A30243:1029
Spiritual refining
Spiritual refining: or A treatise of grace and assurance Wherein are handled, the doctrine of assurance. The use of signs in self-examination. How true graces may be distinguished from counterfeit. Several true signs of grace, and many false ones. The nature of grace under divers Scripture notions or titles, as regeneration, the new-creature, the heart of flesh, vocation, sanctification, &c. Many chief questions (occasionally) controverted between the orthodox and the Arminians. As also many cases of conscience. Tending to comfort and confirm saints. Undeceive and convert sinners. Being CXX sermons preached and now published by Anthony Burgess sometime fellow of Emanuel College in Cambridge, and now pastor of the church of Sutton-Coldfield in Warwickshire.Spiritual refining: or A treatise of grace and assurance Wherein are handled, the doctrine of assurance. The use of signs in self-examination. How true graces may be distinguished from counterfeit. Several true signs of grace, and many false ones. The nature of grace under divers Scripture notions or titles, as regeneration, the new-creature, the heart of flesh, vocation, sanctification, &c. Many chief questions (occasionally) controverted between the orthodox and the Arminians. As also many cases of conscience. Tending to comfort and confirm saints. Undeceive and convert sinners. Being CXX sermons preached and now published by Anthony Burgess sometime fellow of Emanuel Colledge in Cambridge, and now pastor of the church of Sutton-Coldfield in Warwickshire.
London: printed by A. Miller for Thomas Underhill, 1652
Title page typeset from the transcription.
A TREATISE OF GRACE and ASSURANCE; Being CXX. SERMONS. › Section 4 › Sermon 37
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 better discovery of this, consider these things.1
- 1Particulars to clear this. 1.
First, That the understanding of a man is not only corrupted with sin, but naturally weakened, so that it is not able to find out natural truths, much less supernatural. The forms of things are hidden to us: Vitrum lambimus, pultem non attingimus; the fire, the water, a stone, none can have essential definitions of them: we cannot tell wherein the form or essence almost of any thing consists, only we describe things by their effects, properties, and common accidents, and we have but the shell, not the kernel. If then the work of God in nature be so abstruse to us, and we know not what to say of it, How much rather the work of God in Grace? Basil saith, Divers questions may be made about a very fly, which no Philosopher is ever able to answer, How much rather then in the hidden operations of Gods spirit? So that although it was Nicodemus his sin, that he did not know, or believe the necessity of this new birth, yet it was a natural impotency, rather then a moral, that he could not tell how this wind did blow upon him.
First, That the understanding of a man is not onely corrupted with sin, but naturally weakned, so that it is not able to finde out natural truths, much less supernatural. The forms of things are hidden to us: Vitrum lambimus, pultem non attingimus; the fire, the water, a stone, none can have essential definitions of them: we cannot tell wherein the form or essence almost of any thing consists, onely we describe things by their effects, properties, and common accidents, and we have but the shell, not the kernel. If then the work of God in nature be so abstruse to us, and we know not what to say of it, How much rather the work of God in Grace? Basil saith, Divers questions may be made about a very fly, which no Philosopher is ever able to answer, How much rather then in the hidden operations of Gods spirit? So that although it was Nicodemus his sin, that he did not know, or believe the necessity of this new birth, yet it was a natural impotency, rather then a moral, that he could not tell how this wind did blow upon him.