The Works of Sir John Suckling in prose and verse/An Account of Religion by Reason
AN
ACCOUNT
OF
RELIGION
BY
sented to the Earl of DORSET.
By
LONDON,
Printed by Ruth Raworth for Humphrey Moseley, and
are to be sold at his shop at the signe of the
Princes Arms in S. Pauls Church-yard. 1646.
THE EPISTLE
I send you here (my lord) that discourse enlarged, which frighted the lady into a cold sweat, and which had like to have made me an atheist at court, and your lordship no very good Christian. I am not ignorant that the fear of Socinianism at this time renders every man, that offers to give an account of religion by reason, suspected to have none at all; yet I have made no scruple to run that hazard, not knowing why a man should not use the best weapon his Creator hath given him for his defence. That faith was by the apostles both highly exalted and severely enjoined, is known to every man, and this upon excellent grounds; for it was both the easiest and best way of converting, the other being tedious and almost useless, for but few among thousands are capable of it, and those few not capable at all times of their life, judgment being required. Yet the best servant our Saviour ever had upon earth was so far from neglecting or contemning reason, that his epistles were admired even by those that embraced not the truths he delivered. And, indeed, had the fathers of the Church only bid men believe, and not told them why, they had slept now unsainted in their graves, and as much benighted with oblivion as the ordinary parish-priests of their own age.
That man is deceivable is true, but what part within him is not likelier than his reason? For as Manilius said—
Nam neque decipitur ratio nec decipit unquam.
And how unlikely is it that that which gives us the prerogative above other creatures, and wholly entitles us to future happiness, should be laid aside, and not used to the acquiring of it!
But by this time (my lord) you find how apt those which have nothing to do themselves are to give others trouble. I shall only therefore let you know that your commands to my Lord of Middlesex are performed; and that when you have fresh ones, you cannot place them where they will be more willingly received, than byJohn Suckling.
Bath, Sept. 2.
A DISCOURSE OF RELIGION
Among the truths (my lord) which we receive, none more reasonably commands our belief than those which by all men at all times have been assented to. In this number, and highest, I place this great one, that there is a Deity; which the whole world hath been so eager to embrace, that rather than it would have none at all, it hath too often been contented with a very mean one.
That there should be a great Disposer and Orderer of things, a wise Rewarder and Punisher of good and evil, hath appeared so equitable to men, that by instinct they have concluded it necessary. Nature (which doth nothing in vain) having so far imprinted it in us all that, should the envy of predecessors deny the secret to succeeders, they yet would find it out. Of all those little ladders with which we scale heaven, and climb up to our Maker, that seems to me not the worst, of which man is the first step. For but by examining how I, that could contribute nothing to mine own being, should be here, I come to ask the same question for my father, and so am led in a direct line to a last Producer, that must be more than man; for if man made man, why died not I when my father died? since, according to that maxim of the philosophers, the cause taken away, the effect does not remain. Or, if the first man gave himself being, why hath he it not still? since it were unreasonable to imagine anything could have power to give itself life, that had no power to continue it. That there is then a God, will not be so much the dispute, as what this God is, or how to be worshipped, is that which hath troubled poor mortals from the first; nor are they yet in quiet. So great has been the diversity, that some have almost thought God was no less delighted with variety in his service than he was pleased with it in his works. It would not be amiss to take a survey of the world from its cradle, and, with Varro, divide it into three ages—the Unknown, the Fabulous, and the Historical.
The first was a black night, and discovered nothing; the second was a weak and glimmering light, representing things imperfectly and falsely; the last (more clear) left handsome monuments to posterity. The unknown I place in the age before the Flood, for that deluge swept away things as well as men, and left not so much as footsteps to trace them by. The fabulous began after the Flood; in this time godheads were cheap, and men, not knowing where to choose better, made deities one of another. Where this ended, the historical took beginning; for men began to ingrave in pillars, and to commit to letters, as it were by joint consent; for the three great epochs or terms of accompt were all established within the space of thirty years, the Grecians reckoning from their Olympiads, the Romans from the building of their city, and the Babylonians from their King Salmonassar. To bring into the scale with Christian religion anything out of the first age we cannot, because we know nothing of it.
