The Existence and Attributes of God, Volumes 1 and 2Charnock, Stephen
Religion
The Existence and Attributes of God, Volumes 1 and 2
Charnock, Stephen
God (Christianity) -- Attributes; Providence and government of God -- Christianity
It is visible that he is, “for he covers himself with light as with
a garment” (Psalm civ. 2); it is visible what he is, “for he makes
darkness his secret place” (Psalm xviii. 11). Nothing more clear to
the eye than light, and nothing more difficult to the understanding
than the nature of it: as light is the first object obvious to the eye,
so is God the first object obvious to the understanding. The arguments
from nature do, with greater strength, evince his existence, than any
pretences can manifest there is no God. No man can assure himself by
any good reason there is none; for as for the likeness of events to
him that is righteous, and him that is wicked; to him that sacrificeth,
and to him that sacrificeth not (Eccles. ix. 2): it is an argument for
a reserve of judgment in another state, which every man’s conscience
dictates to him, when the justice of God shall be glorified in another
world, as much as his patience is in this.
2. Whosoever doubts of it, makes himself a mark, against which all
the creatures fight. All the stars fought against Sisera for Israel:
all the stars in heaven, and the dust on earth, fight for God against
the atheist. He hath as many arguments against him as there are
creatures in the whole compass of heaven and earth. He is most {a82}
unreasonable, that denies or doubts of that whose image and shadow he
sees round about him; he may sooner deny the sun that warms him, the
moon that in night walks in her brightness, deny the fruits he enjoys
from the earth, yea, and deny that he doth exist. He must tear his own
conscience, fly from his own thoughts, be changed into the nature of
a stone, which hath neither reason nor sense, before he can disengage
himself from those arguments which evince the being of a God. He that
would make the natural religion professed in the world a mere romance,
must give the lie to the common sense of mankind; he must be at an
irreconcilable enmity with his own reason, resolve to hear nothing
that it speaks, if he will not hear what it speaks in this case, with
a greater evidence than it can ascertain anything else. God hath so
settled himself in the reason of man, that he must vilify the noblest
faculty God hath given him, and put off nature itself, before he can
blot out the notion of a God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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