A92141:489
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.
Though in this or that act of breathing there shine absolute liberty; for who hired the Lord to moisten the withered tree? yet there is place for that Question, Whether the Lord hath not brought himself under a holy necessity of giving influences? to which its answered in these.
1. As there is a necessity of a Decree relating to means and end,1 so is there a necessity of a promise, as to the former. The Lord created the first Vine-tree, and the first Rose, and they seeded and brought forth other Roses and Vine-trees; the Lord first prevenes savingly the dead sinner & by an infused habit (as we shall hear) puts the sinner under an obligation to duties, and puts himself, because of his intended end, to save lost sinners (as it were) under an obligation of bestowing influences of grace, (though in another consideration they be given through sovereignty of grace) because his holy decree carries him not to be wanting to his own seed, nor to forsake the work of his hands. Nature giving hunger, and the holy and supreme Lord of nature giving appetite to eat and drink, gives us also a power of concoction. The Bird by an intended end lays one straw and one feather in the nest, and so it must lay another and a third and a fourth; for the Lord of nature intends a complete house for the Eggs and the young birds: and in like manner the Lord of grace hath a design of grace in his heart to bring many sons to glory. And he must upon the like intention proceed, to make the seed a tree; but first he must make it a plant, and ripen the grape and boil it more with the heat of the Sun, until he make it ripe for the wine-press and the fat: So must he add influences daily of free grace for the perfecting of the work he hath begun, in his holy decree as well as in the execution, ⟨p. 148⟩until he perfect it unto the day of the Lord Jesus.
1. As there is a necessity of a Decree relating to means and end,1