A26892:800
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.
So as to the Habits and Dispositions of the intellect: It is no sin to want those which mans Understanding in its entire and primitive Nature was without. (As not to be able to know without an object, or to know an unrevealed or too distant object; or actually to know all things know able at on••.) But there are defects or ill dispositions that are sinfully contracted; and though these are now immediately natural and necessary, yet being originally and remotely voluntary or free, they are participatively sinful: Such is the natural mans disability or undisposedness to know the things of the Spirit, 1when the Word revealeth them. This lieth not in the want of a Natural faculty to know them, but 1. Radically in the will: 2. And thence in contrary false apprehensions which the Intellect is prepossessed with, which resisting the truth, may be called, its blindness or impotency to know them. And 3. In a strangeness of the mind to those spiritual things which it is utterly unacquainted with.
So as to the Habits and Dispositions of the intellect: It is no sin to want those which mans Understanding in its entire and primitive Nature was without. (As not to be able to know without an object, or to know an unrevealed or too distant object; or actually to know all things know able at on••.) But there are defects or ill dispositions that are sinfully contracted; and though these are now immediately natural and necessary, yet being originally and remotely voluntary or free, they are participatively sinful: Such is the natural mans disability or undisposedness to know the things of the Spirit, 1when the Word revealeth them. This lyeth not in the want of a Natural faculty to know them, but 1. Radically in the will: 2. And thence in contrary false apprehensions which the Intellect is prepossessed with, which resisting the truth, may be called, its blindness or impotency to know them. And 3. In a strangeness of the mind to those spiritual things which it is utterly unacquainted with.
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