Lively Oracles Given to Us: or the Christians Birth-right and Duty in the Custody and Use of the Holy Scripture

The several Methods of Gods communicating the knowledge of himself.

GOD, as he is invisible to human eyes, so he is unfathomable by human understandings; the perfection of his nature, and the impotency of ours, setting us at too great a distance to have any clear perception of him. Nay, so far are we from a full comprehension, that we can discern nothing at all of him, but by his own light; those discoveries he hath been pleas’d to make of himself.

2. THOSE have been of several sorts; The first was by infusion in mans creation, when God interwove into mans very constitution and being the notions and apprehensions of a Deity: and at the same instant when he breath’d into him a living soul, imprest on it that native religion, which taught him to know and reverence his Creator, which we may call the instinct of humanity. Nor were those principles dark and confus’d, but clear and evident, proportionable to the ends they were design’d to, which were not only to contemplate the nature, but to do the will of God; practice being even in the state of innocence preferable before an unactive speculation.