or calefaction, because there were no recipient to be illuminated and heated by it; and it would lose nothing by the want of objects; so the soul, had it no body to act on, would have its profound immanent acts of self-living, self-perceiving, self-loving, and all its external acts on other objects, which need not organs of sense for their approximation. Its sensitive faculty is itself, or such as it is not separated from, though the particular sorts of sensation may be altered with their uses: therefore it may still act on or with the sense and if one way of sensation be hindered, it hath another. How far this lantern of flesh doth help or hinder its operations, we know not yet, but shall know hereafter. Sondius, though a heretical writer, hath said much to prove that the body is a hinderance, and not a help to the soul's intuition and if ratiocination be a compound act, yet intuition may be done for ever by the soul alone. But as we are not to judge what powers the soul hath when the acts are hindered, but when they are done; nor what souls were made by God for, by their state in the womb or infancy, or diseases, but by our ordinary mature state of life; so we have little reason to think that the same God who made them for life, intellect, and volitions here, will not continue the same powers to the same, or as noble uses hereafter, whether with organs, or without, as pleases him. If in this flesh our spirits were not inactive and useless, we have no reason to think that they will be so hereafter, and that for ever.

This greatest and hardest of all objections, doth make us confess, with Contarenus, that though by the light of nature we may know the immortality of souls, and that they lose not their powers or activity; yet, without supernatural light we know not what manner of action they will have in their separated state, or in another world, because here they act according to objective termination, and the receptivity of the sense, and in the womb we perceive not that it acts intellectually at all.'

But we know that, if even then it differed not in its formal power from the souls of brutes, it would not so much afterward differ in act: and it would never be raised to that which was not virtually in its nature at the first. We find, that even very little children have quick and strong knowledge of such objects as are brought within their reach that their ignorance is not for want of an intellectual power, but for want of objects, or images of things, which time and use, and

the womb, or in an apoplexy, hath not objects of intellect within its reach to act upon; but is as the sun to a room that hath no windows to let in its light. What if its profound vitality, selfperception, and self-love be by a kind of sensation and intuition, rather than by discursive reason? I doubt not but some late philosophers make snares to themselves and others, by too much vilifying sense and sensitive souls, as if sense were but some loseable accident of contempered atoms: but sensation, though diversified by organs and uses, and so far mutable, is the act of a noble, spiritual form and virtue. As Chambre and some others make brutes a lower rank of rationals, and man another higher species, as having his nobler reason for higher ends: so for man to be the noblest order, here, of sensitives, and to have an intellect to order, and govern sensations, and connect them and improve them, were a noble work, if we had no higher. If intellect and volition were but a higher species of internal sensation than imagination, and memory are, it might yet be a height that should set man specifically above brutes. I am daily more and more persuaded, that intellectual souls are essentially sensitive and more, and that their sensation never ceases. Still I say, that it is to nature itself a thing unlikely, that the God of nature will long continue a soul that hath formally or naturally an intellectual power, in a state in which it shall have no use of it. Let others that will inquire whether it shall have a vehicle or none to act in, and whether aereal, or igneous, and ethereal, and whether it be really an intellectual sort of fire, as material as the solar fire, which is an igneous substance, and formal virtue of life, sense, and intellect, with other such puzzling doubts; it satisfies me, that God, will not continue its noblest powers in vain; and bew they shall be exercised, is known to him; and that God's word tells us more than nature. Withal, life, intuition and love, or volition, are acts so natural to the soul, as motion, light and heat to fire, that I cannot conceive how its separation should hinder them, but rather that its incorporation hinders the two latter by hiding objects, whatever be said of abstract knowledge and memory.

But the greatest difficulty to natural knowledge is, whether souls shall continue their individuality, or rather fall into one common soul, or return so to God that gave them, as to be no more divers, or many individuals, as now; as extinguished candles are united to the illumi

reason to think that in our better state, we shall perfectly love others as ourselves, and the selfish love will turn into a common and a divine love, which must be by our preferring the common and the divine good and interest.

