A30243:941
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.
But more particularly let us consider the nature of it.
First, This new-birth makes grace to be in us by way of an infused life, and supernatural principle, fixed, and permanent; It giveth a man esse supernaturale, a supernatural 1being: Therefore is it called the hidden man, the inward man, 1 Pet. 3. 4. The new creature, the divine nature. It's compared to a root, to a fountain, to a foundation; and now for want of this, we see so much inconstancy and unsettledness in the matters of religion and piety. Men have not a new nature, they have only new notions, or new motions, not new natures. When grace becomes thus a rooted principle in us, then though the winds and storms blow, a ⟨p. 205⟩man will continue firm: Aristotle observed some men had a disposition to moral virtues, but not an habit, now this disposition he made easily separable from the subject, whereas the other made a man like a square stone, which ways soever it falleth, it will stand sure: You have some brute creatures that act many things like men, but because they have not an humane nature they are still brutish, and so many things may be done in the way of holiness, which yet come not from that inward principle of renovation, and therefore is but copper and not gold: Oh let us not then consider so much the outward actions, the outward duties of religion, as that root from whence they grow, that principle from whence they come, are they fixed, settled ones by way of life in thee? then art thou born of God.
First, This new-birth makes grace to be in us by way of an infused life, and supernaturall principle, fixed, and permanent; It giveth a man esse supernaturale, a supernaturall 1being: Therefore is it called the hidden man, the inward man,