Discourses upon the Existence and Attributes of God

But God hath a right to dispense with the ordinary Laws of Nature in the inferior Creatures; he hath a power to alter their course by an arrest of Miracles, and make them come short, or go beyond his Ordinances established for them. He hath a right to make the Sun stand still, or move backward; to bind up the Womb of the Earth, and bar the influences of the Clouds, bridle in the rage of the fire, and the fury of Lions, make the liquid waters stand like a Wall, or pull up the dam, which he hath set to the Sea, and command it to overflow the neighbouring Countries. He can dispense with the natural Laws of the whole Creation, and strain every string beyond its ordinary pitch.

But God hath a right to dispense with the ordinary Laws of Nature in the inferior Creatures; he hath a power to alter their course by an arrest of Miracles, and make them come short, or go beyond his Ordinances established for them. He hath a right to make the Sun stand still, or move backward; to bind up the Womb of the Earth, and barr the influences of the Clouds, bridle in the rage of the fire, and the fury of Lions, make the liquid waters stand like a Wall, or pull up the dam, which he hath set to the Sea, and command it to overflow the neighbouring Countries. He can dispense with the natural Laws of the whole Creation, and strain every string beyond its ordinary pitch.

Positive Laws he hath reversed; as the Ceremonial Law given to the Jews: The very nature indeed of that Law required a repeal, and fell of Course; when that, which was intended by it, was come, it was of no longer significancy; as before it was a useful shadow, it would afterwards have been an empty one. Had not God took away this, Christianity had not in all likelihood been propagated among the Gentiles. This was the partition wall between Jews and Gentiles, Eph. 2.14. Which made them a distinct Family from all the World, and was the occasion of the enmity of the Gentiles against the Jews. When God had by bringing in, what was signified by those Rites, declared his decree for the ceasing of them; and when the Jews, fond of those Divine Institutions, would not allow him the right of repealing, what he had the Authority of enacting, he resolved for the asserting his Dominion, to bury them in the ruins of the Temple and City, and make them for ever uncapable of practising the main and Essential parts of them: For the Temple being the pillar of the legal Service, by demolishing that, God hath taken away their right of sacrificing, it being peculiarly annexed to that place; they have no Altar dignified with a fire from Heaven to consume their sacrifices, no legal High Priest to offer them, God hath by his Providence changed his own Law, as well as by his precept.