A26879:143
The catechizing of families a teacher of householders how to teach their householdsThe catechizing of families a teacher of housholders how to teach their housholds
The catechizing of families a teacher of householders how to teach their households : useful also to school-masters and tutors of youth : for those that are past the common small catechisms [sic], and would grow to a more rooted faith, and to the fuller understanding of all that is commonly needful to a safe, holy comfortable and profitable life / written by Richard Baxter ...The catechizing of families a teacher of housholders how to teach their housholds : useful also to school-masters and tutors of youth : for those that are past the common small chatechisms [sic], and would grow to a more rooted faith, and to the fuller understanding of all that is commonly needful to a safe, holy comfortable and profitable life / written by Richard Baxter ...
London: printed for T. Parkhurst, 1683
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
A. It is a debasing God to think that he is like a finite Creature, absent, or insufficient for any of his Creatures. That there is not the least thing or motion so small, as to be done without him, is most certain to him that will consider, 1. That Gods very Essence is every where: And wherever he is, he is himself, that is, most Powerful, Wise and Good: And if such a God be as near to every Action as the most immediate Actor is, so that ⟨p. 17⟩in him they all Live, and Move, and Be, how can he be thought to have no hand in it, as to Providence or causality?
2. And it's certain that God upholds continually the very Being of every thing that moveth, and all the Power by which they move: For that which had no Being but from him, •an have none continued but by him: That which could not make it self, cannot continue it self: Should not God by his causality continue their being, every Creature would turn to nothing. For there can be nothing without a Cause, but the first Cause which is GOD.
3. And it is all one to Infiniteness to mind every Creature and motion in the World, and to cause and rule the least, as it is to cause and rule but one. God is as sufficient for all the World, even every Fly and Worm, as if he had but One to mind. Seeing then that he is as present with every Creature as it is with it self, and it hath not the least power but what he continually giveth it, and cannot move at all but by him, and he is as sufficient for All as for One, it's unreasonable to think that the least thing is done without him. Is it a dishonour to the Sun that every Eye, even of Flies, and Ants, and Toads, and Snakes, as well as Men, do see by the light of it? or that it shineth at once upon every p•le of Grass and Atom? This is but the certain Effect of Gods Infiniteness and Perfection.