A30574:987
An exposition with practical observations continued upon the eighth, ninth, & tenth chapters of…
An exposition with practical observations continued upon the eighth, ninth, & tenth chapters of the prophesy of Hosea being first delivered in several lectures at Michaels Cornhill, London / by Jeremiah Burroughs ; being the seventh book published by Thomas Goodwin ... [et al.]An exposition with practical observations continued upon the eighth, ninth, & tenth chapters of the prophesy of Hosea being first delivered in several lectures at Michaels Cornhil, London / by Jeremiah Burroughs ; being the seventh book published by Thomas Goodwin ... [et al.]
London: printed by Peter Cole, 1650
AN EXPOSITION Of the PROPHESY of HOSEA. › Chapter 10 › Verse 1 › Israel is an empty Vine.
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,1 There's no plant hath a more unpromising outside than the Vine hath, the outside of it, how mean is it? looks as if it were weathered, rugged, grizzled, weak, and hollow the stalk of it: and this is the Church, the out-side of it is very unpromising, little beauty and comeliness; as Christ himself had little beauty and excellency in his outside.
First,1 There's no plant hath a more unpromising outside than the Vine hath, the outside of it, how mean is it? looks as if it were weathered, rugged, grisled, weak, and hollow the stalk of it: and this is the Church, the out-side of it is very unpromising, little beauty and comliness; as Christ himself had little beauty and excellency in his outside.
- 1Reas. 1.
But yet secondly,1 The Vine is the most fruitful plant that grows out of the earth; Pliny (that great Naturalist) tells of very strange fruitfulness of some kind of Vines, in his 14. Book,2 and 4. Chapter, he tells of ten Culei (that's his word) that an Acre of Vines brought forth in a year, which comes to a matter of eighteen hundred gallons: nay in the 1. Chapter of his 14. Book, he tells of one stock, one single Vine, that was planted by Livia the Empress, that yielded an hundred and eight gallons of good Wine yearly. The Vine is a very fruitful thing, though unpromising in the out-side. And what fruit indeed is there brought forth to God in the world but by his Churches? and God expects much fruitfulness among his people; how ever, as you shall hear, they are charged with being empty.