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,…

A. I know not whether this great Undertaking look more smilingly on the Times to come, or frowningly on the Times past. For if this be true, what thoughts, what names do we deserve for troubling the Christian World, so perniciously and distractingly, with a feigned difference. But, I pray you, tell me in general, how you will manifest all this?

B. 1. You must give me leave to tell you who they are that I undertake this Reconciliation of. 2. And then, how I shall perform it. I. It is not every violent Contender, that runneth into such palpable Errors as the common cause needeth not, and will say any thing rather than agree, that I am speaking of. About these matters, there are two Parties that stand on each extreme, who are not to be called Calvinists and Arminians; but by other Names, for their other Opinions. These I intend to confute distinctly, instead of reconciling them, which i• impossible, but by reforming them. ⟨p. 4⟩1. On the one side, I undertake not the Reconciliation of the Predeterminants, who hold, That [Free-will is nothing but will a related to Reason, Lubentia juxta rationem; and that all its acts are as truly necessitated by the efficacious premotion of God, as is the motion of a Clock, or other Engine, or of a Brute (though they will needs call them free, because they are Volitions, as if willing and free-willing were words of the same signification:) and that is deifying of mans Will or any Creature, to say, that it can move or determine it self to this Object rather than another, without a Physical predetermining efficient premotion by God, at the first total Cause, notwithstanding God should uphold its natural power, and •• the cause of Nature afford his necessary universal Concourse; and that to think that a Will thus predetermined by God could have forborne its act, it to deify it also.] They that think that God cannot make a Creature, whose Will can determine it self without his predetermination to that act as circumstantiated, though God uphold all its powers, and all natural concurrent else, and that a self-determined, not predetermined by premotion is a God, or a Contradiction, I am to confute, and not to reconcile.