A26892:534
A Christian Directory
A Christian directory, or, A sum of practical theology and cases of conscience directing Christians how to use their knowledge and faith, how to improve all helps and means, and to perform all duties, how to overcome temptations, and to escape or mortify every sin : in four parts ... / by Richard Baxter.A Christian directory, or, A summ of practical theologie and cases of conscience directing Christians how to use their knowledge and faith, how to improve all helps and means, and to perform all duties, how to overcome temptations, and to escape or mortifie every sin : in four parts ... / by Richard Baxter.
London: printed by Robert White for Nevill Simmons, 1673
Title page typeset from the transcription.
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.
§. 6. 5. If you must never change your first opinions or apprehensions, how will you grow in understanding? Will you be no wiser at age, than you were in childhood, and after long study and experience than before? Nature and Grace do tend to increase.
§. 7. Indeed, if you should be never so peremptory in your opinions, you cannot resolve to hold them to the end: For Light is powerful; and may change you whether you will or no: you cannot tell what that Light will do which you never saw. But prejudice will make you resist the light, and make it harder for you to understand.
§. 8. I speak this upon much experience and observation: Our first unripe apprehensions of things, will certainly be greatly changed, if we are studious and of improved understandings. Study the ⟨p. 52⟩Con•rove••••s about Grace and Free-will, or about other such points of difficulty when you are young, and ••s two to one that ripeness will afterward make them quite another thing to you. For my own ••••t my judgement is altered from many of my youthful confident apprehensions: And where it holdeth the same conclusion, it rejecteth abundance of the arguments as vain, which once it rested in: And where I keep to the same Conclusions and Arguments, my apprehension of them is not the sa••, •ut I see more satisfying light in many things which I took but upon trust before. And if I had resolved to hold to all my first Opinions, I must have forborne most of my studies and lost much truth which I have discovered, and not made that my own which I did hold: and I must have resolved to live and dye a child.