A92141:446
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.
49. 2. His arrows are sharp in the heart of the Kings enemies, whereby the people fall under him, Isa. 45. 5. A man may in his own natural strength come in within the shoot of Christ's arrow, and under the smiting and stroke of the drawn sword of the Gospel; for Christ puts forth his power in his Ministers, and renewed and unrenewed may come and hear.
3. The difference betwixt the Law and Gospel is, that the Law neither promises nor gives strength, but presupposeth that the man hath strength: but the Gospel promiseth a new heart, and the Law engraven in the heart; therefore Christ doth reign in the New Testament in the actual Omnipotency of grace, and men by a mere local motion of nature or some superadded morality good or bad, come in to wisdoms house of wine, and bring themselves in under the scattered fire coals of Gospel-administration, with no intention spiritual to believe and be saved; and so the coming in to hear, and the applying of the natural organ of hearing, the setting on work the unrenewed mind, judgment, conscience, heart and affections to the literal considering and weighing of the strong reasons that are in the Gospel casteth the man and his soul by a good and inevitable consequent under such heavenly flamings of quickening influences as convey the preached Gospel by an Ordinance of God, in due order, to cause such as are chosen of God believe: its in a mans free will to draw near to the fire, or not to draw near, but when he is come to the fire side, the fire can make him hot, whether he will or no. By a free election a man casts timber in the fire; but without any election, a strong fire cannot choose but burn dry fuel. Its true, the sea-man cannot create winds, nor change the blowing of the wind from East to West; yet he can prepare his vessel, hoist the sails, and fit the ship for receiving the winds. The husband-man hath no command of winds, of rain, of clouds, of summer Sun; yet may he dress, labour, and sit and prepare his rigs and garden to lie under the seasonable influences of such Summer air, rain, dew and impressions of the heaven and the clouds, as the Lord of nature shall afford. Now as all the Kings and ⟨p. 130⟩