his philosophy aground, and the discovery not to answer his search, he turns it all to a pious use, recognises infinite power, and applies it to the ecstacies and raptures of his soul, which were always employed in the charm of exhalted praise.
Thus in another place we find him dissecting the womb of his mother, and deep in the study of anatomy; but having, as it may be well supposed, no help from John Remelini, or of the learned Riolanus, and other anatomists, famous for the most exquisite discovery of human body, and all the vessels of life, with their proper dimensions and use, all David could say to the matter was, good man, to look up to heaven, and admire what he could not understand, Psal. — “I was fearfully and wonderfully made,” &c.
This is very good, and well becomes a pulpit; but what is all this to a philosopher? It is not enough for him to know that God has made the heavens, the moon, and the stars, but must inform himself where he has placed them, and why there; and what their business, what their influences, their functions, and the end of their being. It is not enough for an anatomist to know that he is fearfully and wonderfully made in the lowermost part of the earth, but he must see those lowermost parts; search into the method nature proceeds upon in the performing the office appointed, must search the steps she takes, the tools she works by; and, in short, know all that the God of nature has permitted to be capable of demonstration.
And it seems a just authority for our search, that some things are so placed in nature by a chain of causes and effects, that upon a diligent search we may find out what we look for: to search after what God has in his sovereignty thought fit to conceal, may be criminal, and doubtless is so; and the fruitlessness of the inquiry is generally part of the punishment to a vain curiosity: but to search after what our maker has not hid, only covered with a thin veil of natural obscurity, and which upon our search is plain to be read, seems to be justified by the very nature of the thing, and the possibility of the demonstration is an argument to prove the lawfulness of the inquiry.
The design of this digression, is, in short, that as where nature is plain to be searched into, and demonstration easy, the philosopher is allowed to seek for it; so where God has, as it were, laid his hand upon any place, and nature presents us with an universal blank, we are therein led as naturally to recognise the infinite wisdom and power of the God of nature, as David was in the texts before quoted.
And this is the case here; the winds are some of those inscrutables of nature, in which human search has not yet been able to arrive at any demonstration.
Mr. Bohun's Opinion.
“The winds,” says the learned Mr. Bohun, “are generated in the intermediate space between the earth and the clouds, either by rarefaction or repletion, and sometimes haply by pressure of clouds, elastical virtue of the air, &c., from the earth or seas, as by submarine or subterraneal eruption or decension or refelition from the middle region.”
All this, though no man is more capable of the inquiry than this gentleman, yet to the demonstration of the thing, amounts to no more than what we had before, and still leaves it as abstruse and cloudy to our understanding as ever. Not but that I think myself bound in duty to science in general, to pay a just debt to the excellency of philosophical study, in which I am a mere junior, and hardly any more than an admirer; and therefore I cannot but allow that the demonstrations made of rarefaction and dilation are extraordinary; and that by fire and water wind may be raised in a close room, as the Lord Verulam made experiment in the case of his feathers.
But that, therefore, all the causes of wind are from the influences of the sun upon vaporous matter first exhaled, which being dilated are obliged to possess themselves of more space than before, and consequently make the particles fly before them; this does not seem to be a sufficient demonstration of wind: for this, to my weak apprehension, would rather make a blow like gunpowder than a rushing forward; at best this is indeed a probable conjecture, but admits not of demonstration equal to other phenomena in nature.
And this is all I am upon, viz., that this case has not equal proofs of the natural causes of it that we meet with in other cases: the Scripture seems to confirm this, when it says, in one place, “He holds the wind in his hand;” as if he should mean, other things are left to the common discoveries of natural inquiry, but this is a thing he holds in his own hand, and has concealed it from the search of the most diligent and piercing understanding: this is farther confirmed by the words of our Saviour, “The wind blows where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but knowest not whence it Cometh”; it is plainly expressed to signify that the causes of the wind are not equally discovered by natural inquiry as the rest of nature is.
If I would carry this matter on, and travel into the seas, and mountains of America, where the mansones, the trade-winds, the sea-breezes and such winds as we have little knowledge of, are more common; it would yet more plainly appear ‘that we hear the sound, but know not from whence they come.’
Nor is the cause of their motion parallel to the surface of the earth, a less mystery than their real original, or the difficulty of their generation: and though some people have been forward to prove the gravity of the particles must cause the motion to be oblique; it is plain it must be very little so, or else navigation would be impracticable, and in extraordinary cases where the pressure above is perpendicular, it has been fatal to ships, houses, &c., and would have terrible effects in the world, if it should more frequently be so.
From this I draw only this conclusion, that the winds are a part of the works of God by nature, in which he has been pleased to communicate less of demonstration to us than in other cases; that the particulars more directly lead us to speculations, and refer us to infinite power more than the other parts of nature does.
That the wind is more expressive and adapted to his immediate power, as he is pleased to exert it in extraordinary cases in the world.
That it is more frequently made use of as the executioner of his judgments in the world, and extraordinary events are brought to pass by it.
From these three heads we are brought down directly to speak of the particular storm before us; viz., the greatest, the longest in duration, the widest in extent, of all the tempests and storms that history gives any account of since the beginning of time.
Storms recorded in scripture.
In the farther conduct of the story, it will not be foreign to the purpose, nor unprofitable to the reader, to review the histories of ancient time and remote countries, and examine in what manner God has been pleased to execute his judgments by storms and tempests; what kind of things they, have been, and what the consequences of them; and then bring down the parallel to the dreadful instance before us.
We read in the Scripture of two great storms; one past and the other to come. Whether the last be not allegorical rather than prophetical, I shall not busy myself to determine.
The first was when God caused a strong wind to blow upon the face of the deluged world; to put a stop to the flood, and reduce the waters to their proper channel.
I wish our naturalists would explain that wind to us, and tell us which way it blew, or how it is possible that any direct wind could cause the waters to ebb; for to me it seems, that the deluge being universal, that wind which blew the waters from one part must blow them up in another.
Whether it was not some perpendicular gusts that might by their force separate the water and the earth, and cause the water driven from off the land to subside by its own pressure.
I shall dive no farther into that mysterious deluge, which has some things in it which recommend the story rather to our faith than demonstration.
The
