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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.
CHAP. IIII. Showing the order of working Regeneration.
CHAP. IIII. Shewing the order of working Regeneration.
1Now I proceed to declare, in what order the Spirit of God pleaseth to perform this most admirable change: which is done in these four actions, which I shall lay down. First, the spirit of God working, in and with the Law, (but tempered with the Gospel) becomes a spirit of contrition, causing a man to see and feel his extreme sinfulness,2 and wretchedness, in so much that he is even wounded at the very heart therewith, and his sinful and unhappy estate becomes a woeful bondage & captivity unto him. The Lord doth not alone raise up miserable terrors of conscience in him, in regard of some one or more gross offences that ⟨p. 27⟩he hath actually committed, (although often he maketh these very terrors, a means of making himself a passage to enter in at), but he opens the eyes of the mind, to see the very mud and filth of the soul, that lay at the bottom before unseen and undiscerned. The Spirit convinceth him of sin: It shows him that general wickedness and sinfulness of his nature, whereof we spake before. Now he feels his unbelief, pride, ignorance, hypocrisy, and other heart-corruptions. He judgeth himself worthy to be destroyed, not alone having a sight of his own inability to escape damnation: but likewise of the justice of God in damning him, so that he doth even stoop and yield himself thereto. Whereas before he was alive without the Law, not having the true knowledge of it, now the Law coming in the sound power and working of it, through the strength of the holy Ghost; causeth that he becomes dead in his own sense, and apprehension: but sin becomes alive to his sense and feeling; and he perceiving the strength, force, violence, and mischievousness of it, more then ever before, now cries out with the Apostle, O miserable man that I am! and now confesseth that he is carnal and sold under sin, as the same Apostle did, in the same sense of his natural wretchedness, which the coming of the life of grace had brought with it. Thus the death of sin begins to be changed into life, in that it is felt and discerned. For the very first working of this new life, must needs be a feeling of the old death in sins and trespasses: