A92141:248
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.
3. Its most unjust to lay the blame of our sinful omissions, upon holy Sovereignty, because he withdraws influences: For 1. That is to reproach God, this is like the malcontentedness of Satan and of Hell: for the damned complain that ever they were born, and that they cannot ⟨p. 62⟩be annihilated, and that hills and mountains cover them not quick in soul and body; yea they storm and rage because God gives them a being capable of eternal woe. 2. The wakened consciences of men out of Christ often fall upon this recrimination; the gnawing of conscience of Judas, is, I have sinned; and of the young man, Prov. 5. 12. How have I hated instruction? and my heart despised reproof? Yet it is a more commendable complaining and more hopeful to complain of sinful neglect of means, then of divine permissive providence of sin upon the Lord's withdrawing of gracious influences, but conscience in its kindly acting is the tormenting worm that eats self. No Devil alleges this; its true, Satan bites at providence; God hedges about a hypocrite, Job. and God commends him (says he) Christ torments us before the time: Satan trembles and frets at the existence of God, and that God is above him, Joh 1. 9, 10. Matth. 8. 29. Jam. 2. 19. and so all his words to Christ speak a barking at providence, Matth. 4. its wrong that the Son of God should want bread; it is an useless providence that the man Christ go down stairs; for God (saith he) should save him though he throw himself down headlong. Satan is a better Master, who gives all the Kingdoms of the World to his Worshippers, then God, who denies Bread to his own well-beloved Son; thus doth Satan, but in another kind, fret. So Gen. 3. its a bad providence that Adam and Eve are not as knowing as God, and Luke 5. 34. What have we to do with Christ? But may not conscience accuse providence in the Lord's withdrawing of grace, especially being wakened?