An end of doctrinal controversies which have lately troubled the churches

§. 17. Otherwise all the sin of Adam and the World would be resolved into the necessitating Will and Work of God, and so all Faith would be subverted.

§. 18. Therefore Man's Will was such a Faculty as could be a causa prima, of the moral modification or specification of its own Acts: (Not a causa prima simpliciter, but thus, secundum quid.) For else God must be the causa prima of Sin, which is the ill modification of that Act.

§. 19. I know that to Nature the Reasonings of our late Infidels, to prove, That every Act of the Will is as truly necessitated as the motions of a Clock, do seem plausible and hard •o answer; because it seemeth strange, that in any mode of Action Man should be a first Cause of it, and that a Creatures Act should have no superior Cause in any mode: But on the other side the Evidence is cogent, 1. That God is able to make a self-determining Power, that can thus do: For it is no contradiction. 2. That it is congruous, that below ⟨p. 93⟩the happy Race of confirmed Spirits, there should be a Race of such undetermined free Agents, left much to their own self-determining Power. 3. And Experience persuadeth us de facto, that so it is. 4. And they that deny it, must unavoidably make God the prime Cause of all Sin, in a higher degree than it is or can be ascribed to Satan: And is all this with the rejection of Christianity more eligible, than the Concession that God can and doth make a Creature with such self-determining Free-will, as can, as a first Cause of¹ its modified act, sin without God's Predetermination? And by his help could forbear Sin when he doth not. The Contest is, Whether GOD or Man shall be counted the causa prima of Sin; we say, Man is the first Cause, and GOD is none at all: Some say, God must be the causa prima of all that can have a Cause in it: and rather than deny him the Honour which is given to Satan, they will deny Christianity, and deny him to be holy and to be GOD.