A92141:369
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.
therefore we are to look upon desertions in the song of Solomon as prophetical, and relating to the desertions in the New Testament, in the which the rise of the grief is not so much from the apprehension of sin legally tormenting, as from the sense of the want of the sweet comforting presence of God, and of the well-beloved Christ; yet there is as much in that of pain, as in any we read, Cant. 5. 6. I rose up to open to my beloved, my beloved had withdrawn himself, and had passed away; my soul went forth, because of his speech: Ainsworth, My soul was gone, and departed, that is, failed, fainted, I was even a dead woman through fear and grief; for death is the departing of the soul from the body, Gen. 33. 18. This though an Evangelical desertion, is as much as David saith, my moisture is turned into the drought of Summer, and as the waves of the Lord's wrath coming over Heman; yea, and it is more painful to be thrust out of Heaven, and to be deprived of an high measure of enjoyed and felt love, and is a sadder torment then all the law-burnings, though they have in David and others some such love-sickness, which was ordinary to the Old Testament-dispensation; and these and the like the soul is more able to bear: that the habit and stock is rich, as Christ, from the personally indwelling God-head, was strong in his desertions peculiar to him; and the richer the habit of ⟨p. 106⟩grace be, the more able is the soul to stand out: the strong ship is more able to endure the storm, then the crazy and rotten vessel; a Giant is fitter for a battle with a Giant, then a Child is.
therefore we are to look upon desertions in the song of Solomon as prophetical, and relating to the desertions in the New Testament, in the which the rise of the grief is not so much from the apprehension of sin legally tormenting, as from the sense of the want of the sweet comforting presence of God, and of the wel-beloved Christ; yet there is as much in that of pain, as in any we read, Cant. 5. 6. I rose up to open to my beloved, my beloved had withdrawn himself, and had passed away; my soul went forth, because of his speech: Ainsworth, My soul was gone, and departed, that is, failed, fainted, I was even a dead woman through fear and grief; for death is the departing of the soul from the body,