A92141:361
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.
The Sovereignty of God is much to be observed, in the Lord's manner of dispensing of grace;1 James and John are called being at their Nets, and [Greek or Hebrew] immediately they leave their father and follow him, Matth. 4. 21, 22. Matthew hears but one word, follow me, Matth. 9. 9. and he follows Christ. A gentle throw of the key opens Lydia's heart: the hearers of Peter, who had crucified the Lord of glory, are more violently rent and torn, as if the sharpest points, or the stings of many impoysoned Dragons and Scorpions, had been at once fastened in their hearts, Acts 2. 37.2 the way of Saul's coming with trembling and astonishment, and blindness, and fasting, and praying three days, and the Jailers down casting may witness, that the lock being more rusted and the iron blunted, Acts 9. 6. 7, &c. more strength is required for the opening of the door, then the Lord otherwise employed; as some Devils are cast out with a word, and go out with some sort of humble prayers not to be tormented before the time, Matth. 8. others throw the possessed in the midst, and almost kill the child, so as beholders say, he is dead, Mark 9. there is a certain kind, which is not cast out but by fasting and praying. So some are filled with the holy Ghost from the womb; and hardly can John Baptist, give an account of his conversion, as to the degrees of pangs of the new-birth, ⟨p. 102⟩the way and manner, the place, the Mathematical hour, of the holy Ghost's sliding in, on the heart; Nor must we think none are in John Baptist's case; for beside that God employs some to, and for rare advantages, and gaining of souls to the Kingdom of Christ, shall there be nothing of the holy Ghost in multitudes of infants in Covenant with God, of which many die, as ripe, as if they were, an hundred years old? only beware we take not a sweet tractable nature, to be the very holy Ghost, and a work of Infant conversion, such as was in John Baptist: and let not others cast themselves away, as not belonging to Christ, who yet are his, because they know not, such pangs and throwings of the new-birth, as Saul, the Jailer, the converts who killed Christ,