A Christian Directory, Part 1: Christian Ethics

by Richard Baxter

How the several faculties of the soul are corrupted and diseased.

In what cases sound understanding may be ignorant.

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.

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.

Consider then, the acts, and habits, and disposition of the understanding; and you will find, That some acts, and the privation of them, are necessary, naturally, originally, and unalterably; and these are not virtues or sinful at all, as having no morality. As, to know unwillingly, as the devils do, and to believe when it cannot be resisted, though they would; this is no moral virtue at all, but a natural perfection only. So, 1. To be ignorant of that which is no object of knowledge, or which is naturally beyond our knowledge, as of the essence of God, is no sin at all. 2. Nor, to be ignorant of that which was never revealed, when no fault of ours hindered the revelation, is no sin. 3. Nor, to be without the present, actual knowledge or consideration of one point, at that moment when our thoughts are lawfully diverted, as in greater business, or suspended, as in sleep. 4. But to be ignorant, wilfully, is a sin, participatively in the intellect, and originally in the will. 5. And to be ignorant for want of revelation, when ourselves are the hinderers of that revelation, or the meritorious cause that we want it, is our sin: because, though that ignorance be immediately necessary, and hypothetically, yet originally and remotely it is free and voluntary.

So, as to the habits and disposition of the intellect; it is no sin to want those, which man's understanding in its entire and primitive nature was without. As, not to be able to know without an object, or to know an unrevealed or too distant object, or actually to know all things knowable, at once. But there are defects or ill dispositions, that are sinfully contracted; and though these are now immediately natural[98] and necessary, yet being originally and remotely voluntary or free, they are participatively sinful. Such is the natural man's disability or undisposedness to know the things of the Spirit, when the word revealeth them. This lieth not in the want of a natural faculty to know them, but, 1. Radically in the will. 2. And thence in contrary, false apprehensions which the intellect is prepossessed with, which resisting the truth, may be called, its blindness or impotency to know them. And 3. In a strangeness of the mind to those spiritual things which it is utterly unacquainted with.

Note here, 1. That the will may be guilty of the understanding's ignorance, two ways: either, by positive averseness prohibiting or diverting it from beholding the evidence of truth; or, by a privation and forbearance of that command or excitation which is necessary to the exercise of the acts of the understanding. This last is the commonest way of the sin in the understanding; and that may be truly called voluntary which is from the will's neglect of its office, or suspension of its act, though there be no actual volition or nolition.

2. That the will may do more in causing a disease in the understanding, than it can do in curing it. I can put out a man's eyes, but I cannot restore them.

3. That yet for all that, God hath so ordered it in his gracious dispensation of the grace of the Redeemer, that certain means are appointed by him, for man to use, in order to the obtaining of his grace, for his own recovery: and so, though grace cure not the understanding of its primitive, natural weakness, yet it cureth it of its contracted weakness, which was voluntary in its original, but necessary, being contracted. And, as the will had a hand in the causing of it, so must it have, in the voluntary use of the aforesaid means, in the cure of it. So much to show you how the understanding is guilty of sin.