A92141:495
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.
So I shall never teach that hearing, reading, literal considering of the weight of reasons in the Gospel from Heaven, from the beauty and preciousness of Christ,1 the excellency of free grace, the happy condition of a communion with the Father and the Son Jesus Christ, the sweetness of the love of Christ, the torment of Hell, though there be no acting of grace mixed therewith, are unprofitable and hinder us from closing with Christ, and that they confer not some influence (materially) of help in promoving towards Christ; What these trusted in may do as in another thing. Hence though there be no promise, no moral connection betwixt simple using of means and influences of Christ, for saving grace and the incoming of the new creation into the soul; yet comparatively a connection there is, in this sense.
So I shall never teach that hearing, reading, literal considering of the weight of reasons in the Gospel from Heaven, from the beauty and preciousness of Christ,1 the excellency of free grace, the happy condition of a communion with the Father and the Son Jesus Christ, the sweetness of the love of Christ, the torment of Hell, though there be no acting of grace mixed therewith, are unprofitable and hinder us from closing with Christ, and that they confer not some influence (materially) of help in promoving towards Christ; What these trusted in may doe as in another thing. Hence though there be no promise, no moral connection betwixt simple using of means and influences of Christ, for saving grace and the incoming of the new creation into the soul; yet comparatively a connection there is, in this sense.
- 1Civil professors are nearer to conversion and to Christ then the openly profane and flagitious, and how they are also farther distant.
1. As painful tilling, sowing and labouring is nearer to a plentiful harvest then lazy sleeping in Summer; so discretion and moral walking in the Commandments of God, by which the man is not far from the Kingdom of Heaven, and nearer to it, is nearer to conversion then the godless and flagitious conversation of a dissolute wretch; as he, who is at a distance from a City, by twenty miles only, is nearer to the City, then he who is distant a hundred miles from it; though both be distant from it, and the one formally is out of the City as well as the other; this is a wily comparison. I assert no preparatory dispositions to conversion, as Papists and Arminians teach.