A30243:671
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 25
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.
In the next place our Saviour directs him to keep the Commandments, instancing not in the Ceremonial, but the moral, nor in the moral duties that relate to God, but that belong to our neighbour, which were most vulgar, that hereby he might teach this Pharisaical man, that he never yet performed any one Commandment aright. Therefore the ignorance and the arrogance of this young man in the text is remarkable; All these have I kept from my youth up; he thought he had kept not some but all, and that from his youth up, as soon as ever he could act with reason; some Expositors think, that he grossly lied against his own conscience in saying so: but that is not likely because Mark saith Christ loved him, upon this speech, and that could not be if he were such a dissembler; and if you take ⟨p. 143⟩the word love, for to praise or kindly to speak to a man; as the Septuagint sometimes do, Caut. 1. 1, 4. 2 Chron. 18. it will argue that he was no hypocrite, and hereby we see, that it is a Ministers duty to love and encourage those men, who though they have not the truth of grace, yet have a fair, civill, honest life, and have general desires for heaven. He did not therefore lie against his conscience, but yet he spake that which was false, for he had not kept one of those Commandments perfectly, as appeareth by that trial or exploratory precept Christ puts him upon: only he knew no better: He was brought up in ignorance about the spiritual latitude and extent of the Law, and so thought a mere negative, or not doing gross wickedness, to be a positive keeping of the Law.
In the next place our Saviour directs him to keep the Commandements, instancing not in the Ceremoniall, but the morall, nor in the morall duties that relate to God, but that belong to our neighbour, which were most vulgar, that hereby he might teach this Pharisaicall man, that he never yet performed any one Commandment aright. Therefore the ignorance and the arrogance of this young man in the text is remarkable; All these have I kept from my youth up; he thought he had kept not some but all, and that from his youth up, as soon as ever he could act with reason; some Expositors think, that he grosly lyed against his own conscience in saying so: but that is not likely because Mark saith Christ loved him, upon this speech, and that could not be if he were such a dissembler; and if you take ⟨p. 143⟩