A53712:464
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.
Having then fixed on the Demonstration of the power of sin, from the effects it doth produce, and having given a double instance hereof in Believers themselves, I shall now farther evidence the same truth, or pursue the same evidence of it, by showing somewhat of the power that it acteth in them who are unregenerate, and so have not the remedies against it which Believers are furnished withal.
Having then fixed on the Demonstration of the power of sin, from the effects it doth produce, and having given a double instance hereof in Believers themselves, I shall now farther evidence the same truth, or pursue the same evidence of it, by shewing somewhat of the power that it acteth in them who are unregenerate, and so have not the remedies against it which Believers are furnished withal.
I shall not handle the whole power of sin in unregenerate persons, which is a very large field, and not the business I have in hand; but only by some few instances of its effects in them, intimate, as I said, unto Believers, what they have to deal withal.
First then, it appears in the violence it offers to the nature of man, compelling them unto sins, fully contrary to all the principles of the reasonable ⟨p. 266⟩nature wherewith they are endued from God. Every creature of God hath in its creation, a Law of operation implanted in it, which is the rule of all that proceedeth from it, of all that it doth of its own accord. So the fire ascends upwards, bodies that are weighty and heavy descend; the water flows, each according to the Principles of their nature, which give them the Law of their Operation. That which hinders them in their operation is force and violence, as that which hinders a stone from descending, or the fire from going upwards. That which forceth them to move contrary to the Law of their nature, as a stone to go upwards, or the fire to descend, is in its kind the greatest violence, of which the degrees are endless. Now that which should take a great Millstone, and fling it upwards into the air, all would acknowledge to be a matter of wonderful force, power, and efficacy.