Let us ask sery be assumed eternal, or not. now, whether the truth of this maxim, the innocence of the Lainb of God, and the sufferings and geominious death of Christ, can be reconciled together, and how? The nicest casuist would, I think, be puzzled; but our casuist goes on most dogmatically, and shows no more regard to the dignity than to the innocence of the Divine Person who died on the cross. He does, indeed, allow, that no one can certainly say, that God might not have pardoned sin, upon repentance, without any sacrifice. But he pronounces this method of doing it, by the death of Christ, to be more wise and fit, for several prudential reasons. Read them, they would appear futile and impertinent, if applied to human councils: but in their application to the divine councils they become profane and impious. Nay, it would not be hard to show, that this method was more proper to produce a contrary effect, than that which is assigned as a reason for taking it. For instance, the death of Christ, it is said, was proper to discountenance presumption, and to discourage men from repeating their transgressions. Surely it would not be hard to show by reason, that the death of Christ might, and by fact, that it has countenanced presumption, without discouraging men from repeating their transgressions. But I shall not descend into particulars that are trifling and tedious, and that would render a full answer to them little better. A general reflection, or two, may serve, and are as much as they all deserve. Though Though I am far from approving the practice of those who compare so frequently the divine with the human ceconomy and policy, and who build on the last their hypothetical schemes of the first; yet, on this occasion, and to frame an argument ad hominem, it may be properly done. Let us suppose then, a great prince governing a wicked and rebellious people. He has it in his power to punish, he thinks fit to pardon them. But he orders his only beloved son to be put to death, to expiate their sins, and to satisfy his royal vengeance. Would this proceeding appear to the eye of reason, and in the unprejudiced light of nature, wise, or just, or good? No man dares to say that it would, except he be a divine, for Clark does in effect say that it would; since he imputes this very proceeding to God, and justifies it not implicitly on the authority of revelation, but explicitly on the authority of reason, which may be applied to man as well as to God, and as a particular instance of the general rule, that is, according to him, common to both. Allow me one reflection more. Clarke acknowledges readily, that human reason could never have discovered such a method as this for the reconciliation of sinners to an offended God. But if reason could not have discovered it, how comes it to pass, that reason finds no such difficulty nor inconceivableness in it, as to make a wise man call the truth of it in question? the truth of a well attested revelation, he says. But son, But here he plays the sophist. He is to prove the method agreeable to sound unprejudiced reaindependently of revelation. No matter how it came to be known, is it reasonable, is it agreeable to a fitness, founded in the nature of things, and in the qualifications of persons? That is the point to be considered. To consider it as reasonable relatively to the revelation of it, is not to appeal to unprejudiced, but to prejudiced reason. It is, in plain terms, to beg the question shamefully. Heathen theology was licentious enough in all conscience. The professors of it gave an extravagant loose to their imaginations, passed all the bounds of probability, and scarce kept within those of conceivable possibility. Thus they came very near to such a system as this: so near, that there was little more to be added; but this little they did not think so highly of the human, and so lowly of the divine nature, as was necessary to make them add. Esculapias came down from Heaven, conversed in a visible form with men, and taught them the art of healing diseases. The passage is cited from Julian by Clarke, in order to show, according to his laudable custom, that there is nothing in the christian system which we may not believe on grounds of reason; because there is nothing in it more incredible than what the least reasonable men that ever were, wild metaphysicians, heathens, hereticks, apostates, have believed. It may be cited * Evid. p. 268. more more properly to show, what I mean to show by it, how easy and short a transition might have been made by heathen divines, in the rage that possessed them all of framing complete schemes of the whole order and state of things, from a god teaching physick to a god teaching theology. The most ignorant and savage of them, like the Phonicians and the Carthaginians, who have been already mentioned, for they were all superstitious alike, came a little pearer to the doctrine of redemption. But even they did not come up to it entirely. They meaned to encourage the pious practice of sacrificing their children; for pious it was on the principle of expiation by shedding of blood but there was a great difference between the conceptions they had of their gods, and those which christians have of the Father and the Son. Their gods had been men, and Saturn was a man when he sacrificed his son. Their ideas of human government led them to notions of divine mediations, and of expiations by shedding of blood, which were so many particular redemptions. But nothing in the reason of the thing, nor in the most superstitious of their prejudices, could lead them to imagine so much rigour in one god, as to exact that another should be sacrificed even by men who meaned no expiation, and in whom it was a murder, not a sacrifice; nor so much humility and condescension in another, as to make him subunit to be this divine victim. They could not imagine any thing so repugnant as this to all their ideas of order, of justice, of goodness, and in short, of theism; though they imagined many other things that were really inconsistent with all these ideas. Those of them, therefore, who embraced this doctrine, after it had been revealed, embraced it, not because they found no difficulty nor inconceivableness in it, which Clarke was to prove, by proving it agreeable to sound reason, but merely because it was a part of a relation they believed true, for reasons of another kind; which is nothing to his purpose under this head of argu ment. XXXVIII. ALL that he says more than I have observed upon it; all that follows about the importance of this world of ours, which it is assumed was made for the sake of man, and which, we are told, is as considerable and worthy of the divine care as most other parts of our system, which is likewise as considerable as any other single system in the universe, in order to take off the objection arising from the meanness of the creature; and finally, all that follows about the manifestations of God, and the discoveries of his will, supposed to have been made by the same divine Logos to other beings in other systems, in order to take off the imputation of partiality from the Creator: all this, I say, is a rhapsody of presumptuous reasoning, of profane absurdities disguised by epithets, of evasions that seem to answer, while they only perplex, and in one word, of the most arbi trary |