Newsgroup: it.scienza.ambiente
Titolo: Re: Making unbiblical predictions is heretical (WAS: @ MAKING  PREDICTIONS IS BIBLICAL ! @)

pride. He wanted to make himself his own centre and
independent of my help. He withdrew himself from my rule; and, on his making
himself equal to me by the desire of finding his happiness in himself, I
abandoned him to himself. And setting in revolt the creatures that were
subject to him, I made them his enemies; so that man is now become like the
brutes and so estranged from me that there scarce remains to him a dim
vision of his Author. So far has all his knowledge been extinguished or
disturbed! The senses, independent of reason, and often the masters of
reason, have led him into pursuit of pleasure. All creatures either torment
or tempt him, and domineer over him, either subduing him by their strength,
or fascinating him by their charms, a tyranny more awful and more imperious.
"Such is the state in which men now are. There remains to them some feeble
instinct of the happiness of their former state; and they are plunged in the
evils of their blindness and their lust, which have become their second
nature. "From this principle which I disclose to you, you can recognize the
cause of those contradictions which have astonished all men and have divided
them into parties holding so different views. Observe, now, all the feelings
of greatness and glory which the experience of so many woes cannot stifle,
and see if the cause of them must not be in another nature.
For Port-Royal to-morrow (Prosopopaea).--"It is in vain, O men, that you
seek within yourselves the remedy for your ills. All your light can only
reach the knowledge that not in yourselves will you find truth or good. The
philosophers have promised you that, and you have been unable to do it. They
neither know what is your true good, nor what is

they seem to themselves
to be very senseless, when indeed most sensible. There have been some
instances of persons who have had as great a sense of their danger and
misery as their natures could well subsist under, so that a little more
would probably have destroyed them; and yet they have expressed
themselves much amazed at their own insensibility and sottishness at
such an extraordinary time.
Persons are sometimes brought to the borders of despair, and it looks as
black as midnight to them a little before the day dawns in their souls.
Some few instances there have been, of persons who have had such a sense
of God's wrath for sin, that they have been overborne; and made to cry
out under an astonishing sense of their guilt, wondering that God
suffers such guilty wretches to live upon earth, and that he doth not
immediately send them to hell. Sometimes their guilt doth so stare them
in the face, that they are in exceeding terror for fear that God will
instantly do it; but more commonly their distresses under legal
awakenings have not been to such a degree. In some, these terrors do not
seem to be so sharp, when near comfort, as before; their convictions
have not seemed to work so much that way, but to be led further down
into their own hearts, to a further sense of their own universal
depravity and deadness in sin.
The corruption of the heart has discovered itself in various exercises,
in the time of legal convictions; sometimes it appears in a great
struggle, like somethi