perstition will never venture upon) it is manifest that if there were no God, no Spirit, no Life to come, it were far better that there were no such Religions propensions in Mankind as we see universally there are.
For the fear of the Civil Magistrate, the convenience of mutual aide and support, and the natural scourge and plague of Diseases would contain men in such bounds of Justice, Humanity, and Temperance, as would make them more clearly and undisturbedly happy, then they are now capable of being from any advantage Religion does to either publick State or private person, supposing there were no God.
Wherefore this Religious Affection which Nature has implanted and as strongly rooted in Man as the fear of Death or the love of Women, would be the most enormous slip or bungle she could commit; so that she would so shamefully fail in the last Act, in this contrivance of the nature of Man, that in stead of a Plaudite she would deserve to be hissed off the Stage.
16. But she having done all things else so wisely, let us rather suspect our own Ignorance then reproach her, and expect that which is allowed in well-approved Comedies, θεὸς ἀπὸ μηχανῆς for nothing can unloose this knot but a Deity. And then we acknowledging Man to dwell as it were in the borders of the Spiritual and Material world (for he is utriusque mundi nexus, as Scaliger truly calls him) we shall not wonder that there is such tugging and pulling this way and that way, upward and downward, and such broken disorder of things; those that dwell in the confines of two Kingdoms being most subject to disquiet and confusion. And hitherto of the Passions of the Mind of Man, as well those that tye him down to the Body, as those that lift him up towards God. Now briefly of the whole Man as he is part of the Universe.
17. It is true, if we had not been here in the world, we could not then have missed our selves: but now we find our selves in being and able to examine the reasonableness of things, we cannot but conclude that our Creation was an Act of very exquisite Reason and Counsel. For there being so many notable Objects in the world to entertain such Faculties as Reason and inquisitive Admiration, there ought to be such a member of this visible Creation as Man, that those things might not be in vain: And if Man were out of the world, who were then left to view the face of Heaven, to wonder at the transcursion of Comets, to calculate Tables for the Motions of the Planets and Fix d Stars, and to take their Heights and Distances with Mathematical Instruments; to invent convenient Cycles for the computation of time, and consider the several forms of Years; to take notice of the Direction, Stations and Repedations of those Erratick Lights, and from thence most convincingly to inform himself of that pleasant and true Paradox of the Annual Motion of the Earth; to view the Asperities of the Moon through a Dioptrick-glass and venture at the Proportion of her Hills by their shadows; to behold the beauty of the Rain-bow, the Halo, Parelii and other Meteors; to search out the causes of the Flux and Reflux of the Sea, and the hidden virtue of the Magnet; to inquire into the usefulness of Plants, and to observe the variety of the Wisdom of the first Cause in framing their bodies, and giving sundry ob-