And the second was so fabulous, that those which took it up afterwards smiled at it as ridiculous and false (which, though, was easier for them to do than to show a true). In the historical, it improved and grew more refined; but here the fathers entered the field, and so clearly gained the victory, that I should say nothing in it, did I not know it still to be the opinion of good wits that the particular religion of Christians has added little to the general religion of the world. Let us take it, then, in its perfecter estate, and look upon it in that age, which was made glorious by the bringing forth of so many admirable spirits; and this was about the eightieth Olympiad, in the year of the world 3480; for in the space of an 100 years flourished almost all that Greece could boast of—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Architas, Isocrates, Pythagoras, Epicurus, Heraclitus, Xenophon, Zeno, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Demosthenes, Parmenides, Zenocrates, Theophrastes, Empedocles, Tymæus, with divers others, orators and poets. Or rather (for they had their religion one from another, and not much different), let us take a view of it in that century in which Nature (as it were to oppose the Grecian insolence) brought forth that happy birth of Roman wits—Varro, Cicero, Caesar, Livie, Salust, Virgil, Horace, Vitruvius, Ovid, Pliny, Cato, Marcus Brutus; and this was from Quintus Servilius his consulship to that of Augustus, 270 years after the other. And to say truth, a great part of our religion, either directly or indirectly hath been professed by heathens, which I conceive not so much an exprobation to it as a confirmation, it being no derogating from truth to be warranted by common consent.
First, then, the creation of the world is delivered almost the same in the Phoenician stories with that in Moses; from this the Grecians had their Chaos, and Ovid the beginning of his Metamorphosis. That all things were made by God was held by Plato and others; that darkness was before light, by Thales; that the stars were made by God, by Aratus; that life was infused into things by the breath of God, Virgil; that man was made, of dust, Hesiod and Homer; that the first life of man was in simplicity and nakedness, the Egyptians taught; and from thence the poets had their Golden Age. That in the first times men's lives lasted a thousand years, Berosus and others; that something divine was seen amongst men till that the greatness of our sins gave them cause to remove, Catullus; and this he that writes the story of Columbus reports from the Indians, of a great deluge, almost all. But to the main they hold one God; and though multiplicity hath been laid to their charge, yet certainly the clearer spirits understood these petty gods as things, not as deities: second causes, and several virtues of the great power: by Neptune, water; Juno, air; by Dispater, earth; by Vulcan, fire; and sometimes one god signified many things, as Jupiter the whole world, the whole heaven; and sometimes many gods one thing, as Ceres, Juno Magna, the earth. They concluded those to be vices which we do; nor was there much difference in their virtues, only Christians have made ready belief the highest, which they would hardly allow to be any. They held rewards for the good, and punishments for the ill; had their Elysium and their hell; and that they thought the pains eternal there, is evident in that they believed from thence was no return. They proportioned sufferings hereafter to offences here; as in Tantalus, Sisyphus, and others, among which that of conscience (the worm that never dies) was one, as in the vulture's gnawing of Prometheus' heart, and Virgil's ugliest of Furies thundering in Pirithous' ear, was not obscurely shown; and, yet nearer us, they held the number of the elect to be but small, and that there should be a last day, in which the world should perish by fire. Lastly, they had their priests, temples, altars.
We have seen now the parallel; let us inquire whether those things they seem to have in common with us, we have not in a more excellent manner, and whether the rest, in which we differ from all the world, we take not up with reason. To begin, then, with their Jupiter (for all before were but little stealths from Moses' works)—how much more like a deity are the actions our stories declare our God to have done, than what the ethnick authors deliver of theirs? How excellently elevated are our descriptions of Him, theirs looking as if they knew what power only by their fears, as their statues erected to him declare! for when he was Capitolinus, he appeared with thunder; when Latiaris, besmeared with blood; when Feretrius, yet more terrible. We may guess what their conceptions were by the worship they gave him. How full of cruelty were their sacrifices! it being received almost through the whole world, that gods were pleased with the blood of men; and this custom neither the Grecian wisdom nor Roman civility abolished, as appears by sacrifices to Bacchus.
Then the ceremonies of Liber Pater and Ceres, how obscene! and those days, which were set apart for the honour of the gods, celebrated with such shows as Cato himself was ashamed to be present at. On the contrary, our services are such as not only Cato, but God Himself, may be there: we worship Him that is the purest Spirit, in purity of spirit; and did we not believe what the Scriptures deliver from Himself, yet would our reason persuade us that such an essence could not be pleased with the blood of beasts, or delighted with the steam of fat; and in this particular Christians have gone beyond all others except the Mahometans, besides whom there has been no nation that had not sacrifice, and was not guilty of this pious cruelty.
