[1.] First, When he hath a design of common or prevailing delusion, he mainly endeavours to corrupt some person of a more strict, serious, and religious carriage, to be the captain and ringleader; such men were Pelagius, Arius, Socinus, &c. He mainly endeavours to have fit instruments. If he be upon that design of blemishing religion, and to bring truth into a disesteem, then, as one observes,[249] he persuades such into the ministry as he foresees are likely to be idle, careless, profane, and scandalous; or doth endeavour to promote such ministers into more conspicuous places, and provokes them to miscarriage, that so their example may be an objection against truth, while in the meantime he is willing that the opposers of truth should continue their smooth carriage; and then he puts a two-edged sword into the hands of the unstable: Can that be truth where there is so much wickedness? and can this be error where there is so much holiness?
[2.] Secondly, In prosecution of this design he usually puts men upon some more than ordinary strictness, that the pretence of holiness may be the more augmented. In this case a course of ordinary sanctity is not enough, they must be above the common practice; some singular additions of severity and exactness above what is written, are commonly affected to make them the more remarkable. Christ notes this in the Pharisees, concerning all their devotions, and the ways of expressing them; their phylacteries spoken of, Mat. xxiii. 5, as some think,[250] were not intended by that text of Deut. vi. 8, but only that they should remember the law, and endeavour not to forget it, as they do that tie a thread or such like thing about their finger for a remembrancer; according to Prov. iii. 3, ‘Bind them about thy neck, write them upon the table of thine heart.’ However, if they were literally enjoined, they would have them, as Christ tells them, broader than others, as an evidence of their greater care. The Cathari boasted of sanctity and good works, and rejected second marriages; the Apostolici were so called from a pretended stricter imitation of the singular holiness of the apostles. The Valesians made themselves eunuchs, according to the letter, ‘for the kingdom of God.’ The Donatists accounted that no true church where any spot or infirmity was found. The Messalians, or Euchytæ, were for constant praying, the Nudipedales for going barefoot, &c. The papists urge canonical hours, whippings, penances, pilgrimages, voluntary poverty, abstinence from meats and marriage in their priests and votaries. In a word, all noted sects have something of special singularity, whereby they would difference themselves from others, as a peculiar character of their greater strictness; and for want of better stuff they sometimes take up affected gestures, devotional looks, and outward garbs; all which have this note, that what they most stand upon, God hath least, or not at all, required at their hands—their voluntary humility, or neglecting of the body being but will-worship, and a self-devised piece of religion.
[3.] Thirdly, When once men are set in the way of exercising severities, Satan endeavours, by working upon their fancies, to press them on further to a delight and satisfaction in these[251] ways of strictness, so that the practisers themselves are not only confirmed in these usages, and the opinions that are concomitant with them, but others are the more easily drawn to like and profess the same things. Any serious temper, under any profession of religion, easily comes to be devout, and readily complies with opportunities of evincing its devotion by strictness. And therefore we shall find among heathens a great devotional severity, and such as far exceeds all of that kind which the papists do usually brag of. The Magi abstained from wine, ate not the flesh of living creatures, and professed virginity. The Indian Brachmans did the like, and besides used themselves to incredible hardship; they laid upon skins, sustained the violence of the sun and storms, and exercised themselves therewith; some spending thirty-seven years in this course, others more. We read strange things of this nature concerning the Egyptian priests, and others. The Mohammedans are not without their religious orders, which pretend a more holy and austere life than others; and though of some, as of the torlachs and dervizes, several private villainies are reported, yet of others, as of the order of calender, we are assured from history that they profess virginity, and expose themselves to hardship, and a stricter devotion in their way; and generally it is said of all of them, that they go meanly clad, or half naked; some abstinent in eating and drinking, professing poverty, renouncing the world. Some can endure cutting and slashing, as if they were insensible; some profess perpetual silence, though urged with injuries and tortures; others have chains about their necks and arms, to shew that they are bound up from the world, &c. If such things may be found among heathens, no wonder that error boasts of them, for in both there is the same reason of men’s pleasing themselves in such hardships, which is from a natural devotion, assisted by Satan’s cunning, and the same design driven on by it; for the devil doth confirm heathens and Mohammedans in their false worship by the reverence and respect they carry to such practices.
