A30243:1380
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 7 › Sermon 51
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.
First, Because the proper end and use of all Doctrinal Principles, is to lead and 1guide the heart into a practical exercise of Grace: Therefore all the while a man doth employ his head, and his heart not sanctified, he falls short of the end of all Religious principles; If ye know these things, saith our Saviour, happy are ye if ye do them, John 13. 17. Happiness lieth not in the knowing of them, but doing of them. Divinity is practical, even as the art of Medicine; for a man doth not attain health by reading Galen, or knowing Hippocrates his Aphorisms, but by the practical application of them to remove his diseases: Hence you have that notable expression, The acknowledgement of the truth, which is after godliness, Tit. 1. 1, If thou doest not acknowledge God, Christ, and all other matters of Religion after godliness, thou missest the mark: But yet we see this vanity upon men, that they know only to know, as it is said of one people, that they had money only to tell it, they made no other use of it. To eat meat, and not to digest it, is like getting knowledge, and not follow it into practice. Knowledge is so ordained for, and relating to practice, that all wicked men are said not to know God, because though they have a general knowledge, yet they improve ⟨p. 317⟩it not in a particular application. If then Solomon observed it as a great vanity in the world, that God gave some men riches, and yet they had no power to use them, Eccles. 5. 19. how much more is it to have great intellectual abilities, and continual exercises of the understanding, and in the mean while to have no power to make use of them for the good of their souls: To be often eating of the tree of knowledge, but never to taste of the tree of life. The very Heathens, though they had but some few sparks of a true knowledge about God, having no other Book but that of nature to learn by, yet in how grievous a measure are they punished by God, because they did not live according to their knowledge, neither did they glorify God as they knew him, Rom. 1. So then, though thou showest thy self a rational man, and not a beast, in that thou searchest into the grounds and reasons of thy Divine hope, yet it is but labour in vain. if these eyes to see, be not also accompanied with feet to walk in the Commandments of God.