A53712:310
The Nature, Power, Deceit, and Prevalency of Indwelling Sin
The nature, power, deceit, and prevalency of the remainders of indwelling-sin in believers together with the ways of its working and means of prevention opened, evinced, and applied with a resolution of sundry cases of conscience thereunto appertaining.The nature, power, deceit, and prevalency of the remainders of indwelling-sin in believers together with the wayes of its working and means of prevention opened, evinced, and applyed with a resolution of sundry cases of conscience thereunto appertaining.
London: printed for Thomas Cockerill, 1675
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, What course sin takes, and what way it proceedeth in, thus to entice, ensnare, or entangle the soul.
For the first, First, The Affections are certainly entangled when they stir up frequent imaginations about the proposed object which this deceit of sin leadeth and enticeth towards. When sin prevails, and the Affections are gone fully after it, it fills the imagination with it, possessing it with Images, likenesses, appearances of it continually. Such Persons devise iniquity and work evil on their beds, which they also practise when they are able, when it is in the power of their hand, Mic. 2. 1. As in particular, Peter tells us that they have Eyes full of an Adulteress, and they cannot cease from sin, 2 Pet. 2. 14. That is, their imaginations are possest with a continual representation of the object of their lusts. And it is so in part where the Affections are in part entangled with sin, and begin to turn aside unto it. John tells us that the things that are in the world, are the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, 1 Ep. 2. 14. The lust of the Eyes is that which by them is conveyed unto the soul. Now it is not the bodily sense of seeing, but the fixing of the imagination from that sense on such thing, that is intended. And this is called ⟨p. 161⟩the Eyes, because thereby things are constantly represented unto the mind and soul, as outward objects are unto the inward sense by the Eyes. And oftentimes the outward sight of the Eyes is the occasion of these imaginations. So Achan declares how sin prevailed with him, Josh. 7. 21. First he saw the wedge of Gold, and Babylonish garment, and then he coveted them. He rolled them the pleasures, the profit of them, in his Imagination, and then fixed his heart upon the obtaining of them. Now the heart may have a settled, fixed detestation of sin; but yet if a man find that the Imagination of the mind is frequently solicited by it and exercised about it, such a one may know that his Affections are secretly enticed and entangled.