19.  Thence we see that the dogma of real and substantial participation can be supported (without resorting to the strange opinions of some Schoolmen) by a properly understood analogy between immediate operation and presence.  Many philosophers have deemed that, even in the order of Nature, a body may operate from a distance immediately on many remote bodies at the same time.  So do they believe, all the more, that nothing can prevent divine Omnipotence from causing one body to be present in many bodies together, since the transition from immediate operation to presence is but slight, the one perhaps depending upon the other.  It is true that modern philosophers for some time now have denied the immediate natural operation of one body upon another remote from it, and I confess that I am of their opinion.  Meanwhile remote operation has just been revived in England by the admirable Mr. Newton, who maintains that it is the nature of bodies to be attracted and gravitate one towards another, in proportion[86] to the mass of each one, and the rays of attraction it receives.  Accordingly the famous Mr. Locke, in his answer to Bishop Stillingfleet, declares that having seen Mr. Newton’s book he retracts what he himself said, following the opinion of the moderns, in his Essay concerning Human Understanding, to wit, that a body cannot operate immediately upon another except by touching it upon its surface and driving it by its motion.  He acknowledges that God can put properties into matter which cause it to operate from a distance.  Thus the theologians of the Augsburg Confession claim that God may ordain not only that a body operate immediately on divers bodies remote from one another, but that it even exist in their neighbourhood and be received by them in a way with which distances of place and dimensions of space have nothing to do.  Although this effect transcends the forces of Nature, they do not think it possible to show that it surpasses the power of the Author of Nature.  For him it is easy to annul the laws that he has given or to dispense with them as seems good to him, in the same way as he was able to make iron float upon water and to stay the operation of fire upon the human body.

20.  I found in comparing the Rationale Theologicum of Nicolaus Vedelius with the refutation by Johann Musaeus that these two authors, of whom one died while a Professor at Franecker after having taught at Geneva and the other finally became the foremost theologian at Jena, are more or less in agreement on the principal rules for the use of reason, but that it is in the application of these rules they disagree.  For they both agree that revelation cannot be contrary to the truths whose necessity is called by philosophers ‘logical’ or ‘metaphysical’, that is to say, whose opposite implies contradiction.  They both admit also that revelation will be able to combat maxims whose necessity is called ‘physical’ and is founded only upon the laws that the will of