That we have the same virtues with them is very true; but who can deny that those virtues have received additions from Christianity, conducing to men's better living together? Revenge of injuries Moses both took himself and allowed by the law to others; Cicero and Aristotle placed it in virtue's quarter. We extol patient bearing of injuries; and what quiet the one, what trouble the other, would give the world, let the indifferent judge. Their justice only took care that men should not do wrong; ours, that they should not think it, the very coveting severely forbidden; and this holds, too, in chastity, desire of a woman unlawfully being as much a breach of the commandment as their enjoying, which showed not only the Christian's care, but wisdom to prevent ill, who provided to destroy it, where it was weakest, in the cradle, and declared He was no less than a God which gave them these laws; for had He been but man, He never would have provided or taken care for what He could not look into, the hearts of men, and what He could not punish, their thoughts. What charity can be produced answerable to that of Christians? Look upon the primitive times, and you shall find that (as if the whole world had been but a private family) they sent from province to province, and from places far distant, to relieve them they never saw nor knew.
Now for the happiness which they proposed: if they take it as the heathens understood it, it was an Elysium, a place of blessed shades, at best but a handsome retirement from the troubles of this world; if according to the duller Jews, feastings and banquetings (for it is evident that the Sadducees, who were great observers of the Mosaical law, had but faint thoughts of anything to come), there being in Moses' books no promises but of temporal blessings, and (if any) an obscure mention of eternity. The Mahometans are no less sensual, making the renewing of youth, high feasts, a woman with great eyes, and dressed up with a little more fancy, the last and best good.
Then the hell—how gentle with the heathens! but the rolling of a stone, filling of a sieve with water, sitting before banquets and not daring to touch them, exercising the trade and businesses they had on earth: with the Mahometans, but a purgatory acted in the grave, some pains inflicted by a bad angel, and those qualified and mitigated too by an assisting good one. Now, for the Jews, as they had no hopes, so they had no fears; so that if we consider it rightly, neither their punishments were great enough to deter them from doing ill, nor their rewards high enough to invite men to strictness of life; for, since every man is able to make as good a heaven of his own, it were unreasonable to persuade him to quit that certain happiness for an uncertainty; whereas Christians, with as much more noble consideration both in their heaven and hell, took care not only for the body but the soul, and for both above man's apprehension.
The strangest, though most epidemical, disease of all religions has been an imagination men have had that the imposing painful and difficult things upon themselves was the best way to appease the Deity, grossly thinking the chief service and delight of the Creator to consist in the tortures and sufferings of the creature. How laden with chargeable and unnecessary ceremonies the Jews were, their feasts, circumcisions, sacrifices, great Sabbaths and little Sabbaths, fasts, burials, indeed almost all their worship, sufficiently declare; and that the Mahometans are much more infected appears by the cutting of the præpuces, wearing iron rings in the skin of their foreparts, lancing themselves with knives, putting out their eyes upon the sight of their prophet's tomb, and the like. Of these last we can shew no patterns amongst us; for though there be such a thing as whipping of the body, yet it is but in some parts of Christendom, and there perchance too more smiled at than practised. Our religion teaches us to bear afflictions patiently when they fall upon us, but not to force them upon ourselves; for we believe the God we serve wise enough to choose His own service, and therefore presume not to add to His commands. With the Jews, it is true, we have something in common, but rather the names than things, our fasts being more the medicines of the body than the punishments of it; spiritual, as our Sabbaths; both good men's delight, not their trouble.
