they be more temperate in this life, give many good moral
precepts, honest, upright, and sober in their conversation, yet in effect
they are the same (accounting no man a good scholar that is not an
atheist), _nimis altum sapiunt_, too much learning makes them mad. Whilst
they attribute all to natural causes, [6646]contingence of all things, as
Melancthon calls them, _Pertinax hominum genus_, a peevish generation of
men, that misled by philosophy, and the devil's suggestion, their own
innate blindness, deny God as much as the rest, hold all religion a
fiction, opposite to reason and philosophy, though for fear of magistrates,
saith [6647]Vaninus, they durst not publicly profess it. Ask one of them of
what religion he is, he scoffingly replies, a philosopher, a Galenist, an
[6648]Averroist, and with Rabelais a physician, a peripatetic, an epicure.
In spiritual things God must demonstrate all to sense, leave a pawn with
them, or else seek some other creditor. They will acknowledge Nature and
Fortune, yet not God: though in effect they grant both: for as Scaliger
defines, Nature signifies God's ordinary power; or, as Calvin writes,
Nature is God's order, and so things extraordinary may be called unnatural:
Fortune his unrevealed will; and so we call things changeable that are
beside reason and expectation. To this purpose [6649]Minutius in _Octavio_,
and [6650] Seneca well discourseth with them, _lib. 4. de beneficiis, cap.
5, 6, 7._ "They do not understand what they say; what is Nature but God?
call him what thou wilt, Nature, Jupiter, he hath as many names as offices:
it comes all to one pass, God is the fountain of all, the first Giver and
Preserver, from whom all things depend," [6651]_a quo, et per quem omnia,
Nam quocunque vides Deus est, quocunque moveris_, "God is all in all, God
is everywhere, in every place." And yet this Seneca, that could confute and
blame them, is all out as much to be blamed and confuted himself, as mad
himself; for he holds _fatum Stoicum_, that inevitable Necessity in the
other extreme, as those Chaldean astrologers of old did, against whom the
prophet Jeremiah so often thunders, and those heathen mathematicians,
Nigidius Figulus, magicians, and Priscilianists, whom St. Austin so eagerly
confutes, those Arabian questionaries, Novem Judices, Albumazer, Dorotheus,
&c., and our countryman [6652]Estuidus, that take upon them to define out
of those great conjunction of stars, with Ptolomeus, the pe