requently press
and invite us to seek after charity, without dividing it into infused
and acquired, or determining whether it be a substance or an accident, a
created or an uncreated being. They detested sin themselves, and warned
others from the commission of it; and yet I am sure they could never
have defined so dogmatically, as the Scotists have since done. St. Paul,
who in other's judgment is no less the chief of the apostles, than
he was in his own the chief of sinners, who being bred at the feet of
Gamaliel, was certainly more eminently a scholar than any of the rest,
yet he often exclaims against vain philosophy, warns us from doting
about questions and strifes of words, and charges us to avoid profane
and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called; which
he would not have done, if he had thought it worth his while to have
become acquainted with them, which he might soon have been, the
disputes of that age being but small, and more intelligible sophisms,
in reference to the vastly greater intricacies they are now improved
to. But yet, however, our scholastic divines are so modest, that if they
meet with any passage in St. Paul, or any other penman of holy writ,
which is not so well modelled, or critically disposed of, as they
could wish, they will not roughly condemn it, but bend it rather to a
favorable interpretation, out of reverence to antiquity, and respect
to the holy scriptures; though indeed it were unreasonable to expect
anything of this nature from the apostles, whose lord and master
had given unto them to know the mysteries of God, but not those of
philosophy. If the same divines meet with anything of like nature
unpalatable in St. Chrysostom, St. Basil, St. Hierom, or others of the
fathers, they will not stick to appeal from their authority, and very
fairly resolve that they lay under a mistake. Yet these ancient fathers
were they who confuted both the Jews and Heathens, though they both
obstinately adhered to their respective prejudices; they confuted them
(I say), yet by their lives and miracles, rather than by words and
syllogisms; and the persons they thus proselyted were downright honest,
well meaning people, such as understood plain sense better than any
artificial pomp of reasoning: whereas if our divines should now
set about the gaining converts from paganism by their metaphysical
subtleties, they would find that most of the persons they applied
themselves to were either so ig