Discourses upon the Existence and Attributes of God

That at one blow, their fears may be dashed all in pieces and dissolved by the removal of the Foundation: As men who desire liberty to commit works of darkness, would not have the lights in the House dimmed, but extinguished. What men say against Providence, because they would have no check in their Lusts, they may say in their hearts against the existence of God upon the same account; little difference between the dissenting from the one and disowning the other.

That at one blow, their fears may be dasht all in peices and dissolved by the removal of the Foundation: As men who desire liberty to commit works of darkness, would not have the lights in the House dimm'd, but extinguished. What men say against Providence, because they would have no check in their Lusts, they may say in their hearts against the existence of God upon the same account; little difference between the dissenting from the one and disowning the other.

They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doth good.

He speaks of the Atheist in the singular, the fool; of the corruption issuing in the life in the plural; Intimating that though some few may choke in their hearts the sentiments of God and his Providence, and positively deny them, yet there is something of a secret Atheism in all which is the fountain of the evil practices in their lives, not an utter disowning of the Being of a God, but a denial or doubting of some of the rights of his nature:^* When men deny the God of purity they must needs be polluted in Soul and Body and grow brutish in their actions: When the sense of Religion is shaken off, all kind of wickedness is eagerly rushed, into, whereby they become as loathsome to God as putrefied carcasses are to men: