own invention, that I then began rather to suspect him for a mountebank, than to hope I should find satisfaction from his performances.  I found much confidence and great pomp of words, but little matter as to the main knot of the business, other than had been said an hundred times before, to wit, of the co-existence of all things past, present, and future [Latin] in mente divina realiter ab aeterno, which is the subject of his whole third book:  only he interpreteth the word realiter so as to import not only praesentialitatem objectivam, (as others held before him,) but propriam et actualem existentiam; yet confesseth it is hard to make this intelligible.  In his fourth book he endeavours to declare a twofold manner of God’s working ad extra; the one sub ordine praedestinationis, of which eternity is the proper measure:  the other sub ordine gratia, whereof time is the measure; and that God worketh fortiter in the one (though not irresistibiliter) as well suamter in the other, wherein the free will hath his proper working also.  From the result of his whole performance I was confirmed in this opinion; that we must acknowledge the work of both grace and free will in the conversion of a sinner; and so likewise in all other events, the consistency of the infallibility of God’s foreknowledge at least (though not with any absolute, but conditional predestination) with the liberty of man’s will, and the contingency of inferior causes and effects.  These, I say, we must acknowledge for the [Greek:  hoti] but for the [Greek:  to pos], I thought it bootless for me to think of comprehending it.  And so came the two Acta Synodalia Dordrechtana to stand in my study, only to fill up a room to this day.”

[Sidenote:  “Vindiciae Gratiae” discussed]

And yet see the restless curiosity of man.  Not many years after, to wit, A.D. 1632, out cometh Dr. Twiss’s[3] Vindiciae Gratiae, a large volume, purposely writ against Arminius:  and then, notwithstanding my former resolution, I must need be meddling again.  The respect I bore to his person and great learning, and the acquaintance I had had with him in Oxford, drew me to the reading of that whole book.  But from the reading of it (for I read it through to a syllable) I went away with many and great dissatisfactions.  Sundry things in that book I took notice of, which brought me into a greater dislike of his opinion than I had before:  but especially these three:  First, that he bottometh very much of his discourse upon a very erroneous principle, which yet he seemeth to be so deeply in love with, that he hath repeated it, I verily believe, some hundreds of times in that work:  to wit this; That whatsoever is first in the intention is last in execution, and e converso. Which is an error of that magnitude, that I cannot but wonder how a person of such acuteness and subtilty of wit could possibly be deceived with