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The new birthThe nevv birth
The new birth: or, A treatise of regeneration delivered in certain sermons; and now published by William Whately, preacher and minister of Banbury in Oxfordshire.The nevv birth: or, A treatise of regeneration delivered in certaine sermons; and now published by William Whately, preacher and minisiter of Banbury in Oxfordshire.
London: printed by Felix Kingston for Thomas Man, 1618
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
For the first point Regeneration,1 (called also sanctification, and renovation, and conversion, and repentance, having the three former names given it, in as much as it is Gods work in us; the two latter, in as much as we also being moved by God, do work together ⟨p. 14⟩with him for the accomplishing and fulfilling thereof; and fitly called a re-begetting, because in it we are restored to that image of God, wherein we were at the first created: but now, by means of our corruption through the fall, are altogether destitute of it in our first birth). This regeneration, I say, seems to me conveniently described in these or the like terms: It is a work of the spirit of God, by means of the word of God, infusing holiness into the whole man, for the glory of God in his salvation. I call it a work, because it is so called of God himself, for we are said to be his workmanship,2 created in Christ, unto good works: and because to beget, is to do; to be begotten, to suffer; in the plainest discourse of natural reason. Now this work is in this description set out by all the causes, and by the subject thereof. The causes are four, all briefly named in the description. The efficient, formal, material, and final. The efficient is double, principal, and instrumental. The principal, the sole author (in whom remaineth all the power of working, and to whom all the praise appertaineth) is the Spirit of God, the Holy Ghost, the third Person in Trinity. The same Spirit by whom our Saviour Christs Man-hood was conceived in his Mothers womb, is the sole worker of this conception of grace in the heart of Christians. So doth our Lord himself instruct Nicodemus in the words following, saying,3 That that is borne of the spirit, is spirit: and before Saint John had told us, that believers were borne, not of blood, 4nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man; that is, not by any natural power, virtue, or strength, which is naturally inherent in them; but of God, that is, of the Spirit of God: wherefore in the New Covenant, ⟨p. 15⟩