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| Scripture Alone Offers Clear Knowledge on the Questions We Have Been Controverting.
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Chapter
XXVI.—Scripture Alone Offers Clear Knowledge on the Questions We
Have Been Controverting.
Now there is no end to the uncertainty and irregularity of human opinion, until we
come to the limits which God has prescribed. I shall at last retire
within our own lines and firmly hold my ground there, for the purpose
of proving to the Christian (the soundness of) my answers to the
Philosophers and the Physicians. Brother (in Christ), on your own
foundation1686
build up your
faith. Consider the wombs of the most sainted women instinct with the
life within them, and their babes which not only breathed therein, but
were even endowed with prophetic intuition. See how the bowels of
Rebecca are disquieted,1687
though her
child-bearing is as yet remote, and there is no impulse of (vital) air.
Behold, a twin offspring chafes within the mother’s womb,
although she has no sign as yet of the twofold nation. Possibly we
might have regarded as a prodigy the contention of this infant progeny,
which struggled before it lived, which had animosity previous to
animation, if it had simply disturbed the mother by its restlessness
within her. But when her womb opens, and the number of her
offspring is seen, and their presaged condition known, we have
presented to us a proof not merely of the (separate) souls of the
infants, but of their hostile struggles too. He who was the first to be
born was threatened with detention by him who was anticipated in birth,
who was not yet fully brought forth, but whose hand only had been born.
Now if he actually imbibed life, and received his soul, in Platonic
style, at his first breath; or else, after the Stoic rule, had the
earliest taste of animation on touching the frosty air; what was the
other about, who was so eagerly looked for, who was still detained
within the womb, and was trying to detain (the other) outside? I
suppose he had not yet breathed when he seized his brother’s
heel;1688
and was still warm with his mother’s
warmth, when he so strongly wished to be the first to quit the womb.
What an infant! so emulous, so strong, and already so contentious; and
all this, I suppose, because even now full of life! Consider,
again, those extraordinary conceptions, which were more wonderful
still, of the barren woman and the virgin: these women would only be
able to produce imperfect offspring against the course of nature, from
the very fact that one of them was too old to bear seed, and the other
was pure from the contact of man. If there was to be bearing at all in
the case, it was only fitting that they should be born without a soul,
(as the philosopher would say,) who had been irregularly conceived.
However, even these have life, each of them in his mother’s womb.
Elizabeth exults with joy, (for) John had leaped in her womb;1689
Mary magnifies the Lord, (for) Christ had
instigated her within.1690
The mothers
recognise each their own offspring, being moreover each recognised by
their infants, which were therefore of course alive, and were not souls
merely, but spirits also. Accordingly you read the word of God which
was spoken to Jeremiah, “Before I formed thee in the belly, I
knew thee.”1691
Since God forms us
in the womb, He also breathes upon us, as He also did at the first
creation, when “the Lord God formed man, and breathed into him
the breath of life.”1692
Nor could God have
known man in the womb, except in his entire nature: “And before
thou camest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee.”1693
Well, was it then a dead body at that early
stage? Certainly not. For “God is not the God of the dead, but of
the living.”E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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