47Z FREEDOM Or WILL. determine the will, because it sees no superior fitness, and the will would be for ever Undetermined, if it did not determine itself. SECT. IV. Sow the Will of God determines itself. Now let us try to apply these things to the great and blessed God in his counsels and actions ; always remembering, that when we speak of these divine and unsearchable themes, we do not pretend nor assume so much as to determine that things must be literally just so transacted in.the divine counsels, but that we Speak of God as acting according to the manner of men, and so far as our ideas can reach those sublimities. X. The great God, whose understanding is perfect, sees all the real and possible fitnesses and unfitnesses, good or evil, Which are in things, as they are contained in bis own eternal ideas : He beholds all that is fit or unfit, whether the things themselves are actually existent, or only possible, because he sees all-the infinite relations of things to one another, with all their consequences, in a simultaneous and comprehensive view-. --Here note, that I do not meddle with the debate whether there can be any fitness or goodness in things antecedent to or abstracted from the beingof a God. Had there not been a God, there had never actually existed such real fitnesses, nor such, ideas at all. Yet it is certain we may conceive of such fitnesses antecedently to our conception of the being of a God. This is plain and evident, that God is eternal, and his ideas are eternal, and these fitnesses of things also are eternal : and perhaps these fitnesses of things can have no original existence nor eternity but in the divine ideas, and consequentlyare included in the unchangeable nature of God. And this is one argument whereby, as I remember, the late ingenious Mr. Norris somewhere proves the being of a God, viz. that there are certain eternal truths or propositions, natural, ma, thematical and moral, such as, three and three snake six; two jiarallel lines will never meet ; the whole is greater than any of zts parts; and God is to be honoured by his -intelligent creatures. Now these eternal unchangeable truths are net a mere nothing, and therefore they must have an eternal existence somewhere, and this cannot be but in some eternal mind which is God. But however that matter be resolved, this is certain, that all these eternal fituesses lie open to the divine mind, and arepart of his unchangeable ideas, Which is all that my present argument requires. Xl. When we consider or speak of the decrees of God, or his determinations what he will do, or what he will not do, we are constrained toacknowledge that his will always chuses and de- termines to act what is fit and good : that is, in our way of conceiv- ìug, wheresoever'there is an eternal fitness or unfitness, good or
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