A26883:1166
Richard Baxter's Catholic theology plain, pure, peaceable, for pacification of the dogmatical word-warriors who,…Richard Baxter's Catholick theologie plain, pure, peaceable, for pacification of the dogmatical word-warriours who,…
Richard Baxter's Catholic theology plain, pure, peaceable, for pacification of the dogmatical word-warriors who, 1. by contending about things unrevealed or not understood, 2. and by taking verbal differences for real,Richard Baxter's Catholick theologie plain, pure, peaceable, for pacification of the dogmatical word-warriours who, 1. by contending about things unrevealed or not understood, 2. and by taking verbal differences for real,
London: printed by Robert White for Nevill Simmons, 1675
THE Second Part. OF GODS GOVERNMENT, AND MORAL WORKS. › A PREMONITION.
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.
3. But if the meaning were, that no holy quality alone sufficeth, without Gods Influx, that were no more than what must be said of every Creature: without Divine Influx no Creature can be or operate a moment: No created thing of it self, without God, can continue; How then should it keep a man from falling: But if the Soul have any more goodness of nature or inclination in it than the Devils have, it must be a created thing, or God himself: If only God, that proveth not a Saint to be himself better than a Devil, as to nature or disposition, but only that God in him is better.
3. But if the meaning were, that no holy quality alone sufficeth, without Gods Influx, that were no more than what must be faid of every Creature: without Divine Influx no Creature can be or operate a moment: No created thing of it self, without God, can continue; How then should it keep a man from falling: But if the Soul have any more goodness of nature or inclination in it than the Devils have, it must be a created thing, or God himself: If only God, that proveth not a Saint to be himself better than a Devil, as to nature or disposition, but only that God in him is better.
His reason why the Sun is naturally fixed to its Operations, but not a glorified Soul, is (§. 14. M. S.) that one is a natural, and the other a voluntary Agent: One, as Gibieuf saith, Non agit, sed agitur, the other doth agere & non tantum agitur.]
An. 1. Gibieuf and you were deceived, in thinking that such naturals non agunt: Passive matter doth not Act ex principio essentiali (unless Dr. Glisson's and Campanella's Doctrine hold true.) But the three Active Natures, Intellectual, Sensitive and Vegetative (and so Fire and the Sun) do ex principio Activo essentali agere: but nothing doth Act, without an Antecedent Influx to action from the first Cause, in which it is passive: For no Creature is Independent. 2. Voluntas est quaedam Natura, quamvis libera: To move naturally only and not freely is proper to Agents merely natural, distinct from free: But to move freely, and yet from a fixed principle, which shall infallibly determine the Soul to act freely, is not a contradiction; nor that which Gibieuf should deny to the glorified.