It was a fit workhouse for
sprightly, vivid faculties to exercise and exert themselves in; a
fit tabernacle for an immortal soul, not only to dwell in, but to
contemplate upon; where it might see the world without travel, it
being a lesser scheme of the creation, nature contracted a little
cosmography or map of the universe. Neither was the body then subject
to distempers, to die by piecemeal, and languish under coughs,
catarrhs, or consumptions. Adam knew no disease so long as temperance
from the forbidden fruit secured him. Nature was his physician, and
innocence and abstinence would have kept him healthful to immortality.
The two great perfections that both adorn and exercise man's
understanding, are philosophy and religion: for the first of these,
take it even among the professors of it where it most flourished, and
we shall find the very first notions of common-sense debauched by
them. For there have been such as have asserted, "that there is no
such thing in the world as motion: that contradictions may be true."
There has not been wanting one that has denied snow to be white.
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