N01446:235
A guide to Christ. Or, The way of directing souls that are under the…
A guide to Christ. Or, The way of directing souls that are under the work of conversion. Compiled for the help of young ministers: and may be serviceable to private Christians, who are enquiring the way to Zion. / By Solomon Stoddard, A.M. and Pastor of the church in Northampton. ; With an epistle prefixed, by the Reverend Dr. Increase Mather.
Boston: printed by J. Allen for N. Boone, 1714
Directions How to guide Souls through the Work of Conversion.
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. When it is the fruit of their own strivings. Men hear that they must submit themselves to God, before they obtain mercy; and accordingly they strive for it, and work up a kind of image of submission to God: they bring themselves to own that they are in Gods hands, and he may do what he will with them, this is never right. When men are brought to submit to God indeed, the thing is forced by the power of Conviction: they strive against it, but never so evidently convinced of the insufficiency of themselves, and the Justice of God, that they had no other way left them, but to fall into the hands of God; as it was with those Lepers, 2 King. 7.4.
2. When men make a righteousness of their submission. When men have got a false submission, they are wont to be proud of that, and to think that God will be taken with them: they look upon it a choice frame of spirit, and rejoice in it as a thing pleasing to God; but when men do indeed submit to God, they see nothing in it to be proud of; they see themselves all over defiled like Lepers; empty of all good, and look upon this submission as having nothing at all of goodness in it; they see they are merely ⟨p. 75⟩forced to it: That they have no other way to take, but to fall into the hands of God.
2. When men make a righteousness of their submission. When men have got a false submission, they are wont to be proud of that, and to think that God will be taken with them: they look upon it a choice frame of spirit, and rejoyce in it as a thing pleasing to God; but when men do indeed submit to God, they see nothing in it to be proud of; they see themselves all over defiled like Lepers; empty of all good, and look upon this submission as having nothing at all of goodness in it; they see they are meerly ⟨p. 75⟩forced to it: That they have no other way to take, but to fall into the hands of God.