A92141:1385
Influences of the life of grace
Influences of the life of grace. Or, A practical treatise concerning the way, manner, and means of having and improving of spiritual dispositions, and quickening influences from Christ the resurrection and the life. By Samuel Rutherfurd, Professor of Divinity in the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.Influences of the life of grace. Or, A practical treatise concerning the way, manner, and means of having and improving of spiritual dispositions, and quickning influences from Christ the resurrection and the life. By Samuel Rutherfurd, Professor of Divinity in the Vniversity of St. Andrews in Scotland.
London: printed by T.C. for Andrew Crook, 1659
Title page typeset from the transcription.
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.
2. We keep not the oil clean, that it may shine more clearly in the lamp;1 inky blackness defaces the beauty of the white rose and the lily; the dustiness and filth of lusts dimness darkens the precious stone, that it loseth lustre and colour: when a judicial darkness, even on a believer, it covereth the habit of grace, and darkens the spiritual strain, the sin of the spirit is out of measure sinful; the spirit judicially sleeping, sees and hears less in the Prophet Jonah, then carnal reason in the Heathen Mariners, for Jonah sleeps, the Heathen men do wake and fear, when wrath from Heaven blows on their ship: the lesser habit of grace that is young and green in the repenting thief, doth more in adhering to Christ, because actual breathing of the spirit is stronger and more vigorous, then the more rooted and experienced habit of grace in the Apostles, when it is now overwhelmed with the base fear of suffering, for he confesses ⟨p. 408⟩him to be a King on the Cross, the Disciples fleeing forsake him: and the Lord preaches that we are more debtors to the Spirit of Christ then to the habit of grace; praying, praising, believing, hoping, loving, joying, as acts of kin to the Spirit, gladden the Spirit; what should we then do to fetch the wind? grieve not the Spirit, but keep the fountain pure and clean from the muddiness of lusts, for in the light of the Spirit you see your own spots. 1 Joh. 3. 3. He that hath this hope in him, purifies himself, as he also is pure.
2. We keep not the oyl clean, that it may shine more clearly in the lamp;1 inky blackness defaces the beauty of the white rose and the lilly; the dustiness and filth of lusts dimness darkens the precious stone, that it loseth lustre and colour: when a judicial darkness, even on a believer, it covereth the habit of grace, and darkens the spiritual strain, the sin of the spirit is out of measure sinful; the spirit judicially sleeping, sees and hears less in the Prophet Jonah, then carnal reason in the Heathen Mariners, for Jonah sleeps, the Heathen men do wake and fear, when wrath from Heaven blows on their ship: the lesser habit of grace that is young and green in the repenting theif, doth more in adhering to Christ, because actual breathing of the spirit is stronger and more vigorous, then the more rooted and experienced habit of grace in the Apostles, when it is now overwhelmed with the base fear of suffering, for he confesses