yet, I think, a fuller improvement may be made of their arguments, at least to the advantage of those that we have now to do with. The account that I can give of the publication of this discourse is only this. I find myself most effectually excited to action, cæteris paribus, by the nearest objects; but especially when they are the greatest as well as the nearest. It hath long grieved me to see how the stream of errors, that beareth down this present age, doth plainly lead to the gulph of infidelity. While I only heard and read of infidels in the remote parts of the world, I was either of their judgment that thought it best not once to name, much less confute, so vile a sin, or at least I was not awakened to the sight, because the enemy was no nearer; but when I perceived such a formidable approach, I thought it time to look about us. It is many years since I observed the tendency of the prevailing giddiness, unruliness, and levity of these times. When, through the great ignorance, looseness, or ungodly violence of too many ecclesiastics, the officers of Christ among us had once lost their authority, and were grown into contempt, the people grew suspicious of almost all that they had taught them, and the proud, self-conceited, wanton professors did see no further need of guides, but contemned all that was truly government, and rejoiced in it as a part of their christian liberty that they were from

under the yoke of Christ. They either chose to themselves a heap of teachers, or thought themselves sufficient to be their own guides, yea, and the teachers of others; they take themselves no longer for children, and, therefore, will go to school no more; they will be disciples of Christ, if either the name will serve or he will come down from heaven and teach them immediately himself; but if he must teach them by these his ministers or ushers, he may go look him new disciples for them. Hereupon this pride and passion leads them to open schism; and they gather into separated societies where they may freely vent themselves with little contradiction, and where the spirit of light and unity doth seldom trouble them in their self-pleasing way. They now scorn that which once they called 'The Church.' It is none of the smallest points of their zeal, nor the least piece of their pretended service to God, to make his messengers and some of his ordinances odious unto others, and to deride them in their conference, preaching, and prayers; they now rejoice that they have got out of the supposed darkness of this or that error, which they suppose all the priests, as they call them scornfully by an honourable name, to be involved in. The devil and seducers having got them at this advantage, they are presently told that it is yet many more things that the priests have deceived them in, as well as these; and so they fall upon one ordinance of God after another, till they have made them think hardly of them all. The first of them that must be here opposed is infant baptism, that their posterity may be kept more disengaged from Christ, and so great a part of his church may be unchurched, and the breach may begin where the closure and engagement did begin; but especially that the seducer may the better succeed, by beginning at a point which may hold so much disputation, and whose evidence the more dull, unexercised wits cannot easily discern, because the Scripture hath not spoken of it so expressly as they expect, or would prescribe. Here, also, they grow to many singularities in the Lord's supper, and other ordinances singing of God's praises in David's psalms they fall to deride; first, as it is done in mixed assemblies, and, next, as by any at all. Praying in families they account unnecessary, for, as in infant baptism, the proof, though plain enough to the humble and wise, yet is not palpable enough for them; catechizing they deride as superstitious forms; and teaching children is to make them hypocrites, because they cannot yet understand. Here their foolish reason controlleth the confessed precepts of

the word. (Deut vi. and xi., Eph. vi. 4.) In doctrinals they presently fall into a subdivision: the one-half of them are pelagian anabaptists, the other are antinomian anabaptists; but these foxes that are thus sent out to fire the harvest, are so tailed together for and by their joint opposition to the truth and the university of the church, and by their consent to an universal liberty or toleration, that their manifest differences disjoin not their posteriors, nor hinder them much from setting all their faces against the church of Christ. The pelagian party proceedeth next to be Socinians; and they find by the light of their benighted reason, that it was the deceit of the anti-christian priests that persuaded men that Christ or the Holy Ghost is God; and that they may escape anti-christianity, they will deny Christ's Godhead, and his satisfaction for sin; and when they have come so near the borders of infidelity as to make Christ and the Spirit to be but creatures, a little thing leads them the other step, even to take him with the Mahometans to be but a prophet; and lastly, with the Jews and infidels, to blaspheme him as a deceiver. The other stream or subdivision that went the antinomian way, do often turn libertines in opinion and conversation, and thence turn familists, seekers, and, lately, ranters or quakers. And here some of them, to save their reputation, do play with the name of Christ and Scripture, and the life to come; but when they dare speak out you may know their minds, that they take the Scripture to be fabulous delusions, and Christ to be an impostor, and the resurrection of the dead to be an idle dream. But where they dare not speak out, for fear of making themselves odious and marring all their work, their course is sometime to keep their opinions to themselves; so that you may live many years with them and never shall know what religion they are of. This is the course especially of the more subtle and politic part of them; and I wonder not at it, for there is nothing in their opinions that should induce them to be very zealcus in promoting them. But those of them that are of hotter or less reserved minds do use to vent themselves more freely; and that is commonly against all our ministry, churches, and ordinances; against supernatural grace, and all truths of supernatural revelation, that they can contradict without too great suspicions, especially against the immortality of the soul, though that be a truth, that nature may reveal. Also, they will be much quarrelling with the Scripture, and labouring to prove it guilty of self-contradictions and untruths; and vilifying it as a dead letter. By this, those