I am so sensible of the power and plague of selfishness, and how it now corrupts, tempts, and disquiets me, that when I feel any fears, lest individuality cease, and my soul fall into one common soul, as the Stoics thought all souls did at death, I find great cause to suspect that this arises from the power of this corrupting selfishness for reason sees no cause at all to fear it, were it so. For I find also that the nature of love is to desire as near a union as is possible; and the strongest love doth strongly desire it. Fervent lovers think they can scarcely be too much one. Love is our perfection, and therefore so is union. I find that when Christians had the first and full pourings out of the Spirit they had the ferventest love, the nearest union, and the least desire of propriety and distance. I find that Christ's prayer for the felicity of his disciples is a prayer for their unity, and in this he places much of their perfection. I find also that man is of a sociable nature, and that all men find by experience, that conjunction in societies is needful for their safety, strength, and pleasure. I find that my soul would fain be nearer God, and that darkness and distance is my misery, and near communion is it that would answer all the tendencies of my soul: why then should I fear too near a union. I think it utterly improbable, that my soul should become more nearly united to any creature than to God: though it be of the same kind with other souls, and infinitely below God; for God is as near me as I am to myself: I still depend on him as the effect upon its total, constant cause; and that not as the fruit upon the tree, which borrows all from the earth, water, air, and fire, which it communicates to its fruit: but as a creature on its Creator, who hath no being but what it receives totally from God, by constant communication. Hence Antonine, Seneca, and the rest of the Stoics, thought that all the world was God, or one great animal consisting of divine spirit and matter, as man of soul and body; sometimes calling the supposed soul of the world, God; and sometimes calling the whole world, God; but still meaning, that the universe was but one spirit and body united, and that we are all parts of God, or of the body of God, or accidents at least.*

*This Stoical philosophy is still prevalent over a great part of India; and is usually taught and held, so as to exonerate man of all

responsibility to his Maker. It renders him a kind of machine; and is in fact atheism in a heathen garb.-Ed.

Even the popish mystical divines, in their pretensions to the highest perfection, say the same in sense: such as Benedict. Anglus, in his Rule of Perfection, approved of by many doctors, who places much of his supereminent life in our believing verily that there is nothing but God, and living accordingly; maintaining that all creatures are nothing distinct from God, but are to God, as the beams are to the sun, and as the heat is to the fire, which really is itself: and so teaching us to rest in all things as good, as being nothing but God's essential will, which is himself, resolving even our sins and imperfections accordingly into God, so that they are God's or none.

All these men have as fair a pretence for the conceits of such a union with God now, as for such a union after death: for their reason is that God being infinite, there can be no more beings than his own. But God and the smallest distinct being, would be more entity than God alone: but infinity can have no addition: but God only is good. If we are, notwithstanding all this, distinct beings from God now, we shall be so then. For we shall not be annihilated, and we shall not be so advanced as to be deified, and of creatures or distinct beings, turned into a Being infinitely above us. If we be not parts of God now, we shall not be so then.

But if they could prove that we are so now, we should quickly prove to them that then God hath material, divisible parts, as the Stoics thought. And that we are no such parts as are not distinct from one another; but some are tormented, and some happy. That, as is said, it will be no abatement of the misery of the tormented, nor of the felicity of the blessed, to tell them that they are all parts of God: for though the manner of our union with him, and dependence on him, be past our comprehension, yet that we are distinct and distant from each other, and have each one a joy or misery of his own, is past all doubt. Therefore there is no union with God to be feared by holy souls, but the utmost possible to be most desired.

