ever. But, says your lordship, from this evidence it takes off very much, if it depends wholly upon God's giving that, which of its own nature it is not capable of, i. e. The revelation and testimony of God loses much of its evidence, if this depends wholly upon the good pleasure of God, and cannot be demonstratively made out by natural reason, that the soul is immaterial, and consequently in its own nature immortal. For that is all that here is or can be meant by these words, which of its own nature it is not capable of, to make them to the purpose. For the whole of your lordship's discourse here is to prove, that the soul cannot be material, because then the evidence of its being immortal would be very much lessened. Which is to say, that it is not as credible, upon divine revelation, that a material substance should be immortal, as an immaterial; or which is all one, that God is not equally to be believed, when he declares, that a material substance shall be immortal, as when he declares, that an immaterial shall be so; because the immortality of a material substance cannot be demonstrated from natural reason.

Let us try this rule of your lordship's a little farther. God hath revealed, that the bodies men shall have after the resurrection, as well as their souls, shall live to eternity. Does your lordship believe the eternal life the one of these more than of the other,

because you think you can prove it of one of them by natural reason, and of the other not? Or can any one, who admits of divine revelation in the case, doubt of one of them more than the other? or think this proposition less credible, that the bodies of men, after the resurrection, shall live for ever; than this, That the souls of men shall, after the resurrection, live for ever? For that he must do, if he thinks either of them is less credible than the other. If this be so, reason is to be consulted how far God is to be believed, and the credit of divine testimony must receive its force from the evidence of reason; which is evidently to take away the credibility of divine revelation in all supernatural truths, wherein the evidence of reason fails. And how much such a principle as this tends to the support of the doctrine of the Trinity, or the promoting the christian religion, I shall leave it to your lordship to consider.

I am not so well read in Hobbes or Spinosa as to be able to say, what were their opinions in this matter. But possibly there be those, who will think your lordship's authority of more use to them in the case, than those justly decried names; and be glad to find your lordship a patron of the oracles of reason, so little to the advantage of the oracles of divine revelation. This at least, I think, may be subjoined to the words at the bottom of the next page *, That those who have gone about to lessen the credibility of the articles of faith, which evidently they do, who say they are less credible, because they cannot be made out demonstratively by

* 1st Answer.

natural reason, have not been thought to secure several of the articles of the christian faith, especially those of the Trinity, incarnation, and resurrection of the body, which are those upon the account of which I am brought by your lordship into this dispute.

I shall not trouble the reader with your lordship's endeavours, in the following words, to prove, that if the soul be not an immaterial substance, it can be nothing but life; your very first words visibly confuting all that you allege to that purpose: they are, * If the soul be a material substance, it is really nothing but life; which is to say, That if the soul be really a substance, it is not really a substance, but really nothing else but an affection of a substance; for the life, whether of a material or immaterial substance, is not the substance itself, but an affection of it.

2. You say, † Although we think the separate state of the soul after death is sufficiently revealed in the scripture; yet it creates a great difficulty in understanding it, if the soul be nothing but life, or a material substance, which must be dissolved when life is ended. For, if the soul be a material substance, it must be made up, as others are, of the cohesion of solid and separate parts, how minute and invisible soever they be. And what is it which should keep them together, when life is gone? So that it is no easy matter to give an account how the soul should be capable of immortality, unless it be an immaterial substance; and then we know the solution and texture of bodies cannot reach the soul, being of a different nature.

Let it be as hard a matter as it will, to give an account what it is that should keep the parts of a material soul together, after it is separated from the body; yet it will be always as easy to give an account of it, as to give an account what it is which shall keep together a material and immaterial substance. And yet the difficulty that there is to give an account of that, I hope, does not, with your lordship, weaken the credibility of the inseparable union of soul and body to eternity: and I persuade myself, that the men of sense, to whom your lordship appeals in the case, do not find their belief of this fundamental point much weakened by that difficulty. I thought heretofore (and by your lordship's permission would think so still) that the union of the parts of matter, one with another, is as much in the hands of God, as the union of a material and immaterial substance; and that it does not take off very much, or at all, from the evidence of immortality, which depends on that union, that it is no easy matter to give an account what it is that should keep them together: though its depending wholly upon the gift and good pleasure of God, where the manner creates great difficulty in the understanding, and our reason cannot discover in the nature of things how it is, be that which, your lordship so positively says, lessens the credibility of the fundamental articles of the resurrection and immortality.

But, my lord, to remove this objection a little, and to show of how small force it is even with yourself; give me leave to presume, that your lordship as firmly believes the immortality of the body after the resurrection, as any other article of faith; if so, then it being no easy matter to give an account what it is that shall keep together the parts of a material soul, to one that believes it is material, can no more weaken the credibility of its immortality, than the like difficulty weakens the credibility of the immortality of the body. For, when your lordship shall find it an easy matter to give an account what it is, besides the good pleasure of God, which shall keep together the parts of our material bodies to eternity, or even soul and body, I doubt not but any one who shall think the soul material, will also find it as easy to give an account what it is that shall keep those parts of matter also together to eternity.

Were it not that the warmth of controversy is apt to make men so far forget, as to take up those principles themselves (when they will serve their turn) which they have highly condemned in others, I should wonder to find your lordship to argue, that because it is a difficulty to understand what shall keep together the minute parts of a material soul, when life is gone; and because it is not an easy matter to give an account how the soul shall be capable of immortality, unless it be an immaterial substance: therefore it is not so credible, as if it were easy to give an account, by natural reason, how it could be. For to this it is that all this your discourse tends, as is evident by what is already set down; and will be more fully made out by what your lordship says in other places, though there needs no such proof, since it would all be nothing against me in any other sense.

