Taken from ‘Theologiae christianae fundamenta et elementa; Vol. 1; (Lausannae)’
The reverend Alexandre César Chavannes, born at Montreux on 30 July 1731 and translated to glory at Lausanne on 2 May 1800, sprang from steadfast Huguenot stock and bore the yoke of Christ and learning with singular constancy. Schooled in philosophy and divinity at the Academy of Lausanne, he was ordained in 1753, served beside his father, and from 1766 until death held the chairs of professor, rector, and librarian, compiling the academy’s first catalogue and its earliest history. During his Basel pastorate he cultivated fellowship with the Bernoulli savants while preaching the evangelical Word to the French Reformed congregation. His magnum opus, Anthropologie ou Science générale de l’homme—a 1788 printed abstract of a vast thirteen-volume manuscript—sought to wed bodily anatomy with the science of the soul, and there he first coined for the French tongue the term ethnologie, charting the study of the nations. In that “new science of man” he forged a pedagogic schema meant to marshal every branch of knowledge toward the cultivation of intellect and virtue. More than three hundred essays for the Encyclopédie d’Yverdon flowed from his tireless pen, trimming the lamps of the Helvetic Enlightenment. Remaining a bachelor, he walked humbly yet cut a broad channel through which modern anthropology still courses, esteeming him a father of its first principles.
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The second foundation of religion is laid in the attributes of God, which are joined unto the chief notion thereof, and, according unto the manner of our conceiving, do constitute His essence.
The first sort maketh up those which are ascribed unto God as the primary cause: as self-existence, whereby He existeth of Himself; necessity, whereby, by the strength of His own essence, He cannot but be; unchangeableness of essence, whereby He existeth of necessity as He is, nor can be otherwise; independence, whereby He existeth from no other being, nor can be changed; eternity, whereby He existeth without beginning or end; immortality, incorruptibility, immateriality, simplicity.
Unto the second sort pertain the attributes of God as a spirit.
Two necessary beings cannot be set forth together, for it would follow that it were impossible there should be but one, which is absurd.
Therefore, the world cannot be held as a necessary consequence of God’s existence; otherwise the world should be set forth as necessary, even as God Himself, which likewise standeth contrary to the things afore said.
Therefore, this world, being contingent, hath the cause of its existence and the reason wherefore it existeth as it doth, rather than in any other possible wise, not in the necessary existence of God, but in a power free from such necessity, working through a will determined, not without the counsel of understanding, and so in the divine liberty.