He takes the name of the son of a woman, and 'wanes' the miraculous name of the son of a virgin.--Christ 'waned' the glorious name of Son of God, and the miraculous name of Son of a virgin too; which is not omitted to draw into doubt the perpetual virginity of the blessed virgin, the mother of Christ, &c. Very ingenious; but likewise very presumptuous, this arbitrary attribution of St. Paul's silence, and presumable ignorance of the virginity of Mary, to Christ's own determination to have the fact passed over. N.B. Is 'wane' a misprint for 'wave' or 'waive?' It occurs so often, as to render its being an 'erratum' improbable; yet I do not remember to have met elsewhere 'wane' used for 'decline' as a verb active. Ib. p. 23. A. If there were reason for it, it were no miracle. The announcement of the first comet, that had ever been observed, might excite doubt in the mind of an astronomer, to whom, from the place where he lived, it had not been visible. But his reason could have been no objection to it. Had God pleased, all women might have conceived, [Greek: aneu tou andròs], as many of the 'polypi' and 'planariæ' do. Not on any such ground do I suspend myself on this as an article of faith; but because I doubt the evidence. Ib. p. 25. A--E. Though we may think thus in the law of reason, yet, &c. It is, and has been, a misfortune, a grievous and manifold loss and hindrance for the interests of moral and spiritual truth, that even our best and most vigorous theologians and philosophers of the age from Edward VI. to James II. so generally confound the terms, and so too often confound the subjects themselves, reason and understanding; yet the diversity, the difference in kind, was known to, and clearly admitted by, many of them,--by Hooker for instance, and it is implied in the whole of Bacon's 'Novum Organum'. Instead of the 'law of reason,' Donne meant, and ought to have said, 'judging according to the ordinary presumptions of the understanding,' that is, the faculty which, generalizing particular experiences, judges of the future by analogy to the past. Taking the words, however, in their vulgar sense, I most deliberately protest against all the paragraphs in this page, from A to E, and should cite them, with a host of others, as sad effects of the confusion of the reason and the understanding, and of the consequent abdication of the former, instead of the bounden submission of the latter to a higher light. Faith itself is but an act of the will, assenting to the reason on its own evidence without, and even against, the understanding. This indeed is, I fully agree, to be brought into captivity to the faith. [5] Ib. p. 26. A. B. And therefore to be 'under the Law,' signifies here thus much; to be a debtor to the law of nature, to have a testimony in our hearts and consciences, that there lies a law upon us, which we have no power in ourselves to perform, &c.