_The true doctrine of love to God, to holiness, to ourselves, and to others, opened in certain propositions; especially for resolving the questions, What self-love is lawful?--what sinful?--Whether God must be loved above our own felicity, and how?--Whether to love our felicity more than God, may stand with a state of saving grace?--Whether it be a middle state between sensuality and the divine nature, to love God more for ourselves than for himself?--Whether to love God for ourselves be the state of a believer as he is under the promise of the new covenant?--And whether the spirit and sanctification promised to believers, be the love of God for himself, and so the divine nature, promised to him that chooseth Christ and God by him out of self-love for his own felicity?--How God supposeth and worketh on the principle of self-love in man's conversion?--With many such like. To avoid the tediousness of a distinct debating each question._
Though these things principally belong to the theory, and so to another treatise in hand, called "Methodus Theologiæ;" yet because they are also practical, and have a great influence upon the more practical directions, and the right understanding of them may help the reader himself to determine a multitude of cases of conscience, the particular discussion and decision of which would too much increase this volume, which is so big already, I shall here explain them in such brief propositions as yet shall give light to one another, and I hope contain much of the true nature of love, which is the mystery of the christian religion.
_Prop._ 1. The formal act of love is complacency, expressed by a _placet_; which Augustine so oft calleth delectation.
2. Benevolence, or desiring the good of those we love, is but a secondary act of love, or an effect of the prime, formal act. For to wish one well is not to love him formally; but we wish him well because we love him, and therefore first in order love him.
3. Their definition of love is therefore inept, and but from an effect, who say it is, _Alicui bene velle, ut ipst bene sit_.
4. Love is either merely sensitive and passionate, which is the sensible act and passion of the sensitive and fantastical appetite; or it is rational, which is the act of the rational appetite or will. The first is called sensitive in a double respect; 1. Because it followeth the apprehension of the senses, or fantasy, loving that which they apprehend as good; 2. And because it is exercised passionately and feelingly by the sensitive appetite. And the other is called rational, 1. Because it is the love of that which reason apprehendeth as good; and, 2. Because it is the complacency of that will which is a higher faculty than the sensitive appetite.
5. Sensitive love is oft without rational, (always in brutes,) but rational love is never totally without sensitive, at least in this life; whether it be because that the sensitive and rational are faculties of the same soul, or because they are so nearly connexed as that one cannot here move or act without the other?
6. But yet one is predominant in some persons, and the other in others.
7. Love is the complacency of the appetite in apprehended good. Good is the formal object of love. Sensitive love is the complacency of the sensitive appetite in sensible good (or in that which the sense and imagination apprehendeth as good). Rational love is the complacency of the rational appetite in that which reason apprehendeth good: the same thing with primary volition.
8. Good is not only a man's own felicity and the means thereto, called _mihi bonum_, good to me; either as profitable, pleasant, or honourable (as some think that have unmanned themselves): but there is extrinsic good, which is such in itself, in others, or for others, which yet is the natural object of man's love (so far as nature is sound). As the learning, and wisdom, and justice, and charity, and all other perfections of a man at the antipodes, whom I never saw, nor hope to see, or to receive any benefit by, is yet amiable to every man that hath not unmanned himself. So also is the good of posterity, of countries, of kingdoms, of the church, of the world, apprehended as future when we are dead and gone; yea, if we should be annihilated, desirable, and therefore amiable to us; when yet it could be no benefit to us.
9. Self-love is sensitive or rational. Sensitive, as such, is necessary and not free; and it is purposely by the most wise and blessed Creator planted in man and brutes, as a principle useful to preserve the world, and to engage the creature in the use of the means of its own preservation, and so to bring it to perfection, and to endue it with those fears and hopes which make us subjects capable of moral government.
10. The rational or higher appetite also hath a natural inclination to self-preservation, perfection, and felicity; but as ordinable and ordinate to higher ends.