That which is now undertaken to be proved is, that God doth not make use of exhortations as means for the establishing of the saints in believing and for confirming their perseverance. This is that which by us is assigned unto them, and this is all that the nature of them doth require that they should be used unto, the certainty of the event whereunto they are applied depending not on their nature, as such means, but on the purpose of God to use them for that end which he hath designed and promised to bring about and accomplish.
Before he ventures on any opposition to the intendment of this assertion, he phraseth it so as either to render it unintelligible to himself and others, or (if any thing be signified by the expressions he useth) to divert it wholly from the mind of them and their sense Avith whom he hath to do. Who ever said that " God by exhortations doth influence the wills of men upon such terms as to make them uufrustrably and necessitatingly willing to persevere?" Or, can he tell us what is the meaning of these terms, " Uufrustrably, necessita- tingly willing to persevere?" Though it is easy to g-uess at wdiat he here intends, yet it is far above my shallow capacity to reach the sense of these expressions. How any of these terms, relating to the event and issue of things, [are used,] and in what sense they may be used, I have often showed. As relating either to the manner of God's opera- tion in and upon the -will, or the will's elicitation of its own act (any farther than by relation to that axiom, " Unumquodque quod est, dum est, necesse est"), they express neither our sense nor any body's else that I know. That which I shall make bold to take up for Mr Goodwin's intendment is, that God doth not by exhortations effectu- ally cause the saints to persevere. To be willing to persevere is to persevere; to be " necessitatingly willing" is I know not what. Now, if such an efficacy be ascribed to exhortations as teaches the certainty of the effect, so that the certainty of the effect as to the event should be asserted to depend on them as such means, this is nothing to us. We ascribe an efficacy to them in proprio genere, but the certainty
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of that event to whose production they concur, we affirm, as hatli been abundantly declared, to depend on other causes.
But the proof of what is here asserted outruns for uncouth strange- ness the assertion itself, equis alhis, as they say ; for, saith he, " If this be so" (that is, "as you have heard above" — how, neither he nor we know), " then the same act of the will should be both physical and moral." And, —
1. Why so? " Because physical and moral means are used for the producing of it!" — as though sundry causes of several kinds might not concur to produce one uniform effect, far enough from a neces- sity of receiving so much as a denomination from each of them. In the concurrence of several causes, whereof some may be free and con- tingent, others natural and necessary, the effect absolutely follows its next and immediate cause alone. God causes the sun to shine freely, yet is the shining of the sun a necessary effect of the sun, and not any way free or contingent. God determined the piercing of Christ's side, and so as to the event made it necessary, but yet was the doing of it in them that did it free as to the manner of its doing, and no way necessary. But, —
2. Suppose the same act of the will should be said to be both physical and moral upon several accounts? And what if every act of the will in and about things good or bad be so, and it be utterly impossible it should be otherwise? "Yea, but then the same act should be specifically distinguished in and from itself."
Yea, but who told you so? The terms of "physical and moral," as related to the acts of the will, are very far from constituting different kinds or species of acts, being only several denominations of the same individual acts upon several regards and accounts. The acts of the will as they flow from that natural faculty, or are elicited thereby, are all 'physical, but as they relate to a law whence they are good or evil, they are moral; the one term expresseth their being, the other their regulai'ity and conformity to some rule whereunto their agents are obliged. " Quid dignum tanto?" If by " physical and moral " Mr Goodwin intends " necessary and free," (being the first that ever abused these words, and in that abuse of them not consistent with himself, affirming afterward the act of a minister's preaching, as pro- ceeding from his abilities of understanding and speaking, to be phy- sical or natural, which yet he will not aver to be necessary, but free), he should have told us so ; and then, though we would not grant that the same act may not in several respects be both necessary and free, the latter in respect of the manner of its performance and nature of its immediate cause, the former in respect of the event and the de- termination of its first cause, yet its consequent is so palpably false, as to the advancing of his former assertion, that it would have been directly denied, without any farther trouble.