Baxter - Houston-Packer Collection BX5200 .B352 1835 v2

40' BAXTER'S DYING THOUGHTS. munion with him, as experience showeth us in this life; which yet holy souls have, as being made capable recipients of it. As I said, different plants, briers, and cedars, the stinking and the sweet, are implanted parts (or accidents) of the same world or earth. 3. And the godly themselves may have as different a share of.háp- piness in one common soul, as they have now of holiness, and so as different rewards, (even as roses, and rosemary, and other herbs, differ inJthe same garden, and several fruits in the . same orchard, or on the same tree.) For, if souls are unible, and so partible substances, they have neither more nor less of substance or holi- ness for their union ; and so will each have his proper measure. As a tun of water cast into the sea will there still be the same, and more than a spoonful cast into it. Obj. But spirits are not as bodies, extensive and quantitative, and so not partible or divisible; and therefore your supposition is vain. Anew. 1. My supposition is but the objector's ; for, if they con- fess that spirits are substances, (as cannot with reason be denied ; for they that 'specify their operations by motion only, yet suppose a pure, proper substance to be the substanceor thing moved,) then when they talk of many souls becoming one, it must be by con- junction, and increase of the substance of that one ; or'when they say, that they were always one, they will confess, withal, that they now differ in number, as individuate in the body. And who will say, that millions of millions are no 'more than one of all those millions ? Number is a sort of quantity ; and all souls in the world are more than Cain's or Abel's only ; one feeleth not what another feeleth ; one knoweth not what another knoweth. And indeed, though souls have not such corporeal extension as passive, gross, bodily matter bath, yet, as they are more noble, they have a more noble sort of extension, quantity, or degrees, according' to which all mankind conceive of all the spiritual substance of the universe; yea, all the angels, or all the souls on earth, as being more, and having more substance than one man's soul alone. 2. And the fathers, for the most part, especially the Greeks, (yea,'and the second council of Nice,) thought that spirits created had a purer sort of material being, which Tertullián called a body ; and, doubt- less, all created spirits have somewhat of passiveness ; for they do recipere vel pati from the divine influx ; only God is wholly im- passive. We are moved when we move, and acted when we act; and it is hard to conceivd, that (when matter is commonly called passive) that which is passive should have no sort of matter in a large sense taken ; and if it had any parts distinguishable, they are by God divisible. 3. But if the, contrary be supposed, that all

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTcyMjk=