491 FREEDOM pr WILL. the dominion of God ? Does it not destroy the glory of his libertyof choice, and take away from the Creator and Governor and Benefactorof the world, that most free and sovereign agent, all the glory of this sort of freedom ? Does it not seem to make him a kind of intelligent instrument of eternal necessity, an almost mechanical medium of fate, and introduce Mr. Hobbes's doctrine of fatality and necessity into all ,things that God bath to do with ? Doth it not seem to represent God as a being of vast understanding and consciousness, as well as of power and efficiency, but still to leave him without a will to chose . among all the objects within his view ? In short, it seems to . snake the blessed God a sort of almighty minister of fate under its universal and supreme influence. Thus speaks the heathen stoic in a tragedy : " tZute nexa suis current causis Non licet ipsum vertisse Jovem. " Seneca. "Thus causes run, a long connected train ; Not Jove himself can break th' eternal chain." And it was the professed sentiment of some of the ancients, thatfide was above the gods. Is it not abundantly better to suppose that among the infi- nite variety of possibles in the survey of the great God, there (night be many schemes of grand design, and many mediums of accomplishment, both in the larger and minuter parts of them, which might be equally fit and proper ? And that God by his own will determined which scheine he would chuse, and which medium he would make useof to bring it to pass ? And that he made or rendered this particular scheme and these mediums be- come, if I may so express it, more fit and good, that is, pleas- ing and agreeable by his own chusing them ? So a man, when he has once chosen Mr himselfone thing out of many which he proposed to himself, and all which before appeared to him to be equally good, makes that which he has chosen particularly more agreeable and good to himself by his choice of it, and for ever after prefers it because his own will has actually chosen it : He' delights in his own free choice. Objection. Perhaps it may be replied here, that even accord- ing to the scheine that 1 have proposed, all those things are al- lowed to be eternally and unchangeably necessary in which God beholds a superior fitness ; and these perhaps arefar more in number than those which have no such superior fitness, or which in themselves are equal and indifferent : And then it will follow that even in this scheme of mine, fatality is intro- duced intofar the greatest parts of the works of God.* For Another objection is raised here'. If there be any one thing to which God is influenced by superior fitness, this ais fatality s sad if such a fatality be
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTcyMjk=