Cousin-germans to these men are many of our great philosophers and deists, who, though they be more temperate in this life, give many good moral precepts, honest, upright, and sober in their conversation, yet in effect they are the same (accounting no man a good scholar that is not an atheist), nimis altum sapiunt, too much learning makes them mad.  Whilst they attribute all to natural causes, [6646]contingence of all things, as Melancthon calls them, Pertinax hominum genus, a peevish generation of men, that misled by philosophy, and the devil’s suggestion, their own innate blindness, deny God as much as the rest, hold all religion a fiction, opposite to reason and philosophy, though for fear of magistrates, saith [6647]Vaninus, they durst not publicly profess it.  Ask one of them of what religion he is, he scoffingly replies, a philosopher, a Galenist, an [6648]Averroist, and with Rabelais a physician, a peripatetic, an epicure.  In spiritual things God must demonstrate all to sense, leave a pawn with them, or else seek some other creditor.  They will acknowledge Nature and Fortune, yet not God:  though in effect they grant both:  for as Scaliger defines, Nature signifies God’s ordinary power; or, as Calvin writes, Nature is God’s order, and so things extraordinary may be called unnatural:  Fortune his unrevealed will; and so we call things changeable that are beside reason and expectation.  To this purpose [6649]Minutius in Octavio, and [6650] Seneca well discourseth with them, lib. 4. de beneficiis, cap. 5, 6, 7. “They do not understand what they say; what is Nature but God? call him what thou wilt, Nature, Jupiter, he hath as many names as offices:  it comes all to one pass, God is the fountain of all, the first Giver and Preserver, from whom all things depend,” [6651]_a quo, et per quem omnia, Nam quocunque vides Deus est, quocunque moveris_, “God is all in all, God is everywhere, in every place.”  And yet this Seneca, that could confute and blame them, is all out as much to be blamed and confuted himself, as mad himself; for he holds fatum Stoicum, that inevitable Necessity in the other extreme, as those Chaldean astrologers of old did, against whom the prophet Jeremiah so often thunders, and those heathen mathematicians, Nigidius Figulus, magicians, and Priscilianists, whom St. Austin so eagerly confutes, those Arabian questionaries, Novem Judices, Albumazer, Dorotheus, &c., and our countryman [6652]Estuidus, that take upon them to define out of those great conjunction of stars, with Ptolomeus, the periods of kingdoms, or religions, of all future accidents, wars, plagues, schisms, heresies, and what not? all from stars, and such things, saith Maginus, Quae sibi et intelligentiis suis reservavit Deus, which God hath reserved to himself and his angels, they will take upon them to foretell, as if stars were immediate, inevitable causes of all future accidents.  Caesar Vaninus, in his book de admirandis naturae