An Answer to a Great Number of Blasphemous Cavillations

that God hath mercy upon whom he will, and whom he will he maketh hard hearted. And therefore as of his mercy and free grace, God worketh willingly in the one with his Spirit, softness, & y• feeling of mercy, so doth his just judgements, & just wrath against sin conceived by the spirit of satan, work in the others hardness obstinacy, & the sense of his wrath. You reason affirming that Pharaoh had a stony heart before that Moses spake unto him, then could not it be hardened more than a stone a fore it it was mollified▪ this your reason I say is more then foolish▪ for I suppose that you be not so brutish, that you will affirm that the heart of any tyrant at any time, in natural hardness I mean to grope & feel, is comparable to the hardness of a stone, but it is a figurative speech by the with is declared the unchangeable hardness ⟨p. 316⟩of mans heart as touching the natural power of the same. for as the stone by it self can never come to any softness of flesh, so can never man by any gift, which nature hath of it self, come to that humility and obedience, which is acceptable before God. But doth it thereof ensue that one man is not, nor can not be more cruel then an other, yea that one and the same may not proceed from evil to worse, and by contempt of grace, make him self more hard and more hard: although his heart was never fully mollified. I think you will not affirm the contrary. for the holy Ghost giving this exhortation: This day if you hear his voice harden not your hearts,¹ doth confirm my affirmation, which is, that men proceed from hardness to hardness, yea from one sin to an other, till their sins be become inexcusable, and so finally irremissible, because that obstinately they refuse grace offered. as Christ doth witness in these words, if I had not come, and spoken unto them, they should not have sin, but now have they nothing to cloak their sin, for they have seen, and hated not only me, but also my father. No man will be so fond, as to affirm, that the Jews before Christs preaching and miracles, were clean without sin: but the contempt of grace did so augment and increase their sin, that it became inexcusable. even so say I that Pharaoh did harden his own heart from time to time becoming more unthankful unto God and more cruel to his people.