A30243:503
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 3 › Sermon 19
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.
2. We are also deficient when although we do not cry down forms wholly, yet we 1give too little to these institutions of Christ. As we may give too much to baptism and the Lords Supper, •o also we may give too little; in former times of superstition ⟨p. 106⟩the first sin was common: In these latter times, I fear the latter doth over-flow. The Remonstrants, they say, that the doctrine which the Protestants deliver about the Sacraments is valdè suspecta greatly suspected by them of falsehood. And the Socinians they make them only commemorative of some former mercy: they deny any real exhibition or increase in grace thereby. Hence it is their expression, As, say they, when the Israelites in eating of the Paschal lamb, made thereby a commemoration of their deliverance out of Egypt God did then bestow no new mercy on them, only there was a remembrance of the old; so in the Lords Supper there is no new conveyance of any grace, but a remembrance of an old former mercy, but this cometh too short: for those Scripture-expressions 1 Cor. 10. The bread that we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ &c. and in the very words of the institution, Take, eat, this is my body, do evidently prove more then […] mere commemoration. The Scripture when men are apt to rest upon Sacraments, speaks contemptibly of them; Your Fathers ate Manna and died, Circumcision profiteth nothing, he that eateth unworthily eateth damnation to himself: but when it regards the institution and proper use of them, and not the subject receiving them, then it speaks gloriously. These things are premised by way of explication and caution.
2. We are also deficient when although we doe not cry down formes wholly, yet we 1give too little to these institutions of Christ. As we may give too much to baptism and the Lords Supper, •o also we may give too little; in former times of superstition ⟨p. 106⟩