g of that whole book. But from the
reading of it (for I read it through to a syllable) I went away with
many and great dissatisfactions. Sundry things in that book I took
notice of, which brought me into a greater dislike of his opinion than
I had before: but especially these three: First, that he bottometh
very much of his discourse upon a very erroneous principle, which yet
he seemeth to be so deeply in love with, that he hath repeated it, I
verily believe, some hundreds of times in that work: to wit this;
That whatsoever is first in the intention is last in execution, and
_e converso._ Which is an error of that magnitude, that I cannot
but wonder how a person of such acuteness and subtilty of wit could
possibly be deceived with it. All logicians know there is no such
universal maxim as he buildeth upon. The true maxim is but this:
_Finis qui primus est in intentione, est ultimus in executione_. In
the order of final causes, and the means used for that end, the rule
holdeth perpetually: but in other things it holdeth not at all, or
but by chance; or not as a rule, and necessarily. Secondly, that,
foreseeing such consequences would naturally and necessarily follow
from his opinion, as would offend the ear of a sober Christian at the
very first sound, he would yet rather choose not only to admit the
said harsh consequences, but professedly endeavour also to maintain
them, and plead hard for them in large digressions, than to recede
in the least from that opinion which he had undertaken to defend.
Thirdly, that seeing (out of the sharpness of his wit) a necessity of
forsaking the ordinary sublapsarian way, and the supralapsarian too,
as it had diversely been declared by all that had gone before him,
(for the shunning of those rocks, which either of those ways must
unavoidably cast him upon,) he was forced to seek out an untrodden
path, and to frame out of his own brain a new way, (like a spider's
web wrought out of her own bowels,) hoping by that device to salve all
absurdities, that could be objected; to wit, by making the glory of
God (as it is indeed the chiefest, so) the only end of all other his
decrees, and then making all those other decrees to be but one
entire co-ordinate medium conducing to that one end, and so the whole
subordinate to it, but not any one part thereof subordinate to any
other of the same. Dr. Twiss should have done well to have been more
sparing in imputing the _studium partlum_ to others, where