A92141:693
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. The actings of sense.
2. The objects of sense, and spiritual discerning the acts of sense in order to others, are not infallible either in the habit or the act; the eleven may all their life mistake Judas. But as touching the object, the saving influences and actings of God have them in some singular and peculiar thing by which actu primo, and in themselves they may be discerned. As Christs preaching had such grace in it, never man spake like him. Pauls preaching in the evidence, and demonstration, and power of the Spirit, 1 Cor. 2. had something that a spiritual discerning might take up: the garden flower and the wild flower that grows in the mountains are like other, yet the senses of seeing and smelling find a difference. ⟨p. 216⟩It's dreadful when Christs preaching, and the Apostles speaking and praying in the holy Ghost, brings forth mocking and persecution, and the miracles of Christ that were done by the power of God are fathered upon the Prince of devils; it's hard to persuade men of the naughtiness of their own heart. What comes from self, comes from grace: the heart, because it is the mans own, is good to God; the prayers are the mans own and good; the lamps they are our own, and they shine, and therefore the shining is from the oil of grace within, and yet the lamp is empty.
2. The objects of sense, and spiritual discerning the acts of sense in order to others, are not infallible either in the habit or the act; the eleven may all their life mistake Judas. But as touching the object, the saving influences and actings of God have them in some singular and peculiar thing by which actu primo, and in themselves they may be discerned. As Christs preaching had such grace in it, never man spake like him. Pauls preaching in the evidence, and demonstration, and power of the Spirit, 1 Cor. 2. had something that a spiritual discerning might take up: the garden flower and the wild flower that grows in the mountains are like other, yet the senses of seeing and smelling find a difference.