I thought your lordship had in other places asserted, and insisted on this truth, that no part of divine revelation was the less to be believed, because the thing itself created great difficulty in the understanding, and the manner of it was hard to be explained, and it was no easy matter to give an account how it was. This, as I take it, your lordship condemned in others as a very unreasonable principle, and such as would subvert all the articles of the christian religion, that were mere matters of faith, as I think it will: and is it possible, that you should make use of it here yourself, against the article of life and immortality, that Christ hath brought to light through the gospel, and neither was, nor could be made out by natural reason without revelation? But you will say, you speak only of the soul; and your words are, That it is no easy matter to give an account how the soul should be capable of immortality, unless it be an immaterial substance. I grant it; but crave leave to say, that there is not any one of those difficulties, that are or can be raised about the manner how a material soul can be immortal, which do not as well reach the immortality of the body.

But, if it were not so, I am sure this principle of your lordship's would reach other articles of faith, wherein our natural reason

*

finds it not so easy to give an account how those mysteries are; and which therefore, according to your principles, must be less credible than other articles, that create less difficulty to the understanding. For your lordship says, that you appeal to any man of sense, whether to a man, who thought by his principles he could from natural grounds demonstrate the immortality of the soul, the finding the uncertainty of those principles he went upon in point of reason, i. e. the finding he could not certainly prove it by natural reason, doth not weaken the credibility of that fundamental article, when it is considered purely as a matter of faith? which, in effect, I humbly conceive, amounts to this, that a proposition divinely revealed, that cannot be proved by natural reason, is less credible than one that can: which seems to me to come very little short of this, with due reverence be it spoken, that God is less to be believed when he affirms a proposition that cannot be proved by natural reason, than when he proposes what can be proved by it. The direct contrary to which is my opinion, though you endeavour to make it good by these following words; + If the evidence of faith fall so much short of that of reason, it must needs have less effect upon men's minds, when the subserviency of reason is taken away; as it must be when the grounds of certainty by reason are vanished. Is it at all probable, that he who finds his reason deceive him in such fundamental points, should have his faith stand firm and unmoveable on the account of revelation? Than which I think there are hardly plainer words to be found out to declare, that the credibility of God's testimony depends on the natural evidence of probability of the things we receive from revelation, and rises and falls with it; and that the truths of God, or the articles of mere faith, lose so much of their credibility, as they want proof from reason: which if true, revelation may come to have no credibility at all. For if, in this present case, the credibility of this proposition, the souls of men shall live for ever, revealed in the scripture, be lessened by confessing it cannot be demonstratively proved from reason; though it be asserted to be most highly probable: must not, by the same rule, its credibility dwindle away to nothing, if natural reason should not be able to make it out to be so much as probable, or should place the probability from natural principles on the other side? For, if mere want of demonstration lessens the credibility of any proposition divinely revealed, must not want of probability, or contrary probability from natural reason, quite take away its credibility? Here at last it must end, if in any one case the veracity of God, and the credibility of the truths we receive from him by revelation, be subjected to the verdicts of human reason, and be allowed to receive any accession or diminution from other proofs, or want of other proofs of its certainty or probability.

If this be your lordship's way to promote religion, or defend its + Ibid.

* 2d Answer.

articles, I know not what argument the greatest enemies of it could use more effectual for the subversion of those you have undertaken to defend; this being to resolve all revelation perfectly and purely into natural reason, to bound its credibility by that, and leave no room for faith in other things, than what can be accounted for by natural reason without revelation.

Your lordship insists much upon it, as if I had contradicted what I have said in my essay, by saying † that upon my principles it cannot be demonstratively proved, that it is an immaterial substance in us that thinks, however probable it be. He that will be at the pains to read that chapter of mine, and consider it, will find, that my business there was to show, that it was no harder to conceive an immaterial than a material substance; and that from the ideas of thought, and a power of moving of matter, which we experienced in ourselves, (ideas originally not belonging to matter as matter) there was no more difficulty to conclude there was an immaterial substance in us, than that we had material parts. These ideas of thinking, and power of moving of matter, I in another place showed, did demonstratively lead us to the certain knowledge of the existence of an immaterial thinking being, in whom we have the idea of spirit in the strictest sense; in which sense I also applied it to the soul, in the 23d ch. of my essay; the easily conceivable possibility, nay great probability, that the thinking substance in us is immaterial, giving me sufficient ground for it: in which sense I shall think I may safely attribute it to the thinking substance in us, till your lordship shall have better proved from my words, that it is impossible it should be immaterial. For I only say, that it is possible, i. e. involves no contradiction, that God, the omnipotent immaterial spirit, should, if he pleases, give to some parcels of matter, disposed as he thinks fit, a power of thinking and moving; which parcels of matter, so endued with a power of thinking and motion, might properly be called spirits, in contradistinction to unthinking matter. In all which, I presume, there is no manner of contradiction.

I justified my use of the word spirit, in that sense, from the authorities of Cicero and Virgil, applying the Latin word spiritus, from whence spirit is derived, to the soul as a thinking thing, without excluding materiality out of it. To which your lordship replies, That Cicero, in his Tusculan Questions, supposes the soul. not to be a finer sort of body, but of a different nature from the body- -That he calls the body the prison of the soul--And says, that a wise man's business is to draw off his soul from his body. And then your lordship concludes, as is usual, with a question, Is it possible now to think so great a man looked on the soul but as a modification of the body, which must be at an end with life? Ans. No; it is impossible that a man of so good sense as Tully, when he uses the word corpus or body for the gross and

* 1st Answer.

+ B. 2. C. 23. ‡ 1st Answer.