But, lest this discourse should swell into a greatness such as would make it look rather like a defence, which I have laboured to get, than an accompt which I always carry about me, I will now briefly examine whether we believe not with reason those things we have different from the rest of the world. First, then, for the persuasion of the truth of them in general, let us consider what they were that conveyed them to us: men (of all the world) the most unlikely to plot the cozenage of others, being themselves but simple people, without ends, without designs: seeking neither honour, riches, nor pleasure, but suffering (under the contrary) ignominy, poverty, and misery: enduring death itself, nay, courting it; all which are things distasteful to nature, and such as none but men strangely assured would have undergone. Had they feigned a story, certainly they would not in it have registered their own faults, nor delivered Him, whom they propounded as a God, ignominiously crucified. Add to this the progress their doctrine made abroad, miraculous above all other either before or since: other religions were brought in with the sword, power forcing a custom, which by degrees usurped the place of truth, this even power itself opposing; for the Romans (contrary to their custom, which entertained all religions kindly) persecuted this, which by its own strength so possessed the hearts of men, that no age, sex, or condition refused to lay down life for it. A thing so rare in other religions that, among the heathens, Socrates was the sole martyr; and the Jews (unless of some few under Manasses and Antiochus) have not to boast of any. If we cast our eyes upon the healing of the blind, curing the lame, redeeming from the grave, and but with a touch or word, we must conclude them done by more than humane power, and if by any other, by no ill: these busy not themselves so much about the good of man; and this religion not only forbids by precept the worship of wicked spirits, but in fact destroys it wheresoever it comes. Now, as it is clear by authors impartial (as being no Christians) that strange things were done, so it is plain they were done without imposture. Delusions shun the light; these were all acted openly, the very enemies both of the Master and disciples daily looking on. But let us descend to those more principal particulars which so much trouble the curious wits: these I take to be the Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, and Trinity.
For the first, that man should be made without man, why should we wonder more at it in that time of the world, than in the beginning? Much easier, certainly, it was here, because nearer the natural way, woman being a more prepared matter than earth. Those great truths and mysteries of salvation would never have been received without miracles; and where could they more opportunely be shown than at His entrance into the world, where they might give credit to His following actions and doctrine? So far it is from being against my reason to think Him thus born, that it would be against it to believe Him otherwise, it being not fit that the Son of God should be produced like the race of men. That humane nature may be assumed by a deity, the enemy of Christians, Julian, confirms, and instances (himself) in Æsculapius, whom he will have descend from heaven in mortal shape, to teach us here below the art of physick. Lastly, that God has lived with men, has been the general fancy of all nations, every particular having this tradition, that the Deity at some time or other conversed amongst men. Nor is it contrary to reason to believe Him residing in glory above, and yet incarnate here. So, in man himself, the soul is in heaven when it remains in the flesh, for it reacheth with its eye the sun: why may not God then, being in heaven, be at the same time with us in the flesh? since the soul without the body would be able to do much more than with it, and God much more than the soul, being the soul of the soul. But it may be urged as more abstruse, how all in heaven, and all in earth? Observe man speaking (as you have done seeing). Is not the same speech, at the instant it is uttered, all in every place? Receives not each particular ear alike the whole? and shall not God be much more ubiquitary than the voice of man? For the Passion (to let alone the necessity of satisfying divine justice this way, which, whosoever reads more particularly our divines, shall find rationally enforced), we find the heathen had something near to this (though as in the rest, imperfect), for they sacrificed single men for the sins of the whole city or country. Porphyrius, having laid this foundation, that the supreme happiness of the soul is to see God, and that it cannot see Him unpurified, concludes that there must be a way for the cleansing of mankind; and proceeding to find it out, he tells that arts and sciences serve but to set our wits right in the knowledge of things, and cleanse us not enough to come to God. The like judgment he gives of purging by theurgy, and by the mysteries of the sun; because those things extend but to some few, whereas this cleansing ought to be universal for the benefit of all mankind: in the end resolves, that this cannot be done but by one of the three In-beings, which is the word they use to express the Trinity by. Let us see what the divinest of the heathens (and his master Plato) delivers to admiration, and as it were prophetically, to this purpose. That a truly just man be shown (saith he) it is necessary that he be spoiled of his ornaments, so that he must be accounted by others a wicked man, be scoffed at, put in prison, beaten, nay, be crucified; and certainly for Him that was to appear the highest example of patience, it was necessary to undergo the highest trial of it, which was an undeserved death.
