this fatality and necessity of all things. And the Essenes, who were the most religious sect among the Jews, and fell not under the censure of our Saviour for their hypocrisy as the Pharisees did, were asserters of absolute fate and necessity. St. Paul,[1] who was a Pharisee and the son of a Pharisee, is suppos’d by the learn’d Dodwell,[2] to have receiv’d his doctrine of fate from the masters of that sect, as they receiv’d it from the Stoicks. And he observes further, that the Stoick Philosophy is necessary for the explication of Christian Theology; that there are examples in the holy scriptures of the Holy Ghost’s speaking according to the opinions of the Stoicks, and that in particular, the apostle St. Paul in what he has disput’d concerning Predestination and Reprobation, is to be expound’d according to the Stoicks opinion concerning fate. So that liberty is both the real foundation of popular Atheism, and has been the profess’d principle of the Atheists themselves; as on the other side, fate, or the necessity of events, has been esteem’d a religious opinion and been the profess’d principle of the religious, both among Heathens and Jews, and also of that great Convert toChristianity
