474 FEÈl'aopi or vent, of things would have the force of laws, and carry any proper obligationwith them upon the mind and will of man without the consideration of the existenceof God, and of his will thus found out by our reasoning powers. I am rather inclined to think that it is the will of God as manifested by reason or revelation, which lays the true and proper moral obligation on the practice of in- telligent creatures ; but I avoid the embarrassing my present scheme of thoughts with that dispute. It is evident enough, that in the grand lines of moral virtue and piety there are these eternal fitnesses; and our reasoning powers, when they have found out the beingof a God, and our relation to him, must also acknowledge they are so far the will of God, that we are obliged to practise according to these moral fitnesses, these eternal rules of virtue. XIV. But there may be several things supposed to come within the view ofthe divine mind, or the understanding of God, considered as a Creator, which have no real fitness or goodness in themselves, or at least which have all an equal fitness or equal goodness to answer any general or special design of God : And if they are considered in all the various relations in which they stand either to God himself, or to other things in the universe, there is no real superior fitness or goodness in any of them above the rest, so that they appear perfectly indifferent in the divine ideas. Now in such instances the will of God, as a sovereign agent, has no determination from his own ideas, and therefore in and of itself determines itself to chuse one thing and not another ; and, as it were, makes that thinggood, that is, makes it pleasing to himself, by his own determination or choice of it., Wheresoever the infinite knowledge of God sees no goodness nor evil in the ideas of things themselves, he can make them so fir goodby fixing his own freewill and choice upon them, that they then are agreeable and pleasing because of his free choice, which before were entirely indifferent. And I think we may, without injury to the dignity of godhead, suppose him to be better pleased now with those his works which he has actually 'wrought or determined into actual existence, than with those which he has left in the state of mere possibility, though antece- dent to this determination they might be both equally fit or good. And indeed there seems to be a great number of instances of this kind relating to God and his works : as, What sort of system of beings he would make, and whether minds, bodies, or both ? What should be the precise shape, and what the precise place of every corporeal being in the world? Whether this whole universe, or the sun in our system, should have one atom in it more or less? Whether the whole or any part of it should have been created one moment sooner or later ? In what precise spot Ad oursolar world Jupiter or Saturn, ox any of their satellites,
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