It is easy to take notice how their thoughts
enlarge themselves, only as they come to be acquainted with a
greater variety of sensible objects; to retain the ideas of them in
their memories; and to get the skill to compound and enlarge them, and
several ways put them together. How, by these means, they come to
frame in their minds an idea men have of a Deity, I shall hereafter
show.
14. Contrary and inconsistent ideas of God under the same name.
Can it be thought that the ideas men have of God are the characters
and marks of himself, engraven in their minds by his own finger,
when we see that, in the same country, under one and the same name,
men have far different, nay often contrary and inconsistent ideas
and conceptions of him? Their agreeing in a name, or sound, will
scarce prove an innate notion of him.
15. Gross ideas of God. What true or tolerable notion of a Deity
could they have, who acknowledged and worshipped hundreds? Every deity
that they owned above one was an infallible evidence of their
ignorance of Him, and a proof that they had no true notion of God,
where unity, infinity, and eternity were excluded. To which, if we add
their gross conceptions of corporeity, expressed in their images and
representations of their deities; the amours, marriages,
copulations, lusts, quarrels, and other mean qualities attributed by
them to their gods; we shall have little reason to think that the
heathen world, i.
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