[4.] Fourthly, Because religious holiness hath a beauty in it, and is very lovely, he doth all he can to affect men with the highest reverence for these pretences of religious strictness; so that they that will not be at pains to practise them, can bestow an excessive respect and admiration upon those that are grown famous in the use of such things; and by that means being almost adored, they are without doubt persuaded that all they teach or do is right, and in a doting fondness they multiply superstitious errors. Idolatry is supposed to have a great part of its rise from this. While men endeavoured to express their thankful and admiring remembrances of some excellent persons by setting up their pictures, their posterity began to worship them as gods. Pilgrimages were first set on foot by the respects that men gave to places that were made famous by persons and actions of more than ordinary holiness;[252] and because the devil found men so very apt to please themselves in paying such devotional reverences, he wrought upon their superstitious humour to multiply to themselves the occasions thereof, and by fabulous traditions sent them to places no otherwise made memorable than by dreams and impostures. Much of this you might see if you would accompany a caravan from Cairo to Mecca and Medina, where you would see the zealous pilgrims, with a great many orisons and prayers, compassing Abraham’s house, kissing a stone which, they are told, fell from heaven; blessing themselves with a relic of the old vesture of Abraham’s house, washing themselves in the pond, which, as their tradition goes, the angel shewed to Hagar; saluting the mountain of pardon, throwing stones in defiance of the devil, as their legend tells them Ishmael did; their prayers on the mountain of health, their visit to the prophet’s tomb at Medina, &c.[253] The like might you observe among the papists, in their pilgrimages to Jerusalem and the sepulchre, to the Lady of Loretto’s chapel, and other places. By such devices as these the unobservant people are transported with a pleasure, insomuch that they not only persuade themselves they are very devout in these reverences, but they also become unalterably fixed to these errors that do support these delightful practices, or as consequences do issue from them.
(6.) Sixthly, A more plausible argument for error than the learning and holiness of the persons that profess it, is that of inspiration, in which the devil soars aloft and pretends the highest divine warrant for his falsehoods; for ‘God is truth,’ and ‘we know that no lie is of the truth.’ Now to make men believe that God by his Holy Spirit doth in any manner dictate such opinions, or certainly reveal such things for truths, is one of the highest artifices that he can pretend to, and such a confirmation must it be to those that are so persuaded, that all disputes and doubtings must necessarily be silenced.
That the devil can thus ‘transform himself into an angel of light,’ we are assured from Scripture, which hath particularly cautioned us against this cheat. The apostasy of the later times, 1 Tim. iv. 1, the apostle foretells should be carried on by the prevalency of this pretence: ‘Some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits.’ That by ‘spirits’ there, doctrines are intended rather than doctors, is Mr Mede’s interpretation;[254] but it will come all to one if we consider that the word ‘spirit’ carries more in it than either doctrine or doctor; for to call either the one or the other ‘a spirit’ would be intolerably harsh, if it were not for this, that that ‘doctor’ is hereby supposed to pretend an infallibility from the Spirit of God, or, which is all one, that he received his doctrine by some immediate revelation of the Spirit; so that by ‘seducing spirits’ must be men or doctrines that seduce others to believe them, by the pretence of the Spirit or inspiration; and that text of 1 John iv. 1 doth thus explain it: ‘Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God,’ which is as much as if he had said, Believe not every man or doctrine that shall pretend he is sent of God and hath his Spirit; and the reason there given makes it yet more plain, because many ‘false prophets are gone out into the world;’ so that these ‘spirits’ are ‘false prophets,’ men that pretend inspiration. And the warning, ‘Believe not every spirit,’ tells us that Satan doth with such a dexterity counterfeit the Spirit’s inspirations, that holy and good men are in no small hazard to be deceived thereby. Most full to this purpose is that of 2 Thes. ii. 2, ‘That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand;’ where the several means of seduction are particularly reckoned as distinct from the doctrine and doctors, and by ‘spirit’ can be meant no other than a pretence of inspiration or revelation.[255]
It is evident then that Satan by this artifice useth to put a stamp of divine warrant upon his adulterate coin; and if we look into his practice, we shall in all ages find him at this work. Among heathens he frequently gained a repute to his superstitious idolatrous worship by this device. The men of greatest note among them feigned a spiritual commerce with the gods. Empedocles endeavoured to make the people believe that there was a kind of divinity in him, and affecting to be esteemed more than a man, cast himself into the burnings of Mongebel, that they might suppose him to have been taken up to the gods.[256] Pythagoras his fiction of a journey to hell was upon the same account. Philostratus and Cedrenus report no less of Apollonius, than that he had familiar converses with their supposed deities; and the like did they believe of their magi and priests; insomuch that some cunning politicians, observing how the vulgar were under a deep reverence to such pretences, gave it out that they had received their laws by divine inspirations. Numa Pompilius feigned he received his institutions from the nymph Ægeria, Lycurgus from Apollo; Minos the lawgiver of Candia boasted that Jupiter was his familiar. Mohammed also speaks as high this way as any; his Alcoran must be no less than a law received from God, and to that end he pretends a strange journey to heaven, and frequent converse with the angel Gabriel.
