The Certainty of Christianity Without Popery, Chapter 5
CHAP. V.
Quest. II. Whether it be true that the Papists grant us, that all Divine Revelations are true?
§. 1. Answ. YES, if you will first take their bare word what are Divine Revelations, 2. And will take in this word [in the sense that God intends them] 3. And will allow them to speak contradictions. For thus, 1. They can tell you when they have a mind, that Gods plainest Revelations, are none of his Revelations. 2. And that whatever Evidence of truth or sense there is in the signs revealing, God intendeth something contrary: 3. And that that is his revelation which is contrary to his Revelation.
§. 2. For instance: The first fundamental Revelation of God to man, is unto our senses of things sensible, and thereby Intelligible to our understandings: Now we cannot get the Papists assent that these Divine Revelations are certainly true: yea, they say that daily they are certainly false. God made Sense: God made the Intellect: God made the Medium, and God made the object. In the Lords Supper all the sound senses of all men living Christians and Heathens, Papists and Protestants perceive Bread and Wine, by seeing, smelling, touching and tasting. Yet the Papists say, and their Priests swear that there is no Bread and Wine, and that God by another Revelation hath certified us that this Revelation to sense and the Intellect by sense is false: He that will not swear that there is no Bread shall be no Priest: He that will not renounce this Divine Revelation in Nature, and all his senses, and all mens senses, is a Heretick to be burnt and damned. All Temporal Lords that will suffer such as thus renounce not sense and sensible Revelation, are to be excommunicate, and deprived of their dominions, and their subjects absolved from their oaths of allegiance. All this is in the Council of Lateran sub Innoc. 3. Can. 1. 3. And the Trent Oath and Council. Is this now a Divine Revelation or not? If not, then they that heard Christ speak and saw his Miracles, and saw him after his Resurrection, had none. For their senses might be all deceived if all mens now may.
§. 3. And if God intendeth here the quite contrary to the Evidence, even of sensible natural signs, how can they ever prove that he doth not so in his word too, even in Hoc est corpus meum, and in every article of the faith, Certainty lieth in Evidence, and if all the declaring evidence may be false, because of the contrary intent, then who knoweth what is true? or whether ever God said true to man?
§. 4. And here Revelations are pretended against Revelation, yea the superstruct against the fundamental, the consequent against the antecedent, the less certain against the more certain; yea certain forgery fathered on God, against his Certain Natural Revelations. For, 1. We are men before we are Christians; we have sense before we have faith. We can have no certainty of faith, but by means of the Certainty of sense: For we cannot tell that there is any man or book in the world, nor that ever we saw a letter or heard a word. What then shall we believe?
2. And they have nothing but pretended Miracles against this Constant Evident Natural Revelation. For every Priest (how sottish and wicked soever) to turn Bread into no Bread and Wine into no Wine when he list: For all the Priests in the world these sixteen hundred years to do this every week, or each day that they celebrate their Mass, publickly or privately, must needs be an undeniable Miracle (if true) being as much beyond all natural power as raising Lazarus from death: And to make these miracles as universal, constant, and easie as Gods worship in the Assembly, is to turn Miracles into the familiarest of Gods dealings: And hath not all this need of good proof, to prove Gods natural Revelations to be as ordinarily and universally false?
3. Yea, the Miracle is doubled, while the accidents remain: They deny them to be the Accidents of Christs body and blood. If they are Accidents then, it is either of Bread or of Nothing: An Accident of Bread which is no bread, the Quantity and Colour of bread which is no bread, or of wine which is no Wine, is a plain contradiction. If they be the Accidents of nothing; the Quantity of nothing, the weight of nothing, the locality of nothing, the colour, tast, smell of nothing, all these are as plain contradictions. Then God must be said by his Omnipotence to cause Contradictories, and to work constant Miracles for that end, and all to prove his Natural Revelation false.
§. 5. And what cogent Evidence bringeth them to all this? Why, Hoc est corpus meum; No more than Davids [I am a worm and no man] or Christs [I am the vine and ye are the branches] and Pauls [that Rock was Christ], Though paul becometh Christs expositor, and three times in the three next verses, 1 Cor.▪ 11. calleth it Bread after the Consecration; And the old Fathers as often as Edmundus Albertinus hath shewed in folio. Yet because the foresaid Later an and Trent Council have in the later end of the world, new made this Article of the Papists faith, by their exposition of Christs words contrary to St. Paul, all Christs fore-revelation in nature must go for falshoods, and God daily worketh Miracles to deceive all the common senses of the world, when yet no word or Miracle can be believed, but on supposition of the certainty of senses.
§. 6. This, his blind supposition called me to premise; that you may see how far Papists and we are or are not agreed that all Gods Revelations are true? and how impossible it is for them to know what is a Divine Revelation, or when Gods meaning is agreeable to his Revelations. These are things neer and plain and weighty.