be attracted and gravitate one towards another, in proportion[86]
to the mass of each one, and the rays of attraction it receives.
Accordingly the famous Mr. Locke, in his answer to Bishop Stillingfleet,
declares that having seen Mr. Newton's book he retracts what he himself
said, following the opinion of the moderns, in his _Essay concerning Human
Understanding_, to wit, that a body cannot operate immediately upon another
except by touching it upon its surface and driving it by its motion. He
acknowledges that God can put properties into matter which cause it to
operate from a distance. Thus the theologians of the Augsburg Confession
claim that God may ordain not only that a body operate immediately on
divers bodies remote from one another, but that it even exist in their
neighbourhood and be received by them in a way with which distances of
place and dimensions of space have nothing to do. Although this effect
transcends the forces of Nature, they do not think it possible to show that
it surpasses the power of the Author of Nature. For him it is easy to annul
the laws that he has given or to dispense with them as seems good to him,
in the same way as he was able to make iron float upon water and to stay
the operation of fire upon the human body.

20. I found in comparing the _Rationale Theologicum_ of Nicolaus Vedelius
with the refutation by Johann Musaeus that these two authors, of whom one
died while a Professor at Franecker after having taught at Geneva and the
other finally became the foremost theologian at Jena, are more or less in
agreement on the principal rules for the use of reason, but that it is in
the application of these rules they disagree. For they both agree that
revelation cannot be contrary to the truths whose necessity is called by
philosophers 'logical' or 'metaphysical', that is to say, whose opposite
implies contradiction. They both admit also that revelation will be able to
combat maxims whose necessity is called 'physical' and is founded only upon
the laws that the will of God has prescribed for Nature. Thus the question
whether the presence of one and the same body in divers places is possible
in the supernatural order only touches the application of the rule; and in
order to decide this question conclusively by reason, one must needs
explain exactly wherein the essence of body consists. Even the Reformed
disagree thereon amongst themselves; the Cartesians confine it to
extension, but their adve