4. Secondly, Traditional revelation may make us know propositions knowable also by reason, but not with the same
certainty that reason doth.
Secondly, I say that the same truths may be discovered, and conveyed down from
revelation, which are discoverable to us by reason, and by those ideas we naturally may have. So God might, by
revelation, discover the truth of any proposition in Euclid; as well as men, by the natural use of their faculties,
come to make the discovery themselves. In all things of this kind there is little need or use of revelation, God
having furnished us with natural and surer means to arrive at the knowledge of them. For whatsoever truth we
come to the clear discovery of, from the knowledge and contemplation of our own ideas, will always be certainer
to us than those which are conveyed to us by traditional revelation. For the knowledge we have that this revelation
came at first from God can never be so sure as the knowledge we have from the clear and distinct perception of
the agreement or disagreement of our own ideas: v.g. if it were revealed some ages since, that the three angles of a
triangle were equal to two right ones, I might assent to the truth of that proposition, upon the credit of that
tradition, that it was revealed: but that would never amount to so great a certainty as the knowledge of it, upon the
comparing and measuring my own ideas of two right angles, and the three angles of a triangle. The like holds in
matter of fact knowable by our senses; v.g. the history of the deluge is conveyed to us by writings which had their
original from revelation: and yet nobody, I think, will say he has as certain and clear a knowledge of the flood as
Noah, that saw it; or that he himself would have had, had he then been alive and seen it. For he has no greater an
assurance than that of his senses, that it is writ in the book supposed writ by Moses inspired: but he has not so
great an assurance that Moses wrote that book as if he had seen Moses write it. So that the assurance of its being a
revelation is less still than the assurance of his senses.
