N02384:1453
A complete body of divinity in two hundred and fifty expository lectures on the…A compleat body of divinity in two hundred and fifty expository lectures on the…
A complete body of divinity in two hundred and fifty expository lectures on the Assembly's Shorter catechism wherein the doctrines of the Christian religion are unfolded, their truth confirmed, their excellence displayed, their usefulness improved; contrary errors & vices refuted & exposed, objections answered, controversies settled, cases of conscience resolved; and a great light thereby reflected on the present age. / By the Reverend & learned Samuel Willard, M.A. late Pastor of the South Church in Boston, and vice-president of Harvard College in Cambridge, in New-England. ; Prefaced by the pastors of the same church. ; [Six lines of Scripture texts]A compleat body of divinity in two hundred and fifty expository lectures on the Assembly's Shorter catechism wherein the doctrines of the Christian religion are unfolded, their truth confirm'd, their excellence display'd, their usefulness improv'd; contrary errors & vices refuted & expos'd, objections answer'd, controversies settled, cases of conscience resolv'd; and a great light thereby reflected on the present age. / By the Reverend & learned Samuel Willard, M.A. late Pastor of the South Church in Boston, and vice-president of Harvard College in Cambridge, in New-England. ; Prefac'd by the pastors of the same church. ; [Six lines of Scripture texts]
printed by B. Green and S. Kneeland for B. Eliot and D. Henchman, 1726
AN EXPOSITION OF THE ASSEMBLY's SHORTER CATECHISM: IN Two Hundred a… › Sermon 53 (Question 13 cont.)
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.) HENCE man being left to himself, the Tempter was t•• ha•d for him, and overcame him. Thus it was eventually; and God had purposed that it should be so; and yet his thus being left was not a necessitating compulsive cause of his fall. For,
1. THE Tempter could only Tempt••. He could not compel. All his strength lay in his subtlety: Man's free will is incapable of compulsion: it was therefore in it's own nature a thing contingent, whether the Temptation should prevail or no. The Devil had no physical power ever man's free will, he had only the cunning of persuasion, by presenting his covered fallacies.
1. THE Tempter could only Tempt••. He could not compel. All his strength lay in his subtlety: Man's free will is incapable of compulsion: it was therefore in it's own nature a thing contingent, whether the Temptation should prevail or no. The Devil had no physical power ever man's free will, he had only the cunning of perswasion, by presenting his covered fallacies.
2. MAN's liberty of will had an innate power of refusing the temptation, as well as of the embracing it. It did not then want it's liberty to good, as it doth since the fall, for he had the habits of sanctification on him, that grace in him which had he stirred up and made use of, would have led him to have rejected Satan with utmost detestation, and no corrupt inclination in him; so his liberty was not an indifferency to good or evil; but only a freedom to good, with a mutability, or capacity of being seduced to evil.