Concerning the Resurrection, I conceive the difficulty to lie not so much upon our Lord as us, it being with easy reason imagined, that He, which can make a body, can lay it down and take it up again. There is something more that urges and presses us; for in our estate we promise ourselves hereafter, there will be no need of food, copulation, or excrement: to what purpose should we have a mouth, belly, or less comely parts? it being strange to imagine God to have created man, for a moment of time, a body consisting of particulars which should be useless to all eternity. Besides, why should we desire to carry that along with us which we are ashamed of here, and which we find so great a trouble, that very wise men (were it not forbidden) would throw it off before it were worn out? To this I should answer that, as the body is partner in well or ill doing, so it is but just it should share in the rewards or punishments hereafter; and though by reason of sin we blush at it here, yet when that shall cease to be, why we should be more ashamed than our first parents were, or some in the last discovered parts of the world are now, I cannot understand. Who knows but these unsightly parts shall remain for good use, and that, putting us in mind of our imperfect estate here, they shall serve to increase our content and happiness there? What kind of thing a glorified body shall be, how changed, how refined, who knows? Nor is it the meanest invitement to me now to think that my estate there is above my capacity here. There remains that which does not only quarrel with the likelihood of a resurrection, but with the possibility; alleging that man, corrupted into dust, is scattered almost into infinite, or devoured by an irrational creature; goes into aliment, and grows part of it; then that creature, perchance, is made like food to another: and truly, did we doubt God's power, or not think Him omnipotent, this were a labyrinth we should be lost in. But it were hard, when we see every petty chymick in his little shop bring into one body things of the same kind, though scattered and disordered, that we should not allow the great Maker of all things to do the same in His own Universe.
There remains only the mystery of the Trinity, to the difficulty of which the poverty and narrowness of words have made no small addition.
St. Austin plainly says the word person was taken up by the Church for want of a better. Nature, substance, essence, hypostasis, suppositum, and persona have caused sharp disputes amongst the doctors; at length they are contented to let the three first and three last signify the same thing. By all of them is understood something complete, perfect, and singular; in this only they differ, that nature, substance, essence, are communicable ad quid and ut quo (as they call it). The other are not at all; but enough of this. Those that were the immediate conveyers of it to us wrapt it not up in any of these terms. We then hold God to be one and but one, it being gross to imagine two Omnipotents, for then neither would be so; yet since this good is perfectly good, and perfect goodness cannot be without perfect love, nor perfect love without communication, nor to an unequal or created, for then it must be inordinate, we conclude a Second Coeternal, though Begotten; nor are these contrary (though they seem to be so) even in created substances, that one thing may come from another, and yet that, from whence it comes, not be before that which comes from it, as in the sun and light. But in these high mysteries similitudes may be the best arguments. In metaphysicks they tell us, that to the constituting of every being there is a posse sui esse, from whence there is a sapientia sui esse; and from these two proceedeth an amor sui esse: and though these three be distinct, yet they may make up one perfect being. Again, and more familiarly, there is a hidden original of waters in the earth; from this a spring flows up; and of these proceeds a stream: this is but one essence, which knows neither a before nor an after, but in order—and that, too, according to our considering of it: the head of a spring is not a head but in respect of the spring; for if something flowed not from it, it were not original; nor the spring a spring, if it did not flow from something; nor the stream a stream but in respect of both. Now, all these three are but one water, and though one is not the other, yet they can hardly be considered one without the other. Now, though I know this is so far from a demonstration, that it is but an imperfect instance (perfect being impossible of infinite by finite things), yet there is a resemblance great enough to let us see the possibility. And here the eye of reason needed no more the spectacles of faith, than for these things of which we make sympathy the cause, as in the load-stone, or antipathy, of which every man almost gives instance from his own nature; nor is it here so great a wonder that we should be ignorant; for this is distant and removed from sense, these near and subject to it; and it were stranger for me to conclude that God did not work ad extra, thus one and distinct within Himself, because I cannot conceive how begotten, how proceeding, than if a clown should say the hand of a watch did not move because he could not give an account of the wheels within. So far is it from being unreasonable, because I do not understand it, that it would be unreasonable I should. For why should a created substance comprehend an uncreated; a circumscribed and limited, an uncircumscribed and unlimited? And this I observe in those great lovers and lords of reason, quoted by the fathers, Zoroastres, Trismegistus, Plato, Numenius, Plotinus, Proclus, Amelius, and Avicen, that when they spoke of this mystery of the Trinity, of which all writ something, and some almost as plainly as Christians themselves, that they discussed it not as they did other things, but delivered them as oracles which they had received themselves, without dispute.
Thus much of Christian profession compared with others. I should now shew which (compared within itself) ought to be preferred; but this is the work of every pen, perhaps to the prejudice of religion itself. This excuse (though) it has, that (like the chief empire), having nothing to conquer, no other religion to oppose or dispute against, it hath been forced to admit of civil wars, and suffer under its own excellency.