Book I.

Alas ! too late, indeed they understood, by the unwonted novelty and shamefulness of their concupiscence, why God had so lovingly forbade the eating of the apple. Indeed, the truth being agreeable unto itself, doth attest the filthiness of impure Adamical generation ; for the impurity which had received a contagion from any natural issues whatsoever of menstrues or seed, and that by its touching alone is reckoned equal to that which should by degrees creep on a person from a co-touching of dead carcases, and to be expiated by the same ceremonious rite that the text might agreeably denote, that death began by the concupiscence of the flesh lying hid in the fruit forbidden ; therefore, also, the one only healing medicine, of so great an impurity contracted by touching, consisted in washing : under the similitude or likeness thereof, faith and hope, which in baptism are poured on us, are strengthened.
For as soon as Adam knew that by fratricide the first born of mortals, whom he had begotten in the concupiscence of the flesh, had killed his brother, guiltless and righteous as he was ; and foreseeing the wicked errors of mortals that would come from thence, he likewise perceived his own miseries in himself ; certainly knowing that all these calamities had happened unto him from the sin of concupiscence drawn from the apple, which were unavoidably issuing on his posterity, he thought within himself that the most discreet thing he could do, was hereafter wholly to abstain from his wife, whom he had violated ; and therefore he mourned, in chastity and sorrow, a full hundred years ; hoping that by the merit of that abstinence, and by an opposition to the concupiscence of the flesh, he should not only appease the wrath of the incensed Deity, but that he should again return into the former splendour and majesty of his primitive innocence and purity. But the repentance of one age being finished, it is most probable the mystery of Christ’s incarnation was revealed unto him ; neither that man ever could hope to return to the bright- ness of his ancient purity by his own strength, and much less that himself could reprieve his posterity from death ; and that, therefore, marriage was well pleasing, and was after the fall indulged unto him by God because he had determined thus to satisfy his justice at the fulness of times, which should,
to
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to the glory of his own name , and the confusion of Satan, elevate mankind to a more sublime and eminent state of blessedness.
From that time Adam began to know his wife, viz. after he was an hundred years old, and to fill the earth, by multiplying according to the blessing once given him, and the law enjoined him — “ Be fruitful and multiply.”— Yet so, nevertheless, that although matrimony, by reason of the great want of propa- gation, and otherwise impossible coursary succession of the primitive divine generation, be admitted as a sacrament of the faithful.
If, therefore, both our first parents, after the eating of the apple, were ashamed, they covered only their privy parts ; therefore that shame doth pre- suppose, and accuse of something committed against justice — against the intent of the Creator — and against their own proper nature : by consequence, there- fore, that Adamical generation was not of the primitive constitution of their nature, as neither of the original intent of the Creator ; therefore, when God foretels that the earth shall bring forth thistles and thorns, and that man shall gain his bread by the sweat of his brow, they were not execrations, but admo- nitions, that those sort of things should be obvious in the earth : and, because that beasts should bring forth in pain — should plow in sweat — should eat their food with labour and fear, that the earth should likewise bring forth very many things besides the intention of the husbandman ; therefore, also, that they ought to be nourished like unto brute beasts, who had begun to generate after the manner of brute beasts.
It is likewise told Eve, after her transgression, that she should bring forth in pain. Therefore, what hath the pain of bringing forth common with the eating of the apple, unless the apple had operated about the concupiscence of the flesh, and by consequence stirred up copulation ; and the Creator had intended to dissuade it, by dehorting from the eating of the apple. For, why are the genital members of women punished with pains at child-birth, if the eye in seeing the apple, the hands in cropping it, and the mouth in eating of it, have offended ? for was it not sufficient to have chastised the life with death, and the health with very many diseases ? — Moreover, why is the womb afflicted, C 2 as
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as in brutes, with the manner of bringing forth, if the conception granted to beasts were not forbidden to man ?
After their fall, therefore, their eyes were opened , and they were ashamed : it denotes and signifies that, from the filthiness of concupiscence, they knew that the copulation of the flesh was forbidden in the most pure innocent chas- tity of nature, and that they were overspread with shame, when, their eyes being opened, their understandings saw that they had committed filthiness most detestable.
But on the serpent and evil spirit alone was the top and summit of the whole curse, even as the privilege of the woman, and the mysterious prerogative of the blessing upon the earth, viz. That the woman’s seed should bruise the head of the serpent. So that it is not possible that to bring forth in pain should be a curse ; for truly with the same voice of the Lord is pronounced the blessing of the woman, and victory over the infernal spirit.
Therefore Adam was created in the possession of immortality. God intended not that man should be an animal or sensitive creature, nor be born, conceived, or live as an animal ; for of truth he was created unto a living soul, , and that after the true image of God ; therefore he as far differed from the nature of an animal, as an immortal being from a mortal, and as a God-like creature from a brute.
I am sorry that our school-men, many of them, wish, by their arguments of noise and pride, to draw man into a total animal nature (nothing more), drawing (by their logic) the essence of a man essentially from an animal nature : because, although man afterwards procured death to himself and posterity, and therefore may seem to be made nearer the nature of animal creatures, yet it stood not in his power to be able to pervert the species of the divine image : even so as neither was the evil spirit, of a spirit, made an animal, although he became nearer unto the nature of an animal, by hatred and brutal vices. Therefore man remained in his own species wherein he was created ; for as often as man is called an animal , or sensitive living creature, and is in earnest thought to be such, so many times the text is falsified which says, “ But the serpent was more crafty than all the living creatures of the
earth,
Chap. I. NATURAL MAGIC. 21
earth, which the Lord God had made ; ” because he speaks of the natural craft and subtilty of that living and creeping animal. Again, if the position be true, man was not directed into the propagation of seed or flesh , neither did he aspire unto a sensitive soul ; and therefore the sensible soul of Adamical generation is not of a brutal species, because it was raised up by a seed which wanted the original ordination and limitation of any species ; and so that, as the sensitive soul in man arose, besides the intent of the Creator and Nature ; so it is of no brutal species, neither can it subsist, unless it be continually tied to the mind, from whence it is supported in its life.
Wherefore, while man is of no brutal species, he cannot be an animal in respect to his mind, and much less in respect to his soul, which is of no species.
Therefore know, that neither evil spirit, nor whole nature also, can, by any means or any way whatever, change the essence given unto man from his Creator, and by his foreknowledge determined that he should remain con- tinually such as he was created, although he, in the mean time, hath clothed himself with strange properties, as natural unto him from the vice of his own will ; for as it is an absurdity to reckon man glorified among animals, because he is not without sense or feeling, so to be sensitive does not shew the inseparable essence of an animal.
Seeing, therefore, our first parents had both of them now felt the effect throughout their whole bodies of the eating of the apple, or concupiscence of the flesh in their members in Paradise, it shamed them ; because their mem- bers, which, before, they could rule at their pleasure, were afterwards moved by a proper incentive to lust.
Therefore, on the same day, not only mortality entered through concu- piscence, but it presently after entered into a conceived generation ; for which they were, the same day, also driven out of Paradise : hence followed an adulterous, lascivious, beast-like, devilish generation, and plainly incapable of entering into the kingdom of God, diametrically opposite to God’s ordination ; by which means death, and the threatened punishment, corruption , became inseparable to man and his posterity.
Therefore,
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