A92141:986
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.
But as for dispositions of the regenerate, they are qualities that go and come, now & anon. I judge you will say the new-birth and the heavenly disposition are all one; For David was born of God, while he was under a wicked disposition to deflower Bathsheba, to kill Uriah, to be avenged ⟨p. 290⟩no Nabal; all which were bad dispositions, when the new-birth is the new-birth and saving work of the spirit.
But as for dispositions of the regenerate, they are qualities that go and come, now & anon. I judge you will say the new-birth and the heavenly disposition are all one; For David was born of God, while he was under a wicked disposition to deflour Bathsheba, to kill Ʋriah, to be avenged ⟨p. 290⟩no Nabal; all which were bad dispositions, when the new-birth is the new-birth and saving work of the spirit.
And again, the spiritual disposition differs not a little from the spiritual temper.
1. The spiritual temper is permanent; as one is a weak man until he come out of his childhood; for so many years or months he is Infant, so long a child, so long a youth: So one is so long a babe in Christ, and grows to be stronger in the faith, and at length comes to be a father in Christ; but even while the same babes age in Christ continues, and the same weakly and sickly temper and inclination to yield to temptations; in David new born and a babe, good dispositions may be on to pray, to praise, to commit his life to God in extreme dangers, to make Psalms, and yet Davids spiritual temper and constitution is and may be bad and sickly; as Peter before our Saviours death is born again, and a believer,