A92141:844
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. Did not our hearts burn?
This is convinced to be a disposition spiritual rather then a habit; its a burning of heart while Christ speaks, that had a cooling before, though they were believing Disciples.1 But here observe, they feel not so the burning of heart in the mean time as afterward, when v. 31. Christ was vanished out of their sight and gone, now they take special notice, in a feeling way, of the warmness of heart they felt while he opened the Scriptures to them. The Lord preaches in a ladder reaching from earth to heaven; Jacob sleeps, and can give no judgement in the mean time; but Gen. 28. 16. when the sweet vision and preaching is ended Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord was in this place, and I knew not. A strong impression of the presence and glory of God sometimes comes on after the Lord is away. David desires and thirsts, Psalm 63. 2. (saith he in the wilderness of Judah) that I may see thy power and thy glory as I have seen thee. The enjoying of Zion and Zions songs while the people is at home in their own land, hath not such influence on their spirit as when the Sanctuary's glory is removed; then Psalm 137. 1. By the rivers of Babel, there we sate down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. While one is in a fever, they may be ignorant that they are in a fever, but when the cooling ⟨p. 254⟩of health comes, then he well remembers he was sick of a fever. When there is a fever of glory on Peter, he speaks he knows not what, Mark 9. 6. yet after, 2 Pet. 1. 16, 17. he makes sweet comfortable use of that glory of Christ on the mount: when the Lord waters the sown seed, and sends down new influences of grace, then doth it appear what warming hath been in the soul;