The Existence and Attributes of God, Volumes 1 and 2Charnock, Stephen
Religion
The Existence and Attributes of God, Volumes 1 and 2
Charnock, Stephen
God (Christianity) -- Attributes; Providence and government of God -- Christianity
In the doctrinal part of several of his discourses thou wilt find
the depth of _polemical_ divinity, and in his inferences from thence,
the sweetness of _practical_; some things which may exercise the
profoundest scholar, and others which may instruct and edify the
weakest Christian. Nothing is more nervous than his reasonings, and
nothing more affecting than his applications. Though he make great use
of schoolmen, yet they are certainly more beholden to him than he to
them; he adopts their notions, but he refines them too, and improves
them and reforms them from the barbarousness in which they were
expressed, and dresseth them up in his own language (so far as the
nature of the matter will permit, and more clear terms are to be
found), and so makes them intelligible to vulgar capacities, which,
in their original rudeness, were obscure and strange even to learned
heads.
In a word, he handles the great truths of the gospel with that
perspicuity, gravity, and majesty, which best becomes the oracles of
God; and we have reason to believe, that no judicious and unbiassed
reader but will acknowledge this to be incomparably the best practical
treatise the world ever saw in English upon this subject. What Dr.
Jackson did, to whom our author gave all due respect, was more brief
and in another way. Dr. Preston did worthily upon the Attributes in
his day; but his discourses likewise, are more succinct, when this
author’s are more full and large. But whatever were the mind of God in
it, it was not his will that either of these two should live to finish
what he had begun, both being taken away when preaching upon this
subject. Happy souls! whose last breath was spent in so noble a work,
praising God while they had any being (Psal. cxlvi. 2).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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