A92141:811
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.
3. Elisha is so jumbled, that the soul is made like muddy water with indignation at Jehoram, that he is in no spiritual disposition or capacity to see the visions of God, 2 Kings 13. 14, 15. and Jonah is distempered at tender mercy in the Lord towards great Nineveh, and old and young in it, a straw, the withering of a gourd: the renewed soul may be hammered and knocked to pieces like a broken crystal glass, while the Lord be pleased to solder the broken pieces of the soul together again.
3. El•sha is so jumbled, that the soul is made like muddy water with indignation at Jehoram, that he is in no spiritual disposition or capacity to see the visions of God, 2 Kings 13. 14, 15. and Jonah is distempered at tender mercy in the Lord towards great Ninive, and old and young in it, a straw, the withering of a gourd: the renewed soul may be hammered and knocked to pieces like a broken crystal glass, while the Lord be pleased to soldar the broken pieces of the soul together again.
As to the second,1 under such dispositions there may be some stirring of the habit of grace, and of the new creation; the soul either under swooning or sleeping is still acting as the soul one way or other: it's not to be supposed that the life of God in a believer can more intermit all sort of lively and vital actings, then the soul can live of breathing, or to communicate vital heat to the body: the unbroken and intense habit of sin in the unrenewed, is the mother-indisposition that hinders influences of grace; as cast sparkles of fire on cold iron, it makes no flaming, because of the density and coldness of the object: the Lord does not bestow every the same Sun-influences on the thistle or nettle, and on the vintry; nor is it supposed that God more bestows actual influence of saving grace upon a man ⟨p. 247⟩