MR BIDDLE S PEEFACE TO HIS CATECHISM. 57
consideration is so pressing, that a certain author (otherwise a very learned and intelligent man) perceiving the weight thereof, and not knowing how to avoid the same, took up (though very unluckily) one erroneous tenet to maintain another, telling us in a late book of his, entitled Conjectura Cahalistica, " That for JNIoses, by occasion of his writings, to let the Jews entertain a conceit of God as in human shape, was not any more a way to bring them into idolatry than by acknowledging man to be God, as," saith he, "our religion does in Christ." How can this consist even with conson- ancy to his own principles, whilst he holds it to be false that God hath any shape, but true that Christ is God ; for will a false opinion of God not sooner lead men into idolatry than a true ojjinion of Christ ? But it is no marvel that this author, and other learned men with him, entertain such conceits of God and Christ as are repugnant to the current of the Scripture, whilst they set so high a rate on the sublime, indeed, but un- certain notions of the Platonists, and in the meantime slight the plain but certain letter of the sacred writei's, as being far below the Divine Majesty, and written only to comply with the rude apprehensions of the vulgar, unless by a mystical interjjretation they be screwed up to Platonism. This is the stone at which the pride of learned men hath caused them continu- ally to stumble, — namely, to think that they can speak more wisely and worthily of God than he hath spoken of himself in his word. This hath brought that more than Babylonish confusion of language into the Chris- tian religion, whilst men have framed those horrid and intricate expres- sions, under the colour of detecting and excluding heresies, but in truth to put a baffle on the simplicity of the Scripture and usher in heresies, that so they might the more easily carry on their worldly designs, which could not be effected but through the ignorance of the people, nor the jjeople brought into ignorance but by wrapping up religion in such monstrous terms as neither the people nor they themselves that invented them (or at least took them from the invention of others) did understand. Wherefore, there is no possibility to reduce the Christian religion to its primitive in- tegrity,— a thing, though much pretended, yea, boasted of in reformed churches, yet never hitherto sincerely endeavoured, much less effected (in that men have, by severe penalties, been hindered to reform religion beyond such a stint as that of Luther, or at most that of Calvin), — but by cashiering those many intricate terms and devised forms of speaking imposed on our religion, and by wholly betaking ourselves to the plainness of the Scrip- ture : for I have long since observed (and find my observation to be true and certain), that when, to express matters of religion, men make use of words and phrases unheard of in the Scripture, they slily under them couch false doctrines and obtrude them on us; for without question the doctrines of the Scripture can be so aptly explained in no language as that of the Scripture itself. Examine, therefore, the expressions of God's being " infinite and incomprehensible, of his being a simple act, of his subsisting in three persons or after a threefold manner, of a divine circumincession, of an eternal generation, of an eternal procession, of an incarnation, of an hypostatical union, of a communication of properties, of the mother of God, of God dying, of God made man, of transubstantiation, of consub- stantiation, of original sin, of Christ's taking our nature on him, of Christ's making satisfaction to God for our sins, both past, present, and to come, of Christ's fulfilling the law for us, of Christ's being punished by God for us, of Christ's merits or his meritorious obedience, both active and passive, of Christ's purchasing the kingdom of heaven for us, of Christ's enduring the wrath of God, yea, the paiiis of a damned man, of Christ's rising from
58 MR biddle's preface to his catechism.