Page:The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce - Milton (1644).djvu/53

 own Antinomie, or counter-statute, live unreprov'd in the same fact, as he himselfe esteem'd it, according to our common explainers. The hidden wayes of his providence we adore & search not; but the law is his reveled wil, his complete, his evident, and certain will; herein he appears to us as it were in human shape, enters into cov'nant with us, swears to keep it, binds himself like a just lawgiver to his own prescriptions, gives himself to be understood by men, judges and is judg'd, measures and is commensurat to right reason; cannot require lesse of us in one cantle of his Law then in another, his legall justice cannot be so fickle and so variable, sometimes like a devouring fire and by and by connivent in the embers, or, if I may so say, oscitant and supine. The vigor of his Law could no more remit, then the hallowed fire on his altar could be let goe out. The Lamps that burnt before him might need snuffing, but the light of his Law never. Of this also more beneath, is discussing a solution of Rivetus.

The Jesuits, and that sect among us which is nam'd of Arminius, are wont to charge us of making God the author of sinne in two degrees especially, not to speak of his permissions. 1. Because we hold that he hath decreed some to damnation, and consequently to sinne, say they: Next, because those means which are of saving knowledge to others, he makes to them an occasion of greater sinne. Yet considering the perfection wherin man was created, and might have stood, no decree necessitating his free will, but subsequent though not in time yet in order to causes which were in his owne power, they might, methinks be perswaded to absolve both God and us. Whenas the doctrine of Plato and Chrysippus with their followers the Academics and the Stoics, who knew not what a consummat and most adorned Pandora was bestow'd upon Adam to be the nurse and guide of his arbitrary happinesse and perseverance, I mean his native innocence and perfection, which might have kept him from being our true Epimetheus, and though they taught of vertue and vice to be both the gift of divine destiny, they could yet reasons not invalid, to justifie the counsels of God and Fate from the insulsity of mortall tongues: That mans own  self-corrupted is the adequat and sufficient cause of his disobedience besides fate; as Homer also wanted not to expresse both in his Iliad and Odyssei. And Manilius the Poet, although in his fourth book he tells of some created both to sinne and punishment; yet without murmuring, and with an industrious cheerfulnes the Deity. They were not ignorant in their then Errata