Chap. y. PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOVERIES. 572

overstrain their faculties, and fall into foHy or madness ; con-tributing, as much as lies in them, to bring true piety and de-votion into contempt.

3. Neither are they to be commended, who, under the pre-tence of magnifying the essential power of the supreme cause,make truth and falssiood entirely to depend on his will; as weobserved of Des Cartes , Book I. Chap. 4. Such tenets havea direct tendency to introduce the absurd opinion, that intel-lectual faculties may be so made, as clearly and distinctly toperceive that to be true, which is really false. They judgemuch better, who, without scruple, measure the divine omni-potence itself, and the possibility of things, by their own clearideas concerning them ; affirming that God himself cannotmake contradictions to be true at the fame time; and representthe certain part of our knowledge, in some degree, as the know-ledge and wisdom of the Deity imparted to us, in the views ofnature which he has laid before us.

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4. The sublimity of the subject is apt to exalt and transportthe minds of men, beyond what their faculties can always beamtherefore, to support them, allegorical and enigmatical repre-sentations have been invented, which in process of time,haveproduced the greatest abuses. When metaphorical figures ^andnames came to be considered as realities, in place of the trueGod, false deities were substituted without number, and, underthe pretence of devotion, a worssiip was paid to the most de-testable characters, that tended to extinguish the notions of trueworth and virtue amongst men.

5. As there are no enquiries of a more arduous nature thanthose that relate to the Deity, or. of near so great importanceto intellectual beings, that discern betwixt truth and falsehood,

C c c 2 betwixt