[¹] Page 24.
But if that which is necessarily limited, is different from that which is necessarily unlimited, then we have proof enough from this very argument, that a reason necessarily limited cannot be of the same kind with that reason, which is necessarily unlimited. Unless it can be said, that limited and unlimited, finite and infinite, beginning and unbeginning, have no contrariety in kind, but only differ, as a short line differs from a long one.
* The truth of the matter is this; reason is in God and man, as power is in God and man. And as the divine power has some degree of likeness to human power, yet with an infinite difference from it: so that perfection which we call reason in God, has some degree of likeness to reason as it is in man, yet is infinitely and beyond all conception different from it.
* And as our enjoyment of power is so limited, so imperfect, so superficial, as to be scarce sufficient to tell us, what power is, much less what omnipotence is; so our share of reason is so small, and we enjoy it in so imperfect a manner, that we can scarce think or talk intelligibly of it, or so much as define our own faculties of reasoning.
CHAPTER II.
Shewing from the relation between God and man, that human reason cannot be a competent judge of the fitness and reasonableness of God’s proceedings with mankind, either as to the time, or matter, or manner of an external revelation.
AS our author has laid it down for an undeniable rule of God’s actions, that he must, if he be a wise and good being, act according to the relation he stands in towards his creatures; I proceed upon this principle to prove the incapacity of human reason, to judge truly of God’s proceedings in regard to divine revelation.
For if the fitness of actions results from the nature and relations of beings, then the fitness of God’s actions, as he is an omniscient Creator and Governor, to whom every thing is eternally foreknown, over beings endued with our freedom of will, must be to us incomprehensible.
* We are not so much as capable of comprehending by our reason, the possibility of this relation, or how the fore-knowledge of God can consist with the free agency of creatures. We know that God fore-knows all things, with the same certainty as we know there is a God. And if self-consciousness is an infallible proof of our own existence, it proves with the same certainty the freedom of our will. And hence it is, that we have a full assurance of the consistency of God’s fore-knowledge with freedom of will.