A92141:496
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. 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.
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 godlesse and slagitious 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.
2. The man yet unploughed and never broken by the Law, standing in a whole condition, not caring for, nor either needing, or valuing Jesus Christ is farther from showers of saving influences, then the law-humbled & law-broken sinner, who, though he be but half sick, like the woman with child, who is under raw and far-off showers of child-birth pain, not yet, by some weeks, near her time, needs not yet the help of the midwife, yet looks a far off to child-birth pain.
2. The man yet unplowed and never broken by the Law, standing in a whole condition, not caring for, nor either needing, or valuing Jesus Christ is farther from showers of saving influences, then the law-humbled & law-broken sinner, who, though he be but half sick, like the woman with child, who is under raw and far-off showres of child-birth pain, not yet, by some weeks, near her time, needs not yet the help of the midwife, yet looks a far off to child-birth pain.