If we trace Satan in the errors which he hath raised up under the profession of the Scriptures, we may observe the same method. The Valentinians, Gnostics, Montanists talked as confidently of the Spirit as Moses or the prophets could do, and a great deal more; for some of them blasphemously called themselves the Paraclete or Comforter. Among the monsters which later ages produced, we still find the same strain: one saith he is Enoch, another styles himself the ‘great prophet,’ another hath raptures, and all immediately inspired. The papists have as much of this cheat among them as any other; and some of their learned defenders avouch their lumen propheticum, and miraculorum gloria, prophesies and miracles, to be the two eyes, or the sun and moon of their church; nay, by a strange transportment of folly, to the forfeiture of the reputation of learning and reason, they have so multiplied revelations that we have whole volumes of them, as the revelations of their St Bridget and others; and by wonderful credulity they have not only advanced apparent dreams and dotages to the honour of inspirations or visions, but upon this sandy foundation they have built a great many of their doctrines, as purgatory, transubstantiation, auricular confession, &c. By such warrants have they instituted festivals and founded several orders. The particulars of these things you may see more at large in Dr Stillingfleet and others. And that there might be nothing wanting that might make them shamelessly impudent, they are not content to equal their fooleries with the Scriptures of God, as that the rule of their St. Francis—for I shall only instance in him, omitting others for brevity sake—was not composed by the wisdom of man, but by God himself, and inspired by the Holy Ghost, but they advance their prophets above the apostles, and above Christ himself. Their St Benedict, if you will believe them, was rapt up to the third heavens, where he saw God face to face, and heard the choir of angels; and their St. Francis was a nonsuch for miracles and revelations. Neither may we wonder that Satan should be forward in urging this cheat, when we consider,
[1.] First, What a reverence men naturally carry to revelations, and how apt they are to be surprised with a hasty credulity. An old prophecy, pretended to be found in a wall, or taken out of an old manuscript, of I know not what uncertain author, is usually more doted on than the plain and infallible rules of Scripture. This we may observe daily; and foreigners do much blame the English for a facile belief of such things; but it is a general fault of mankind, and we find even wise men forward in their persuasions upon meaner grounds than those that gain credit to old prophecies. For their antiquity and strangeness of discovery, especially at such times wherein the present posture of affairs seem to favour such predictions with a probability of such events, are more likely to get credit than these artificial imitations of the ways and garbs of the old prophets, and the cunning legerdemain of those that pretend to inspirations by seeming ecstasies, raptures, and confident declarations, &c.; nevertheless arrant cheats have by these ways deceived no mean men. Alvarus acknowledgeth that he honoured a woman as a saint that had visions and raptures as if really inspired—and the same apprehensions had the bishop and friars—who was afterward discovered to be a naughty woman.[257] Who shall then think it strange that the unobservant multitude should be deluded by such an art?
[2.] Secondly, Especially if we consider that God himself took this course to signify his mind to men. His prophets were divinely inspired, and the Scriptures were not of ‘any private interpretation,’ ἰδίας ἐπιλύσεως. The words that the penmen of Scriptures wrote were not the interpretations of their own private thoughts, ‘for the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost,’ 2 Pet. i. 20, 21. Now though the prophecies of Scripture are sealed, and no more is to be added to them upon any pretence whatsoever, yet seeing there are promises left us of the ‘giving of the Spirit,’ of ‘being taught and led by the Spirit,’ it is an easy matter for Satan to beguile men into an expectation of prophetic inspirations, and a belief of what is pretended so to be; for all men do not or will not understand that these promises of the Spirit have no intendment of new and extraordinary immediate revelations, but only of the efficacious applications of what is already revealed in Scripture. This kind of revelation we acknowledge and teach, which is far enough from enthusiasm, that is, a pretended revelation of new truths, and we have reason to assert that internal persuasions without the external word are to be avoided as Satan’s cozenages.[258] But for all this, when men’s minds are set agadding, if they meet with such as magnify their own dreams, and call their fancies visions, the suitableness of this to their humour makes them to reject our interpretations of these promises as false, and to persuade themselves that they are to be understood of such inspirations as the prophets of old had; and then they presently conclude they are to believe them, lest otherwise they should resist the Holy Ghost.