For if sin, and misery, and ignorance, cannot convince us of our own weakness, cannot prepare us to accept of any methods of atoning for our guilt, but such as our own disordered reason can suggest, we are not far from the hardened state of those miserable spirits, that make war against God.
For to insist upon the prerogative of our own nature, as qualifying us to make our own peace with God, and to reject the atonement which he has provided for us, because we esteem it more fit and reasonable, that our own repentance should be sufficient without it, is the same height of pride and impiety, as to affirm, that we have no need of any repentance at all.
For as mankind, if they had continued in a state of innocence, could not have known how their innocence was to be rewarded, or what changes of state God intended them for, but as revelation had discovered these things unto them: so after they were fallen into a state of guilt and sin, they could never know what misery it would expose them to, or when, or how, or whether they were ever to be delivered from it, and made as happy as if they had never sinned; these are things that nothing but a revelation from God could teach them.
So that for a sinner to pretend to appoint the atonement for his own sins, or to think himself able to tell what it ought to be, is as foolish and vain a presumption, as if man in innocence should have pretended to appoint his own method of being changed into a cherub.
The writers against revelation appeal to the reason and nature of things, as infallibly discovering every thing that a revelation from God can teach us.
Thus our author; If the relations between things, and the fitness resulting from thence, be not the sole rule of God’s actions, must not God be an arbitrary being? But if God only commands what the nature of things shew to be fit, it is scarce possible that men should mistake their duty; since a mind that is attentive can as easily distinguish fit from unfit, as the eye can beauty from deformity[¹].
[¹] Page 30.
It is granted, that there is a fitness and unfitness of actions founded in the nature of things, and resulting from the relations that persons and things bear to one another. It is also granted, that the reasonableness of most of the duties of children to their parents, of parents to their children, and of men to men, is very apparent, from the relations they bear to one another; and that several of the duties which we owe to God, plainly appear to us, as soon as we acknowledge the relation that is between God and us.
But then, this whole argument proves directly the contrary to that which this author intended to prove by it.
I here therefore join with this author; I readily grant, that the nature, reason and relations of things and persons, and the fitness of actions resulting from thence, is the sole rule of God’s actions. And I appeal to this one common principle, as a sufficient proof that a man cannot thus abide by the sole light of his own reason, without contradicting the nature and reason of things, and denying this to be the sole rule of God’s actions.