A44687:59
The reconcilableness of God's prescience of the sins of men with the wisdom and…The reconcileableness of God's prescience of the sins of men with the wisdom and…
The reconcilableness of God's prescience of the sins of men with the wisdom and sincerity of his counsels, exhortations, and whatsoever other means he uses to prevent them / in a letter to the Honourable Robert Boyle Esq.The reconcileableness of God's prescience of the sins of men with the wisdom and sincerity of his counsels, exhortations, and whatsoever other means he uses to prevent them / in a letter to the Honorable Robert Boyle Esq.
London: printed for Brabazon Aylmer, 1677
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
§. VI.
Wherefore nothing remains but to consider how these may be reconciled, and made appear to be no way inconsistent with one another.
Nor are we to apprehend herein so great a difficulty, as it were to reconcile his irresistible predeterminative concurrence to all actions of the creature, even those that are in themselves most malignantly wicked, with the wisdom and righteousness of his Laws against them, and severest Punishments of them according to those Laws.
Which sentiments must, I conceive, to any impartial understanding, leave it no way sufficiently explicable, how the influence and concurrence, the holy God hath to the worst of actions, is to be distinguished from that which he affords to the best; Wherein such inherently evil actions are less to be imputed to him who forbids them, than to the malicious tempter who prompts to them, or the actor that does ⟨p. 33⟩them, or wherein not a great deal more. And leave it undeniable, that the matter of all his Laws, in reference to all such actions that ever have been done in the world, was a simple and most strictly natural impossibility. Nothing being more apparently so, than either not to do an action whereto the agent is determined by an infinite Power; or to separate the malignity thereof, from an intrinsically evil action; And that this natural impossibility of not sinning was the ineluctable fate of his (at first) innocent Creatures. Who also (as the case is to be conceived of with the Angels that kept not their first station) must be understood irreversibly condemned to the suffering of eternal punishment, for the not doing of what it was (upon these terms) so absolutely