R. 1. This is not once; but as oft as God is worshipped in your Mass and our Sacrament.
2. God can deceive us without a Lie, but not by a Lie. Christ deceived the two Disciples, Luke 24. by carrying it as if he would have gone further; but not by saying that he would go further. God can do that from which he knoweth that man will take occasion of deceit. God can blind a mans eyes, or destroy or corrupt his other senses; he can present an object defectively, with unmeet mediums, distance, site, &c. In this case he doth not give us a FALSE SIGN; nor doth he by the Nature of the Revelation oblige any man to believe it: Yea Nature saith, that a man is not to Judge by a vitiated sense, or an unmeet medium, or a too distant object, or where the due qualification of the sense or object are wanting: Nature there tells us that we are there to suppose or suspect that we are uncapable of certainty: But Nature obligeth us to believe sound senses about duly qualified objects; and to take sense for sound when all the senses of all the men in the world agree; and the object to be a duly qualified object of sense, when all mens senses in the world so perceive it. For we have no way but by sense to know what is an object of sense.
3. The question is not what God can do by his power, if he will; but what God will do, and can will ⟨p. 91⟩to do, in consistency with his perfection, and just and merciful Government of the World. And God in making us men whose Intellects are naturally to perceive things sensible by the means of the perception of sense, doth naturally oblige man and necessitate him also, to trust his senses in such perception. And in Nature man hath no surer way of apprehension: Therefore if you could prove that sense is ordinarily fallible, and Gods revelations to it false, yet man were not only allowed but necessitated to use and trust it, as having no better surer way of apprehension: As among many knaves or liars, I must most trust the honestest and most trusty, when I have no better to trust. If I am not sure that it is a Sun or Light that I see, yet I am sure that I must take my perception of it as a Sun or Light as it is; For God hath given me no better. If I am not sure that my sight, feeling, taste, &c. are infallible; yet I am sure that I am made of God to use them; and that I have no better senses, nor a better way to be certain of their proper objects:
R. 1. This is not once; but as oft as God is worshiped in your Mass and our Sacrament.
2. God can deceive us without a Lie, but not by a Lie. Christ deceived the two Disciples, Luke 24. by carrying it as if he would have gone further; but not by saying that he would go further. God can do that from which he knoweth that man will take occasion of deceit. God can blind a mans eyes, or destroy or corrupt his other senses; he can present an object defectively, with unmeet mediums, distance, site, &c. In this case he doth not give us a FALSE SIGN; nor doth he by the Nature of the Revelation oblige any man to believe it: Yea Nature saith, that a man is not to Judge by a vitiated sense, or an unmeet medium, or a too distant object, or where the due qualification of the sense or object are wanting: Nature there tells us that we are there to suppose or suspect that we are uncapable of certainty: But Nature obligeth us to believe sound senses about duly qualified objects; and to take sense for sound when all the senses of all the men in the world agree; and the object to be a duly qualified object of sense, when all mens senses in the world so perceive it. For we have no way but by sense to know what is an object of sense.
3. The question is not what God can do by his power, if he will; but what God will do, and can will ⟨p. 91⟩to do, in consistency with his perfection, and just and merciful Government of the World. And God in making us men whose Intellects are naturally to perceive things sensible by the means of the perception of sense, doth naturally oblige man and necessitate him also, to trust his senses in such perception. And in Nature man hath no surer way of apprehension: Therefore if you could prove that sense is ordinarily fallible, and Gods revelations to it false, yet man were not only allowed but necessitated to use and trust it, as having no better surer way of apprehension: As among many knaves or lyars, I must most trust the honestest and most trusty, when I have no better to trust. If I am not sure that it is a Sun or Light that I see, yet I am sure that I must take my perception of it as a Sun or Light as it is; For God hath given me no better. If I am not sure that my sight, feeling, taste, &c. are infallible; yet I am sure that I am made of God to use them; and that I have no better senses, nor a better way to be certain of their proper objects:
