A92141:462
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.
2. Suppose that man loves willingly to be blind, as all love their native blindness.
2. Suppose that man loves willingly to be blind, as all love their native blindnesse.
3. Suppose the blind man to be under the moral debt of having his seeing faculty, even the complete image of God, and of loving, & not hating his Physician Christ (when revealed and preached) who only can restore his faculty of seeing. Now man remaining after the Fall a reasonable creature, is obliged by the first command to believe God in all he saith, and to love Christ, God incarnate or not incarnate. He from whom the eyes are plucked, cannot be under a moral obligation to see, because the eye seeth not by freedom, that is, inherent in the eye: But a man within the visible Church is obliged to perform all free obedience of believing in Christ revealed, whether habitual or actual, which his Creator commands; so the comparison halts widely.
3. Suppose the blind man to be under the moral debt of having his seeing faculty, even the compleat image of God, and of loving, & not hating his Physitian Christ (when revealed and preached) who only can restore his faculty of seeing. Now man remaining after the Fall a reasonable creature, is obliged by the first command to believe God in all he saith, and to love Christ, God incarnate or not incarnate. He from whom the eyes are plucked, cannot be under a moral obligation to see, because the eye seeth not by freedome, that is, inherent in the eye: But a man within the visible Church is obliged to perform all free obedience of believing in Christ revealed, whether habitual or actual, which his Creator commands; so the comparison halts widely.
4. Suppose the man does first with his own hand put out his own eyes, as we did in Adam; and that the relation of penalty follows this blindness, by the will of the just Creator, as its here.