Baxter - Houston-Packer Collection BX5200 .B352 1835 v2

BAXTER'S DYING THOUGHTS. 143 opinion of too many philosophers and divines, who exclude all sense and affection fromheaven,,and acknowledge nothing there but intellect and wilt; and this is because they find sense and af- fection in the brutes; and they think that the souls of brutes are but some quality, or perishing temperament of matter, and, there- fore, that sense and affection is in us no better. But, 1. What felicity can we conceive of without any affection of delight or joy ? Certainlybare volition now without these doth seem to be no felicity to us; nor knowledge neither; if there were no delight in knowing. 2. Yea, I leave it to men's experience to judge, whether there be now any such thing in us as proper willing,. which is not also some internal sense of, and affection to, the good which we will if it be complacency, or the pleasedness of the will, this signifies some pleasure ; and love, in the first act, is nothing else but such an appetite : ifit be desire, it hath in it a pleasedness in the thing desired, as in esse cognito, as it is thought on by us; and what is love without all sense and affection? 3. Why doth the Scripture ascribe love and joy to God and an- gels if there werenot some reason for it? Doubtless tare is great difference between theheavenly love and joy, and our here in the body; and so there is alsobetween their knowledge and -ours, and their will and ours: but it is not that theirs is less or lower than ours, but somewhat more excellent, which ours giveth us some -an- alogical, or imperfect, formal notion of. 4. Andwhat though brutes have sense and affection, doth it therefore follow that we have none now? or that we shall have none hereafter ? Brutes have life ; and must we therefore have no life hereafter, because it is a thing that is common to brutes ? Rather, as flowwe have all that the brutes have, and more, so shall we then have life, and sense, and affection, of a nobler sort than brutes, and more. Is not God the living God ? Shall we say that he liveth not because brutes live? or, rather, that they live a sensitive life, and man a sensitive and intellectual, .because God is essential, transcendent, infinite life, that makes them live. 5, But if they say that there is 'no sensation or affection but bybodily organs, I answered before to that : the body.feeleth noth- ing at all, but the soul in the .body r the soul uniteth itself most nearly to the igneous aerial parts, called the spirits'; and in them it feeleth, seeth, tasteth, sinelleth, &c. And that soul that feeleth and seeth, doth also inwardly love, desire and- rejoice ; and that soul-which doth this in the body, bath the same power and faculty out of the body ; . and if they judge by the cessation of sensation, when the organs are undisposed, or dead, so they might as well conclude against our future intellection and will, whose operation

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