N01749:5
A treatise concerning conversion: showing the nature of saving conversion to God, and the…A treatise concerning conversion: shewing the nature of saving conversion to God, and the…
A treatise concerning conversion: showing the nature of saving conversion to God, and the way wherein it is wrought; together with an exhortation to labour after it. : To which is added, a lecture-sermon had at Boston, July 2. 1719. Wherein the way to know sincerity and hypocrisy is cleared up. / By Solomon Stoddard, Pastor of Northampton.A treatise concerning conversion: shewing the nature of saving conversion to God, and the way wherein it is wrought; together with an exhortation to labour after it. : To which is added, a lecture-sermon had at Boston, July 2. 1719. Wherein the way to know sincerity and hypocrisy is cleared up. / By Solomon Stoddard, Pastor of Northampton.
Boston: printed by J.F. i.e for D. Henchman, 1719
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.
CHAP. I. Saving Conversion is wrought at once.
People are said in Scripture to he converted, when they are turned from Heathenism to the Profession of the Truth; so they are said to be turned when there is some notable Reformation made among them. But then Persons are said to be savingly converted, when they are turned from the power of Satan unto God; when they have a work of Regeneration wrought in them; when they are made ho•• ⟨p. 2⟩and so are justified and made heirs of the Kingdom of Heaven; and this change is made at once in the Soul; it is wrought in the twinkling of an eye. There is wont ordinarily to be a great deal of time spent in way of Preparation for this change: In order to this change there is wont to be a work of Contrition and Humiliation; and tho' in the primitive times we read of men passing through' the work in a very little time, yet ordinarily we find that much time is consumed in the work of Preparation: There be many temptations to be overcome, flatteries and discouragements to be removed; men lose a great deal of time by falling into slumbers, by backwardness to reform some evils, by trying to establish their own righteousness, by fearing that they are not elected, or that God has given them up to hardness of heart, by imagining their hearts to be better than they be, by unwillingness to own the Justice and Sovereignty of God, so that commonly several months are spent, and sometimes some years, before they get through' the work of Preparation; yet Conversion it self is wrought at once, in the hearing of one passage in a Sermon, by the remembering of one Scripture. As it will be in the Resurrection,