CHAPTER 111. qßä even of God himself : but if we view the profusion of his bounty and grace amongst his creatures on earth, or the happy spirits in heaven, we shall have so exalted an idea of his goodness as to for- get his vengeance. Some men dwell entirely upon the promises of his gospel, and think him all mercy : others, under a meaan-'' choly frame, dwell upon his terrors and his threatenings, and are overwhelmed with the thoughts of his severity and vengeance, as though there were no mercy in him. The true method of delivering ourselves from this preju- dice, is to view a thing on all sides, to compare all the various appearances of the same thing with one another, and let each of them have its full weight in the balance of our judgment, before we fully determine our opinion. It was by this means that the modern astronomers came to find out that the planet Saturn bath a flat broad circle round its globe, which is called its ring, by observing the different appearances as a narrow or a broader oval, or, as it sometimes seems to be, a straight line, in the different parts of its twenty-nine years revolution through the ecliptic. And if we take the same just and religious survey of the great and blessed God in all the discoveries of his ven- geance and his mercy, we shall at last conclude him to be both just and good. V. The casual association of many of our ideas becomes the spring of another prejudice or rash judgment, to which we are sometimes exposed. If in our younger years we have taken medicines that have been nauseous: when any medicine whatsoever is afterwards proposed to us under sickness, we immediately judge it nauseous; our fancy has so closely joined these ideas together, that we know not how to separate theme then the stomach feels the disgust, and perhaps refuses the only drug that can preserve life. So a child who has been let blood joins the ideas of pain and the surgeon together, and he bates the sight of the surgeon, because he thinks of his pain ; or if he has drank a bider potion, he conceives a bitter idea of the cup which held it, and will drink nothing out of that cup. It is for the same reason that the bulk of the common people are so superstitiously fond of the Pslams translated by Hopkins and Sternhold, and think them sacred and divine, because they have been now for more than an hundred years bound up in the same covers with our bibles. The best relief against this prejudice of association is lo consider whether there be any natural and necessary connection between those ideas, which fancy, custom or chance bath thus joined together ; and if nature has not joined them, let our judg- ment correct the folly of our imagination, and separate these ideas again.
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