Discourses upon the Existence and Attributes of God

So Nineveh shall be destroyed, that is, according to the general rule, unless the inhabitants repent, which they did; they manifested a belief of the threatening, and gave glory to God by giving credit to the Prophet: and they had a notion of this rule God lays down in the other Prophets; for they had an apprehension that upon their humbling themselves, they might escape the threatened vengeance, and ⟨p. 227⟩stop the shooting those Arrows that were ready in the Bow. ^*Though Jonah proclaimed destruction, without declaring any hopes of an arrest of Judgment; yet their natural Notion of God afforded some natural hopes of relief, if they did their duty, and spurned not against the Prophet's message; and therefore saith one^* [God did not always express this condition, because it was needless; his own Rule revealed in Scripture was sufficient to some; and the natural Notion all men had of Gods Goodness upon their Repentance, made it not absolutely necessary to declare it: And besides saith he, it is bootless; The expressing it can do but little good; secure ones will repent never the sooner, but rather presume upon their hopes of Gods forbearance, and linger out their Repentance till it be too late: And to work men to Repentance, whom he hath purposed to spare, he threatens them with terrible Judgments; which by how much the more terrible and peremptory they are, are likely to be more effectual for that end God in his purpose designs them, viz. to humble them under a sense of their demerit, and an acknowledgement of his righteous Justice; and therefore though they be absolutely denounced, yet they are to be conditionally interpreted with a reservation of Repentance: As for that Answer which one gives, that by forty days was not meant forty Natural days, but forty Prophetical days, that is, years, a day for a year; and that the City was destroyed forty years after by the Medes: The expression of Gods repenting upon their Humiliation, puts a Bar to that Interpretation: God repented, that is, he did not bring the punishment upon them according to those days the Prophet had expressed; and therefore forty natural days are to be understood; and if it were meant of forty years, and they were destroyed at the end of that term, how could God be said to repent, since according to that, the punishment threatened was according to the time fixed brought upon them?