A saint or a brute the certain necessity and excellency of holiness, &c. ...…

If you say, that Writing or Printing were not then known; you come to that which confounds you more. How is it possible that in so many hundred thousand years, the world grew to no more experience, and Arts and Sciences were ripened no more, when now they have ripened in a shorter time? How is it that Printing and Writing were not found out? and that all Sciences and Arts are of so late invention, and as it were, but in their youth? Certainly Knowledge is the daughter of Experience, and Experience the daughter of Time; and therefore if the world had been from eternity, it must needs have been many a hundred thousand years ago at • far higher state of Knowledge then is yet attained in the world. For every age receiveth the experiences and writings of the former, and hath opportunity still to make improvement of them. At least the world could not have been ignorant so long, of Printing, Writing, and a hundred things that are certainly of late invention. It is therefore an incredible thing that an Eternal world should lose all the memorials and monuments of its Antiquity, before the Scripture-time of the Creation. And therefore doubtless it began but then.

Qu. 2. And if God were not the Author of the Scripture, how come so many clear and notable Prophesies of it to be fulfilled? How punctually doth David, and Isaiah (53▪) describe the sufferings of Christ, and Daniel foretell the very year? and so of many others?

Qu. 3. And how comes it all to contain but one entire frame, conspiring to reveal the same doctrine of grace and life, (at first more darkly, and in types and promises, and afterwards more clearly in performance) when▪ the writers lived at hundreds and thousands years distance from each other?