eyes of blindness that cannot see that which is visible to seeing men. The Spirit is not given to make our religion reasonable, but to make sinners reasonable, in habit and act, for the believing it. The Spirit, therefore, is not first any objective cause of our belief, unless you speak of the Spirit in the apostles or others, and not in men's selves, but it is the efficient cause; nor doth he cause us to believe by enthusiasm, or without reason, but he works on man as man, and causeth him to believe nothing but what is credible; and his causing us to believe is by showing us the credibility of the thing, or the evidence of the truth to be believed, and elevating the soul to the belief thereof.

And for those that contradict this, it may suffice me now to tell you that their singular opinion is no disparagement to the Scripture, or the christian cause. If they will either make the Spirit to cause an act without its object, that is, faith without apparent reasonable credibility in the thing believed, or if they will make the first work of faith to be enthusiastical, and introduce a constancy of new revelations; if they will assign such a work to the Holy Ghost of their own heads, beyond the work which Scripture assigneth, which was so to inspire the penmen of Scripture, that it may be a sufficient revelation, and then to illuminate men's understandings by a cure of their depravity, that so they may believe, and effectually to excite the heart thereto, if they will accuse the Scripture of being an insufficient revelation, or if they will accuse the christian verity of unreasonableness, or being a doctrine that hath no proof; if they will profess that we have no rational means to confute or convince an infidel, nor to confirm a tempted professor of Christianity; if they will tell all infidels that we can give them no such sound reasons for our faith, as should bind them to believe, by making it their duty, and condemn them if they believe not; but will justify all such infidels from being guilty on that account; if they will say that natural verities are not presupposed to those of supernatural revelations, and may not afford some proof of our principles of faith; if they will unavoidably cast themselves into the circle which the papists, falsely, charge upon protestants in general, but is the case but of these few, to wit, to prove by the Spirit that Scripture is God's word, and to prove by Scripture that this is God's Spirit, circularly; or if they will teach men to be enthusiasts, and to plead new revelations and witnesses of the Spirit, of which they can give no proof that they are of God; if they will tell men of a Spirit, which is not

to be tried by the word whether it be of God or not, seeing its testimony must be believed before we believe the word; if they will contradict themselves, and make two first credibles, that is, Scripture to be God's word, and that it is God's Spirit that witnesseth it; if they will deny that honour to the Scripture to be propter se credibile, and yet give the same honour to the testimony which they say they have from the Spirit; if they will cross the experience of all those Christians that know of no inspiration or testimony of the Spirit which caused them to see a truth without any persuading objective evidence, but caused them to believe, because they believe; seeing no more reason, at the same time, why they should believe, than why they should not believe; finally, if indeed they see no reason why they are or should be Christians themselves, nor can give to him that asketh them a reason of their hope; I say, if all this be so with them, it is not so with me; it is not so with other reformed divines; it was not so with the ancient fathers of the church that confuted the infidels; nor was it so with the apostles who made full proof of their doctrine to the world, and set to that seal that is not yet void or taken away. You may see these men sufficiently confuted by our divines, especially by Rob. Baronius contra Turnebull, and Thes. Salmuriens. de S. Script. et Testim. Spir. For their quarrels with us, we leave them till we shall meet them in the presence of that God whose light will effectually dispel all our darkness and reconcile our differences, and mollify our angry, self-conceited minds, and where it shall be known which of us was in the wrong.

But as to all the friends of infidelity, as we have showed you already such reasons of our belief as will convince you, or condemn you, so are we ready yet to produce more. We undertake not to cure your prejudice, or blindness, or sensual opposition to the word of God, or proud arrogancy that causeth you to censure the word which you should learn, and therefore we undertake not to cause you to believe. And for those of you that have done despite to the Spirit of grace, we have little hope that ever you should be true believers; but yet we undertake to produce such reasons for our religion as should wholly prevail with a reasonable man; and I dare say there are such, even in this imperfect discourse, which here I offer you; but much more by the more judicious, and upon more deliberation, may be said.

Object. You magnify your own reasons, but you know other men of your own religion do vilify them, and maintain them to

be insufficient. You know who saith of you and your reasons, 'There are some who lay much, if not too much, upon universal tradition;' a thing hardly known, for certain, by any, but almost impossible to be known to the many and yet you expect that we should be moved by that which we cannot know.

