Two choice and useful treatises the one, Lux orientalis, or, An enquiry into the opinion of the Eastern sages concerning the praeexistence of souls, being a key to unlock the grand mysteries of providence in relation to mans sin and misery : the other, A discourse of truth / by the late Reverend Dr. Rust ... ; with annotations on them both.

SECT. XVIII.

The second part of the Discourse, which briefly treats of Truth in the Subject; what it is: What in God, and what in the Creature; And that in both it is, A Representation or Con∣ception in the mind, conformable to the un∣changeable Natures and mutual Respects of things.

THus have we spoken concerning the truth of things, or Truth in the Ob∣ject. It follows that we speak

Concerning Truth in the power, or fa∣culty, which we called Truth in the Subject; which we shall dispatch in a few words.

* Truth in the power, or faculty is nothing else but a conformity of its con∣ceptions or Idea's unto the natures and relations of things, which in God we may call an actual, steady, immoveable, eternal Omniformity, as Plotinus calls the Divine In∣tellect, 〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉, which you have largely de∣scribed by him. And this the Platonists truly call the Intellectual World, for here are the natures of all things pure, and unmix'd, purged from all those dregs, re∣fined from all that dross and alloy which cleave unto them in their particular in∣stances. All inferiour and sublunary things,

not excluding Man himself, have their ex∣crescences, and defects; Exorbitances, or privations are moulded up in their very frames and constitutions. There is some∣what extraneous, heterogeneous, and pre∣ternatural in all things here below, as they exist amongst us; but in that other world, like the most purely fined gold, they shine in their native and proper glory. Here is the first goodness, the benign Parent of the whole Creation, with his numerous off-spring, the infinite throng of Created Beings: Here is the fountain of Eternal Love, with all its streams, and rivulets: Here is the Sun of uncreated glory, surroun∣ded with all his rayes, and beams: Here are the eternal, and indispensible Laws of right and Justice, the immediate and inde∣monstrable principles of Truth, and good∣ness: Here are steady and immoveable rules, for all cases and actions, however circum∣stantiated, from which the Will of God, though never so absolute, and independent, from everlasting to everlasting, shall never depart one Tittle. * Now all that Truth that is in any Created Being, is by parti∣cipation and derivation from this first un∣derstanding, and fountain of intellectual light. And that truth in the power of faculty is nothing but the conformity or its conceptions, or Ideas with the natures

and relations of things, is clear and evi∣dent in it self, and necessarily follows from what hath been formerly proved concern∣ing the truth of things themselves, * an∣tecedently to any understanding, or will; * for things are what they are, and cannot be otherwise without a contradiction, and their mutual respects and dependences E∣ternal and unchangeable, as hath been al∣ready shew'd: so that the conceptions and Ideas of these natures and their relations, can be only so far true * as they conform and agree with the things themselves, and the harmony which they have one to an∣other.