Had you or I been born at the Bay of
Soldania, possibly our thoughts and notions had not exceeded those
brutish ones of the Hottentots that inhabit there. And had the
Virginia king Apochancana been educated in England, he had been
perhaps as knowing a divine, and as good a mathematician as any in it;
the difference between him and a more improved Englishman lying barely
in this, that the exercise of his faculties was bounded within the
ways, modes, and notions of his own country, and never directed to any
other or further inquiries. And if he had not any idea of a God, it
was only because he pursued not those thoughts that would have led him
to it.
13. Ideas of God various in different men. I grant that if there
were any ideas to be found imprinted on the minds of men, we have
reason to expect it should be the notion of his Maker, as a mark God
set on his own workmanship, to mind man of his dependence and duty;
and that herein should appear the first instances of human
knowledge. But how late is it before any such notion is discoverable
in children? And when we find it there, how much more does it resemble
the opinion and notion of the teacher, than represent the true God? He
that shall observe in children the progress whereby their minds attain
the knowledge they have, will think that the objects they do first and
most familiarly converse with are those that make the first
impressions on their understandings; nor will he find the least
footsteps of any other.
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