Answ. I magnify the word of God, and its certainty, and the soundness of those reasons which God affordeth us to prove that certainty, but not my own reasonings in the managing of them. That writer doth not there expressly invalidate any argument that I use. He saith, 'Perhaps I give too much to that tradition;' but tells not you or me wherein. I have told you how much I give to it, as plainly as I can speak, in the preface before the three last editions of the second part of the 'Saint's Rest.' We use not the word 'universal,' for that which hath the consent of all men in the world, no more than I mean all the world by the universal church. But that which is opposed to the private tradition of the Romanists, and hath a certain moral universality, and is built, as to the certainty, upon common, rational, and natural grounds, and not on the Romish pretended authority, or infallibility. If none can know a history or tradition of this nature, then can no Englishman know whether the laws of this land, which he saw not made, be indeed such laws, or mere forgeries and so his estate and life must depend upon that which, for ought he knoweth, hath nothing to do with him. In vain, then, do we cite our disputations with the papists, the writings of Austin, Aquinas, Bellarmine, or the Council of Trent, Constance, Basil, &c. For how know we that any of these be their writings, or that ever there were such a thing as the Council of Trent, or ever such men as Austin, Aquinas, or Bellarmine, in the world. If the papists quarrel with Luther, Melancthon, and the Augustin Confession, we will not, tell them it is uncertain whether ever there were such a man as Luther or Melancthon, or such a thing as that confession. No; we are certain, I say certain, of these things. Unlearned men may, ordinarily, be certain of them. We have yet fuller and clearer tradition to ascertain us that this Scripture was delivered down from the apostles, as I have showed elsewhere.

I would not be he that should so much wrong the christian cause, and strengthen the hands of infidels, as to deny or question the certainty of this infallible tradition, by which the Scripture hath been brought down to our hands, for more than I will now speak of. When I have heard somebody tell me bet

ter than I have yet been told, how we shall know which books of Scripture are canonical without this tradition, I should the less set by it. Have we a certainty of the canonical books, or have we none? If we have none, then who can say of one particular book, 'This is God's word, or this is true?' And if we know not any one book to be canonical, then it is almost all one to us, as if we knew not that there is any canonical at all. Nor can we comfort ourselves, or confute an adversary effectually from the Scripture. If we do know certainly some books to be canonical, it is either by the certainty of tradition, joined with the characters of excellency in that book, or by those characters alone, or some other way. If, by the bare inspection of the books, and the witness of the Spirit, then I will appeal to all that have the Spirit, whether they could have known by the Spirit, without such tradition, that the prophecy of Jonas, Nahum, Haggai, &c., were any more canonical than Baruch? or Ecclesiastes than the wisdom of Solomon? We are certain enough which is Homer's Iliad, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Virgil's Eneid, Seneca's Epistles, Cicero's and Demosthenes' Orations, to this day; much more Cleonard's, Cambden's, or Lilly's Grammar, which our schools preserve. And why may we not be as certain of those sacred writings, of which the church hath been always so careful, and had preachers to publish them, and weekly assemblies to hear them, through the christian world? If we may be sure that we have Mahomet's Alcoran by tradition, why may we not be sure by it that we have true writings of the apostles, and the Gospel of Christ? But I have said enough of these matters in the following discourse.

I shall only conclude with these two requests to two sorts of people, to whom I now speak.

1. To those that are but haunted with temptations to infidelity, but not yet quite overcome. In the name of God, make not light of such hideous injections: meet them not but with dread and detestation: wrong not the grace of God and all the discoveries that he hath made to you of his truth, so much as to entertain Satan into a free dispute against it, upon equal terms; and be sure that you be not arrogantly confident of the competency of your understandings to deal with those difficulties which are the ground of the temptations; but make out for help to some able, experienced divine. You may perceive by the malice against God, by the importunity and tendency of the temptation, that it is certainly of the devil, and to be regarded

accordingly. Your studying to increase your apprehensions of the evidence of christian truth, and to be stablished in the faith, and able to defend it, is not your sin; but all the suspicions and doubts of the truth of Scripture, which in those studies you are guilty of, are your sin. To be tempted is common to the good and bad; to be imperfect in believing was the case of the disciples, who said, 'Lord, increase our faith;' but to be overcome by the tempter, would be your everlasting undoing. Play not, then, with such motions and cogitations, as may be your utter ruin, but you are sure beforehand, can never, but by the conquest over them, do you any good. If you suffer the devil to be still stirring in your fantasies, and raising doubts of the truth of your end, what a lamentable clog will it be to you in your way. What a cooler in all duties, and a destroyer of your comforts in life and at death.

2. And for those that are already apostatized from the faith, though I have but little hope to be heard, I shall earnestly crave thus much at their hands, which'they themselves may perceive to be but a reasonable request: that they will be at so much pains, before they adventure any further, as to open their minds to some able minister, and to hear but what can be said against them; and that without prejudice, passion, or scorn, with meekness and willingness to know the truth. Though I abhor your sin, yet the Lord knoweth that it is unfeigned love and compassion to your souls that causeth me to make this motion to you. Your condition is no grief to you, because you believe not your approaching misery. The beast that knoweth not the butcher's mind, is as careless within an hour of his death, as if no harm at all were near him. But would you have a man that knows your danger and the terrors of the Lord to have no more pity on you than you have of yourselves. The Lord knows, I have oft, with a sad lamenting heart, looked on and thought of some in this condition, who have formerly been my familiar friends, and gone with us in company to the house of God, and seemed to be of us; though since they are gone from us; to think what everlasting calamity is near them, while they least fear it, or are most confident in their unbelief. Alas! it is no deliverance from danger to imagine that there is no danger. Your unbelief shall not frustrate the threatenings of God, but bring them on you. God's word will prove true, whether you believe it or not. It is merely your own ignorance and present incapacity of understanding the Scripture, that makes you first