Mount Pisgah, or, A prospect of heaven being an exposition on the fourth chapter…Movnt Pisgah, or, A prospect of heaven being an exposition on the fourth chapter…

I come now to the fifth Object in the beatifical Vision, which is the Divine Essence: ¹This is denied by some, and well it may, if the assertion were so to be understood, that the essence of God is to be discerned by the bodily eye, though in its glorified capacity; for where ever the excellency be which God will put upon the glorified bodies of the Saints in Heaven, yet still they retain the nature of corporeal beings, and Gods essence is so infinitely pure and spiritual, that the Angelical nature compared with it would seem to be but quid materiale, of a material and corporeal constitution; so that now to affirm God to be visible to an organical eye (though glorified) would seem to imply one of these two things, scil. that 1. Either the Divine essence hath matter and corporiety in it. 2. Or that the glorified sense were made altogether immaterial and spiritual, either of which is repugnant to the analogy of faith. Vorstius himself was aware of this, and therefore, though at first he seemed to affirm, that the glorified eye being made (as all the rest of the body shall be) spiritual, might see God, though a Spirit, yet afterward he so explained himself, as only to assert, ⟨p. 27⟩that from the divine essence there did flow a certain light, which light (and not the essence it self immediately) is the object of the glorified eye its sight. But, that God may be seen by the eye (i.e. understood) of the glorified understanding, cannot be denied by any that believe Scripture, or duly consider wherein the happiness of the glorified Saints must needs consist. But how or in what manner he shall be seen, is that, which by this dim light, which now we see by, is wholly undeterminable. The Schoolmen are wont to say that the blessed shall see God, essentially, or by his essence, immediately, intuitively, comprehensively; not indeed comprehensively as God sees and knows himself, but yet comprehensively in contradistinction to apprehensively. Yet some of them say, that the Vision of God is not comprehensive, but apprehensive only, all make it intuitive, quidditative, immediate, and some of our own Divines follow them in this Tenet; I shall give my thoughts of it in a few Conclusions.

I come now to the fifth Object in the beatifical Vision, which is the Divine Essence: ¹