A92141:31
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. A gracious heart is so taken up with care to pay the rent of commanded duties, as he hath no leisure to argue why? and if the Lord had decreed to give me quickening influences I should not thus decline. The thesis of an heart of unbelief is a more edifying them to dispute against, and to weep over, then to quarrel with, and agitate the question concerning the Lords withdrawing of his congruous applying of the word to the heart, or his prescience and permissive decrees: duty is mine, Sovereignty is his.
4. A gracious heart is so taken up with care to pay the rent of commanded duties, as he hath no leasure to argue why? and if the Lord had decreed to give me quickning influences I should not thus decline. The thesis of an heart of unbelief is a more edifying them to dispute against, and to weep over, then to quarrel with, and agitate the question concerning the Lords withdrawing of his congruous applying of the word to the heart, or his praescience and permissive decrees: duty is mine, Soveraignty is his.
5. Faith supposeth this truth, though saving influences be wanting, and holy Sovereignty withdraw them for reasons far above the reach of Angels and mens capacities, yet it is my sin that I lay under unresisted deadness. It may be asserted that it is a sinful inclination in us to make the high decree of God our Bible, and to be unwilling to be ruled by the revealed will of God. So Eve was less willing to believe the revealed threatening (in the day thou eatest thou shalt die) and most bent to climb up to a knowing state with God; which the Lord in his •atent purpose and decree did deny to man. So the devils quarrel is not with their own apostasy, but with the holy Lords dispensation; art thou come [Greek or Hebrew] to torment us? and (which is another fault) before the time? Matth. 8. 29. nor can we move questions concerning the decrees and deep dispensations of God, but we must fall upon the Almighty to defend our own sin; the damned in hell eternally rail against the decrees of holy and spotless justice, and his decrees of giving to them life and being, and denying to them the benefit of death,