A30243:935
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 34
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.
Secondly, Its not, in another extremity, to have a new physical being, As not to lose the essentials we had of a soul and the faculties thereof: some have confusedly 1talked of a transubstantiation into the being of God, and tells us of a strange deification, or being made God with God. These men have affected uncouth and obsolete expressions, as the Paracelsians do in Physic: No, though born of God, yet not made God, only we have the image of God in us, and that which is by way of substance in him is only by accident in us. It is true, the Scripture calleth it a divine nature, 1 Pet. 1. 4. a new creature, 2 Cor. 5. 17. the inward man, and this made Illyricus with his followers at least in words to err, (for some excuse his sense) when he said, The substance of a man is corrupted, and so his substance must be changed. It's true the Scripture useth such expressions to show how real, intimate, and fixed the work of grace is; It's not a notion, it's not a fancy; No ⟨p. 203⟩more then to be a man, to live, to speak, to eat is. Thus grace where it is, makes a wonderful alteration, though not in the essence, yet in the qualities and operations of a man, so that in a Theological sense he is wholly a new man, he is not the same he was: and this is discovered as really and powerfully in him, as when Adam out of nothing was made a man: Take heed then of being in the number of those who account all the change wrought by Gods Spirit in a man, to be only a melancholy fancy, and attribute all to such cloudy imaginations, or else speak of it, as a particular constitution and temperament of the body: No, The Scripture would never call grace by such real powerful names, if it had not also as real and powerful effects: so that regeneration is a real, supernatural change in a man, as when of dead a man is made alive, of foolish, wise; not a relative change, as when a man is made an Husband or Magistrate, wherein his principles and heart are not altered.
Secondly, Its not, in another extremity, to have a new physicall being, As not to lose the essentials we had of a soul and the faculties thereof: some have confusedly 1