N00747:253
Spiritual desertions discovered and remedied. Being the substance of divers sermons preached for the…
Spiritual desertions discovered and remedied. Being the substance of divers sermons preached for the help of dark souls, labouring under divine withdrawings. / By Samuel Willard, teacher of a church in Boston. ; [Four lines from Isaiah]
printed by B. Green for Michael Perry and Benjamin Eliot, 1699
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. From greater discoveries of their own corruptions, and frailties▪ it is an usual complaint, I grow weaker in duty, I find so much deadness, wandering, unbelief, so many vain thoughts crowding in, more than ever, that methinks, instead of growing, I am withering; and if GOD were with me, wou•d ⟨p. 133⟩it be so? but consider, as a Christian grows more in spiritual duties, he will see more of his own vileness in them: when he did them more perfunctorily, he found less of that; for the more there is of the Spirit, the more there will be discovered of the lustings of the flesh, Gal. 5.17.
3. From greater discoveries of their own corruptions, and frailties▪ it is an usual complaint, I grow weaker in duty, I find so much deadness, wandring, unbelief, so many vain thoughts crouding in, more than ever, that methinks, instead of growing, I am withering; and if GOD were with me, wou•d ⟨p. 133⟩it be so? but consider, as a Christian grows more in spiritual duties, he will see more of his own vileness in them: when he did them more perfunctorily, he found less of that; for the more there is of the Spirit, the more there will be discovered of the lustings of the flesh, Gal. 5.17.
3. Endeavour to put the best interpretation on the Desertion. We observed that God ever hath gracious designs in the bottom, respecting his Children; & it becometh us to think so, and accordingly to reduce all to such things as may encourage us. Here,