A92141:314
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.
6. Yet if I had the grace of David, 1I would not do as many do: what is that? ye would not have committed adultery and bloodshed; could you have commanded the influences of God, and warded off an evil hour of a sad desertion? so vain men have their own middle science, the new scientia media, that Jesuits have put upon God: the man foresees he could make a world of his own; for they say as the men, Jam. 4. 13, 14, 15. who eye not God in all their ways say, if we go to such a City and buy and sell, we shall get gain, and say not if God will, if we live; so many, had I a stronger habit of grace, I would not use self, and (I) and free will as Adam did; but know, it is a badder self, and a more wicked (I) then was in Adam; for the self so speaking, is the flesh and the unrenewed part, and there was no unrenewed self, no such flesh in Adam, while he was yet endued with the image of God. So is this the ordinary discourse and language of this woulder, and wisher; by God's grace I should walk more closely with God then Noah, sure, more sincerely then he, I would not have been drunken with wine as he; but believe you that God who gave the habit of grace, to Noah, to Moses, to David, to Hezekiah, would have given you all the actual influences to eschew the slips of infirmities, which these men committed; and except you suppose this, you must lean upon the habit of grace, which is but a creature, and so must not have the room of God. Now if you have not any such habit, your hope must be a broken Tree, and you leaning on a Cypher, and upon nothing.
6. Yet if I had the grace of David, 1I would not do as many doe: what is that? ye would not have committed adultery and bloudshed; could you have commanded the influences of God, and warded off an evil hour of a sad desertion? so vain men have their own middle science, the new scientia media, that Jesuits have put upon God: the man foresees he could make a world of his own; for they say as the men, Jam. 4. 13, 14, 15. who eye not God in all their ways say, if we go to such a City and buy and sell, we shall get gain, and say not if God will, if we live; so many, had I a stronger habit of grace, I would not use self, and (I) and free will as Adam did; but know, it is a badder self, and a more wicked (I) then was in Adam; for the self so speaking, is the flesh and the unrenewed part, and there was no unrenewed self, no such flesh in Adam, while he was yet endued with the image of God. So is this the ordinary discourse and language of this woulder, and wisher; by God's grace I should walk more closely with God then Noah, sure, more sincerely then he, I would not have been drunken with wine as he; but believe you that God who gave the habit of grace, to Noah, to Moses, to Dauid, to Hezekiah, would have given you all the actual influences to eschew the slips of infirmities, which these men committed; and except you suppose this, you must lean upon the habit of grace, which is but a creature, and so must not have the room of God. Now if you have not any such habit, your hope must be a broken Tree, and you leaning on a Cypher, and upon nothing.