14. The bare testimony of divine revelation is the highest certainty.
Besides those we have hitherto mentioned,
there is one sort of propositions that challenge the highest degree of our assent, upon bare testimony, whether the
thing proposed agree or disagree with common experience, and the ordinary course of things, or no. The reason
whereof is, because the testimony is of such an one as cannot deceive nor be deceived: and that is of God himself.
This carries with it an assurance beyond doubt, evidence beyond exception. This is called by a peculiar name,
revelation, and our assent to it, faith, which as absolutely determines our minds, and as perfectly excludes all
wavering, as our knowledge itself; and we may as well doubt of our own being, as we can whether any revelation
from God be true. So that faith is a settled and sure principle of assent and assurance, and leaves no manner of
room for doubt or hesitation. Only we must be sure that it be a divine revelation, and that we understand it right:
else we shall expose ourselves to all the extravagancy of enthusiasm, and all the error of wrong principles, if we
have faith and assurance in what is not divine revelation. And therefore, in those cases, our assent can be
rationally no higher than the evidence of its being a revelation, and that this is the meaning of the expressions it is
delivered in. If the evidence of its being a revelation, or that this is its true sense, be only on probable proofs, our
assent can reach no higher than an assurance or diffidence, arising from the more or less apparent probability of
the proofs. But of faith, and the precedency it ought to have before other arguments of persuasion, I shall speak
more hereafter; where I treat of it as it is ordinarily placed, in contradistinction to reason; though in truth it be
nothing else but an assent founded on the highest reason.
