A92141:305
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.
4. The Objector would be convinced of his backward desires:1 O, if I had grace I would then labour and run. Is it not 1. A contradiction; he loves to be watered with the streams and dewings of Christ, and hates and loathes the fountain. But now have they both seen and hated me and my father, John 15. 24. The world cannot receive the Spirit, John 19. 17. and so must hate the Spirit and all his influences;2 Fools hate wisdom. And 2. Every species and kind of being is delighted with its own being; the Serpent hath not a desire or a real love to be turned into a man, nor would a Lion be turned into a Lamb, nor a Devil into an elect Angel; that desire is contrary to the malice he hath to the image of God in the elect Angels; the withered ⟨p. 90⟩Earth loves rain and dew, it would be perfected in its kind; but a body of sin fights to keep its own being, and would not be destroyed by an habit of grace; nor doth an heir of wrath and a limb of Satan, seriously desire to be a child of God; nor one tormented in Hell really will to be a holy Saint in Heaven; he only would be an eased and painless man, and seeks not to be free of blaspheming God. See Balaam's, and the rich man's desire, Numb. 23. 10. Luke 16. 24. Rev. 6. 15, 16, 17.
4. The Objector would be convinced of his backward desires:1 O, if I had grace I would then labour and run. Is it not 1. A contradiction; he loves to be watered with the streams and dewings of Christ, and hates and loaths the fountain. But now have they both seen and hated me and my father,