A30243:460
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 2 › Sermon 18
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 therefore, This love we speak of, is not a flower growing in Natures garden, 1we naturally love our parents, our children, but not so the godly, hence love is made the fruit of the Spirit; To love a man, because of the image of God in him, because he is holy, is wrought only by Gods Spirit. Naturally we hate 2God, because he is an holy God, his Law, because it is an holy Law, and his children, because they are an holy people. Hence the Schoolmen say, That love to God and to our neighbour, because of God, are not two acts of love, no more then the will of the end by means, is a two-fold act of the will; and this appeareth by the command Matth. 19. 37. where we are commanded to love God with all our might, all we have and can do, and yet our neighbour also, which could not be if our love to another in subordination to God be not considered, as the same with the act of loving God; and this is much more true in loving of a godly man, whom we do love, not only because of Gods command, and for God (as we ought to do all men) but because of God in him, his image there, in which sense Hierom said, he did Diligere Christum habitantem in Augustino. There is a rule out of Aristotle, Idemest motus animae in imaginem & rem. It is the same motion whereby the soul is carried to the image or species of a thing, and the thing it self, as we see it in the acts of the understanding and of the senses, which rule Aquinas, and other Papists wretchedly abuse, to prove the same religious worship ⟨p. 98⟩both in kind and degree, to be given unto the image of God, and God himself but in our instance it is true, when we love God himself, and a godly man, because of Gods image in him, this is the same act or motion of the soul, and ariseth from the same habit of grace, and therefore doth this Apostle argue necessarily from the position of the one to the position of the other, and the negation of one to the negation of the other, he that doth not love his brother, loveth not God, according to the rule of the Hebrews, Qui amat supra amat infra. We are not then speaking of a love, which cometh by the power of free-will, but of a grace infused into us by Gods Spirit, which as it's supernatural in it's original, so also in it's operations and motives; The effects are supernatural, busying and emptying themselves in industry about their souls;