concern him.

God having endued man with those faculties of knowledge which he hath, was no more
obliged by his goodness to plant those innate notions in his mind, than that, having given him reason,
hands, and materials, he should build him bridges or houses,--which some people in the world,
however of good parts, do either totally want, or are but ill provided of, as well as others are wholly
without ideas of God and principles of morality, or at least have but very ill ones; the reason in both
cases being, that they never employed their parts, faculties, and powers industriously that way, but
contented themselves with the opinions, fashions, and things of their country, as they found them,
without looking any further. Had you or I been born at the Bay of Soldania, possibly our thoughts and
notions had not exceeded those brutish ones of the Hottentots that inhabit there. And had the Virginia
king Apochancana been educated in England, he had been perhaps as knowing a divine, and as good a
mathematician as any in it; the difference between him and a more improved Englishman lying barely
in this, that the exercise of his faculties was bounded within the ways, modes, and notions of his own
country, and never directed to any other or further inquiries. And if he had not any idea of a God, it
was only because he pursued not those thoughts that would have led him to it.
13. Ideas of God various in different Men.
I grant that if there were any ideas to be found imprinted on the minds of men, we have reason to
expect it should be the notion of his Maker, as a mark God set on his own workmanship, to mind man
of his dependence and duty; and that herein should appear the first instances of human knowledge. But
how late is it before any such notion is discoverable in children? And when we find it there, how
much more does it resemble the opinion and notion of the teacher, than represent the true God? He
that shall observe in children the progress whereby their minds attain the knowledge they have, will
think that the objects they do first and most familiarly converse with are those that make the first
impressions on their understandings; nor will he find the least footsteps of any other.
It is easy to take notice how their thoughts enlarge themselves, only as they come to be acquainted
with a greater variety of sensible objects; to retain the ideas of them in their memories; and to get the
skill to compound and enlarge them, and several ways put them together. How, by these means, they
come to frame in their minds an idea men have of a Deity, I shall hereafter show.
14. Contrary and inconsistent ideas of God under the same name.
Can it be thought that the ideas men have of God are the characters and marks of himself, engraven
in their minds by his own finger, when we see that, in the same country, under one and the same name,
men have far different, nay often contrary and inconsistent ideas and conceptions of him? Their
agreeing in a name, or sound, will scarce prove an innate notion of him.
15. Gross ideas of God.
What true or tolerable notion of a Deity could they have, who acknowledged and worshipped
hundreds? Every deity that they owned above one was an infallible evidence of their ignorance of
Him, and a proof that they had no true notion of God, where unity, infinity, and eternity were
excluded. To which, if we add their gross conceptions of corporeity, expressed in their images and
representations of their deities; the amours, marriages, copulations, lusts, quarrels, and other mean
qualities attributed by them to their gods; we shall have little reason to think that the heathen world,
i.e. the greatest part of mankind, had such ideas of God in their minds as he himself, out of care that
they should not be mistaken about him, was author of. And this universality of consent, so much
argued, if it prove any native impressions, it will be only this:--that God imprinted on the minds of all
men speaking the same language, a NAME for himself, but not any IDEA; since those people who
agreed in the name, had, at the same time, far different apprehensions about the thing signified. If they
say that the variety of deities worshipped by the heathen world were but figurative ways of