A Christian Directory, Part 1: Christian EthicsBaxter, Richard
Religion
A Christian Directory, Part 1: Christian Ethics
Baxter, Richard
Casuistry; Christian sociology
1. The parts or faculties to be cleansed and cured, are both the
superior and inferior. (1.) The understanding, though not the first in
the sin, must be first in the cure: for all that is done upon the
lower faculties, must be by the governing power of the will: and all
that is done upon the will, according to the order of human nature,
must be done by the understanding. But the understanding hath its own
diseases, which must be known and cured. Its malady in general is
ignorance; which is not only a privation of actual knowledge, but an
undisposedness also of the understanding to know the truth. A man may
be deprived of some actual knowledge, that hath no disease in his mind
that causeth it: as in a case that either the object be absent, and
out of reach, or that there may be no sufficient revelation of it, or
that the mind be taken up wholly upon some other thing, or in case a
man shut out the thoughts of such an object, or refuse the evidence,
which is the act of the will, even as a man that is not blind, may yet
not see a particular object, 1. In case it be out of his natural
reach; 2. Or if it be night, and he want extrinsic light; 3. Or in
case he be wholly taken up with the observation of other things; 4. Or
in case he wilfully either shut or turn away his eyes.
[Sidenote: How the understanding can be the subject of sin?]
It is a very hard question to resolve, how far and wherein the
diseases of the understanding may be called sin? Because the
understanding is not a free, but a necessitated faculty; and there can
be no sin, where there is no liberty. But to clear this, it must be
considered, 1. That it is not this or that faculty that is the full
and proper subject of sin, but the man: the fulness of sin being made
up of the vice of both faculties, understanding and will, conjunct. It
is properer to say, The man sinned, than, The intellect or will
sinned, speaking exclusively as to the other. 2. _Liberium arbitrium_,
free choice, is belonging to the man, and not to his will only, though
principally to the will. 3. Though the will only be free in itself,
originally, yet the intellect is free by participation, so far as it
is commanded by the will, or dependeth on it for the exercise of its
acts. 4. Accordingly, though the understanding, primitively and of
itself, be not the subject of morality, of moral virtues or of moral
vices, which are immediately and primarily in the will; yet
participatively its virtues and vices are moralized, and become graces
or sins, laudable and rewardable, or vituperable and punishable, as
they are imperate by the will, or depend upon it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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