Selected quad for the lemma: nature_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
nature_n	assume_v	humane_a	union_n	3,291	5	9.5119	5	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A41445	The penitent pardoned, or, A discourse of the nature of sin, and the efficacy of repentance under the parable of the prodigal son / by J. Goodman ...	Goodman, John, 1625 or 6-1690.	1679 (1679)	Wing G1115; ESTC R1956	246,322	428

he to give both thanks and reward to him that cures our bodily infirmities though he do it not without some pain and trouble to us and why should we not rather love God's methods as the Physician of Souls there is no passion nor much less revenge in his proceedings with us he neither cuts and lances us cruelly nor uses any other sharpness then the case necessarily requires he doth nothing with intention to hurt or grieve us but proceeds with art and care designing our greatest good and in a word is in all his actions agreeable to the goodness and benignity of his own nature The summe of all which and of what we intend further to say is that of the Apostle God is good and the goodness of God leadeth to repentance Rom. 2. 5. For the consideration of that is the spring of hope and of all motion by way of return THERE are indeed some men who having entertained very crude notions of the Divine Majesty do sometimes assert on the one hand that vindictive justice is essential and natural to God so that he is bound up to require strict satisfaction and without it cannot properly pardon any transgression And others on the other hand talk at the same wild rate of his mercy and goodness as if all the instances he makes thereof were also natural and necessary and that he could not insist upon his own right but must make all the expressions of kindness that are possible towards his Creatures But both these notions are equally false and mischievous the former of them representing God a rigid Majesty and tending to desperation the other an easy and soft Deity and tempting men to presume upon him the one making him an object of horrour and the other of contempt for who can love him that cannot pity and who can reverence him who hath it not in his power to do otherwise The truth is therefore that all particular instances both of the one kind and of the other are subject to his wisedom that he can exercise either mercy or severity as he sees occasion for after this manner the Scripture speaks of him that sometime he hath mercy because he will have mercy and that when he will he hardeneth sinners for destruction AND to think otherwise of God especially in the case of mercy and pardon as if he could not dispense it as he pleases is to bring in a rigid fatality with the Stoicks instead of a God and is so far from aggrandizing the Divine Majesty that it is the greatest diminution of his power and glory and renders him less then a man for we can recedere à nostro jure remit of our own rights and give mercy a triumph over strict justice And although the sinner when he offends against God forfeits himself into the divine hand and gives God just cause to punish him if he will yet certainly he cannot by any act of his put a Law upon God or oblige him to punish or if he think fit to shew mercy AND then for the interest of God's Rectourship and government of the world it is not a necessity of punishment that conserves that but the power or freedom of punishing or remitting accordingly as it shall seem good to his own wisedom Whereby when men are both provoked to amendment by the hopes of pardon and restrained from disobedience by the fear of punishment For the liberty of dispensing either of these at pleasure is that which produces a reverence towards the Divine Majesty that is a complication of love and fear wherein the very notion of Religion consists It is not an impertinent passage to this purpose which we have in the Historian when the young Gentlemen in the new Roman Common-wealth had a design to restore the Kingly Government in the Family of the Tarquins they had Speeches made amongst them to this effect To be bound up by the rigour of Laws which had no compassion nor made allowance for contingency was very harsh and unsafe considering humane infirmity But under Kingly Government there was power of dispensation possibility of indulgence liberty of interpretation room for mercy and pardon a man that fell did not necessarily there miscarry For there was place for intercession repentance might relieve him and the prerogative of the Prince was the security of the Subject NOW that repentance is available with God we have all the assurance that can be desired for besides what we have said already from the consideration of the perfections of the Divine Nature and the interest of his Government Repentance is the great and principal Doctrine of the Gospel which the Son of God himself came to proclaim by his Preaching to confirm by his Miracles to make way for and to procure acceptance to by his Death and Sacrifice and to render throughly effectual and successfull by his Intercession at God's right hand in Heaven Wherefore as Manoah's wife reasoned when her Husband had dreadfull apprehensions of the Majesty of God who had appeared to them and concluded they should die Because they had seen God No saith she if God intended to destroy us he would not have appeared to us or much less have accepted a Sacrifice at our hands So assuredly if God had not great compassion to mankind and did not design to accept them upon repentance he would never have given his own Son to be a Sacrifice for sin Can any man suspect that God is indifferent whether men be saved or no when he hath sent his Son to save them Can any man imagine him implacable towards those whose nature he sent his Son to assume and thereby to make an union betwixt the divine and humane Natures Will any man think him inexorable to sinners who pitied them healed them conversed with them and died for them Let Devils despair who have not only no promise and no Saviour but nothing pitiable in their case having had no tempter to abuse them no flesh or body to clog them no infirmity to extenuate their presumption they are without hope and therefore incapable of repentance and so go on eternally to hate and blaspheme the God that will not pardon them But there is no cause man should do so who as he hath all the arguments of pity in his case so hath all the assurances of pardon from God upon his repentance TO say no more the very constant experience of all Ages and the common sense of all mankind leaves us without all doubt that this method of repentance pacifies the Almighty insomuch that when he hath most exprest his angry resentments and seems to have been most peremptory and decretal in his threatnings yet all but mad and desperate persons have incouraged themselves to hope for impunity upon repentance even then when there hath not been the least intimation of any such condition in his denunciations for thus when the Prophet Jonas had from the mouth of God proclaimed expresly Yet forty days and