A92141:139
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.
Hence 1. Moral Agents are to set to work to do duties, & not to wait upon God's acts of influences; but they are to act, as if the influences of God were in their power; for the influence from Heaven to the duty belongs to God, (he does not lay formal commands upon us to have, or to want his ⟨p. 25⟩influences) and the duty is ours; but we love more to look to God, and judge anxiously his providence of withdrawing of influences, then upon our own duty. Its strange: I judge his holy withdrawings, and not my own sinful omissions.
Hence 1. Moral Agents are to set to work to doe duties, & not to wait upon God's acts of influences; but they are to act, as if the influences of God were in their power; for the influence from Heaven to the duty belongs to God, (he does not lay formal commands upon us to have, or to want his ⟨p. 25⟩influences) and the duty is ours; but we love more to look to God, and judge anxiously his providence of withdrawing of influences, then upon our own duty. Its strange: I judge his holy withdrawings, and not my own sinful omissions.
2. No man is to complain of the Lord's withdrawing of influences; You are joyful and well content to want them. Men put out their own eyes and yet complain God hath made them blind: Of this, more hereafter.
But this Argument may be retorted,1 and unpossible it is to defend the Dominion and Sovereignty of God by these Principles; so if it be not in the dominion and sovereignty of God to procure or hinder the acts of final obedience or disobedience, he cannot be Master of salvation, and of the certain number of the saved; but the free-will of man must be absolute ever here, and the salvation of any must be physically impossible to the sovereign Lord.