The life of faith in three parts, the first is a sermon on Heb.…

And they have also false thoughts of the Goodness of God, who think that there is nothing of communicative Benignity in it at all. For all the good which God doth, he doth it from the Goodness of his Nature: Thou art good, and doest good, Psal. 119.68. And his doing good is usually expressed by the phrase of being good to them: The Lord is good to all, Psal. 145.9. Psal. 25 8 & 86.5.

Object. But if communicative Benignity be natural to God as his Essential Goodness is, then he must do good per modum naturae, & ad ultimum potentiae; and then the world was from Eternity, and as good as God could make it.

Answ. 1. Those Christian Divines who do hold that the Universe was from Eternity, and that it is as good as God can make it; do not yet hold that it was its own original, but an eternal emanation from God, and therefore that God who is the beginning of it, is the ultimate end, and eternally and voluntarily, though naturally and necessarily produced it for himself, even for the pleasure of his will: And therefore that Gods Essential Goodness as it is in it self, is much higher than the same as terminated in, or productive of the Universe. And that no mixed bodies which do oriri & interire, are generated and corrupted, were from eternity; and consequently, that this present system called the world, which is within our sight, was not from eternity: But that as spring and fall doth revive the plants, and end their transitory life; so it hath been with these particular systems; the simpler and nobler parts of the Universe continuing the same. And they held that the world is next to infinitely good; and as good as it is possible to be without being God; and that for God to produce another God, or an infinite good, is a contradiction: And that all the baser, and pained, and miserable parts of the world, are best respectively to the perfection of the whole, though not best