A92141:443
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.
1. What the natural man can do to get influences; the natural man can do more then he does, and can exercise the natural powers to come within the bosom of the net, though he cannot hale himself to land. 2. How the Lord can command the naturally blind to see and believe. 3. How sin original deserves eternal wrath. 4. Its such a sin in infants. 5. The want of original righteousness and a power of believing is a sin in us. 5. How the Lord commands impotent men.
1. What the natural man can doe to get influences; the natural man can doe more then he does, and can exercise the natural powers to come within the bosome of the net, though he cannot hale himself to land. 2. How the Lord can command the naturally blind to see and believe. 3. How sin original deserves eternal wrath. 4. Its such a sin in infants. 5. The want of original righteousnesse and a power of believing is a sin in us. 5. How the Lord commands impotent men.
The greater doubt is how the Lord can command supernatural acts to a man drowned in nature:1 but its not here as when a Tyrant commands a child to wheel about the first heaven, else he shall kill him: for the so moving of the heaven is neither a moral duty, nor was it ever a duty compassible by the physical power of the arm of a child or a strong man. But the main intent of our Lord in laying on supernatural commands upon man unable to believe, is that men may know what they can pay, and what they owe and can never pay, but not of their own pay the debt of faith: the precept is not unrational where the end is rational. 2. Not that the natural man may satisfy, but that he may come and compone, and acquiesce to a friendly Gospel treaty; for nothing heighteneth the price and worth of Christ more in the shining of free grace, nothing kills and renders self-condemned the man more then a seen necessity of forgiving love; yea, the reading of the writ of the Law-debt with tears, when this is holden out to us (the Lord gave a bill of grace to those who had nothing to pay and he forgave them frankly) is a strongly convincing dispensation.