A92141:61
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. Adam in this sinful act of consenting to eat did also interpretatively and virtually, and indirectly, not in an other formal and distinct act, will and desire to want the influence of God, now no precept or law is laid upon Adam, or upon any man, to have or to want the influence of God, whether it be predeterminative or collateral; only in acts of obedience, which cannot be performed without that influence; in sinful acts we are to want the influence of God requisite to the entitative act.
2. No necessity is or can be inferred from Gods determining, either in his decree or in his actual bowing and predetermining of the will to one of the opposites, but such whereby the holy predetermination of God insinuates it self sweetly and connaturally in the bosom of the elective power, without any straining or forcing of the light of the mind, and its indifferency, or compelling the will to be carried to any other of the opposites then the will it self doth connaturally embrace.
2. No necessity is or can be inferred from Gods determining, either in his decree or in his actual bowing and praedetermining of the will to one of the opposites, but such whereby the holy praedetermination of God insinuates it self sweetly and connaturally in the bosome of the elective power, without any straining or forcing of the light of the mind, and its indifferency, or compelling the will to be carried to any other of the opposites then the will it self doth connaturally embrace.
3. The way of Adversaries destroys all eternal decrees in God, under pretence of eschewing a necessity; for by this from eternity the will of God was loose, lubric, potential, disjunctive, and fixed neither upon the breaking or not breaking the legs of Christ, that was left to the free-will and decree of the Soldiers. So God from eternity neither decreed nor determined the selling of Joseph, or the not selling of him; nor the crucifying of Christ, or the not crucifying of him; nor the believing of Jews and Gentiles, or the free not believing, for had he put a necessity of a decree on one of the opposites, on believing rather then on none-believing, he should (say the Adversaries) have fixed all free action, under a fatal and Adamantine Law of