If our union with God shall not cease our individuality, or resolve us into a principle to be feared, we may say so also of our union with any common soul, or many: if we be unible, we are partible, and so have a distinct though not a divided substance, which will have its proper accidents. All plants are parts of the earth, really united to it, and radicated in it, and live, and are nourished by it: and yet a vine is a vine, and an apple is an apple, and a rose is a rose, and a nettle is a nettle. Few men would be

But God lets us see, that though the world be one, yet he delights in a wonderful diversity and multiplicity of individuals. How various and numerous are they in the sea, and on the land, and in the air? Are there none in the other world? How come the stars therein to be so numerous, which are of the same element? Though perhaps Saturn, or some other planets, or many stars, may send forth their radiant effluvia or parts into the same air, which the sunbeams seem totally to fill and illuminate, yet the rays of the sun, and of other stars, are not the same, how near soever in the same air.

Were there now no more contraction by egotism or propriety among men, nor mine and thine did signify no more, nor the distance were greater than that of the several drops of water in the sea, or particles of light in the illuminated air, but I had all my part in such a perfect unity and communion with all others, and knew that all were as happy as I, so that there were no divisions by cross interests or minds, but all were one, certainly it would make my own comforts greater by far than they are now? Are not an hundred candles set together and united, as splendid a flame as if they were all set asunder? So one soul, one love, one joy would be.

Object. But it is only the fomes that individuates lights; as when the same sun by a burning glass lights a thousand candles, they are individuate only by the matter contracting, being still all united parts of the same sun-beams. When they are extinct, they are nothing, or all one again.

Ans. They were before they were extinct, both one and many; none but fools think that extinction annihilates them, or any part of them. They are after as much substance, and as much solar fire, though diffused, and as much and no more one than before, but not indeed many as before, but parts of one. Nature hath made the equal diffused sun-beams to be to the air and surface of the earth, as the blood equally moving in the body our candles and fires seem to be like the same blood contracted in a bile or inflammation, which indeed is more felt than the equally diffused blood, but it is as the pain of a disease. So when our fires go out they are but like a healed scattered inflammation, and the same substance is more naturally and equally diffused, If the individuation of souls were only by corporeal matter, and the union thus as great at their departure, it would not diminish, if it did not too much increase their perfection and feli

This would confute their fond opinion, who think that separated souls sleep for want of an organized body to operate in: for no doubt but if all holy souls were one, this world, either in heaven or earth, hath a common body, enough for such a soul to operate in. Even those stoics that think departed souls are one, do think that one soul hath a nobler operation than ours, in our narrow bodies, and that when our souls cease animating this body, they have the nobler and sweeter work in part, of animating the whole world: those that thought several orbs had their several souls, of which the particular person participated, said the like of separated souls, as animating the bodies of their globes or orbs. Though all these men trouble their heads with their own vain imaginations, yet this much the nature of the matter tells us, which is considerable, that whereas the utmost fear of the infidel is that souls departed lose their individuality or activity, and are resolved into one common soul, or continue in a sleep for want of a body to operate in, they do but contradict themselves, seeing it is a notorious truth that if all holy souls were one, no one would be a loser by the union, but it would be a greater gain than we must hope for: for a part of one is as much, as noble, and as active a substance, as if it were a separated person: annihilation, or loss of specific powers, is not to be rationally feared. That one soul is now either self-subsisting without a body, or animates a suitable body, as some ancients thought the angels stars. If that one soul can act without a body, so may ours, whether as parts of it, or not; if that one soul animate a suitable body, ours, were they united parts of it, would have part of that employment; so that hereby they confute themselves.

Object. But this would equalize the good and bad, or at least those that were good in several degrees; where then were the reward and punishment?

Answ. It would not equal them at all, any more than distinct personality would do: for the souls of all holy persons may be so united, as that the souls of the wicked shall have no part in that union. Whether the souls of the wicked shall be united in one sinful miserable soul, or rather but in one sinful society, or be separated, disunited, contrary to each other, and militant, as part of their sin and misery, is nothing to this case. Yet natural and moral union must be different. God is the root of nature to the worst,