A Christian Directory, Part 3: Christian EcclesiasticsBaxter, Richard
Religion
A Christian Directory, Part 3: Christian Ecclesiastics
Baxter, Richard
Casuistry; Christian sociology
2. He will next teach you that there is a God that made you, and what
he is, and what relation he standeth in to you, and you to him, as
your Creator, your Owner, your Ruler, and your Benefactor, and your
End: and what duty you owe him in these relations, to submit to him,
and resign yourselves to him as his own, to be obedient to all his
laws, and to love him and delight in him; and this with all your
heart, and soul, and might; even to serve him with all the powers of
your soul and body, and with your estates and all his blessings.
[Sidenote: To know the life to come.]
3. He will next teach you that this God hath made your souls immortal,
and that there is a life after this where everlasting happiness or
misery will be your part, and where the great rewards and punishments
are executed by the Judge of all the world as men have behaved
themselves in this present life. That your end and happiness is not
here, but in the life to come, and that this life is the way and time
of preparation, in which everlasting happiness is won or lost.
Thus far he needeth no supernatural proof of what he saith; but can
prove it all to you from the light of nature: and these things you are
not primarily to receive of him as a testifier by mere believing him;
but as a teacher, by learning of him the evidences by which you may by
degrees come to know these things yourselves.
Yet it is supposed that all along you give him so much credit as the
difference between his knowledge and yours doth require, so far as it
appeareth to you; as you will hear a physician, a lawyer, a
philosopher, or any man, with reverence, while he discourseth of the
matters of his own profession; as confessing his judgment to be better
than yours, and therefore more suspecting your own apprehensions than
his. Not but that the truth may compel you to discern it, though you
should come with no such reverence or respect to him; but then you
cast yourself upon much disadvantage irrationally; and this human
belief of him is but a medium to your learning, and so to the
knowledge of the matter; so that you do not stop and rest in his
authority or credibility, but only use it in order to your discovery
of that evidence which you rest in, which as a teacher he acquaints
you with.
These things being thus far revealed by natural light, are (usually)
at first apprehended by natural reason, not so as presently to put or
prove the soul in a state of saving grace; but so as to awaken it to
make further inquiry; and so when the soul is come so far as to see
the same truths by supernatural grace in the supernatural revelation
of the holy Scriptures, then they become more effectual and saving,
which before were known preparatorily; and so the same truths are then
both the objects of knowledge and of faith.
[Sidenote: To know that Christ, faith, repentance, and obedience, is
the way to it.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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