Selected quad for the lemma: spirit_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
spirit_n	abide_v	able_a	day_n	22	3	3.5934	3	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A27065	The vain religion of the formal hypocrite, and the mischief of an unbridled tongue (as against religion, rulers, or dissenters) described, in several sermons, preached at the Abby in Westminster, before many members of the Honourable House of Commons, 1660 ; and The fools prosperity, the occasion of his destruction : a sermon preached at Covent-Garden / by Richard Baxter.	Baxter, Richard, 1615-1691.; Baxter, Richard, 1615-1691. Fools prosperity.	1660 (1660)	Wing B1448; ESTC R13757	102,825	412

say that there is none of them all but when they shall come unto their beds of death and are to grapple immediately with the painful terrours of the King of fears and to stand or fall to the dreadful tribunal of the living God then except the Lord suffer them to fall into the fiery lake with senseless hearts and seared consciences would give ten thousand worlds were they all turned into gold pleasures and imperial crowns to change their former courses of vanity c. into a life of holy preciseness strictness sincerity and salvation Oh! when the heavens shall shrivel together like a scroll and the whole frame of nature flame about their ears when the great and mighty hills shall start out of their places like frighted men and the fearful reprobate cry and call upon this mountain and that rock to fall upon him when as no Dromedary of Egypt nor wings of the morning shall be able to carry them out of the reach of Gods revenging hand no top of Carmel no depth of sea or bottom of hell to hide them from the presence of him that sits upon the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb no rock nor mountain nor the great body of the whole earth to cover them from that unresistible power that laid the foundations of them no arm of flesh or armies of Angels to protect them from those infinite rivers of brimstone which shall be kept in everlasting flames by the anger of God when their poor and woeful souls shall infinitely desire rather to return into the loathed darkness of not being and to be hid for ever in the most abhorred state of annihilation then now to become the everliving objects of that unquenchable wrath which they shall never be able to avoid or to abide and to be chained up by the omnipotent band of God among the damned spirits in a place of flames and perpetual darkness where is torment without end and past imagination I say at that dreadful day and that day will come what do you think would they give for part in that Purity which now they persecute and for the comforts of true-hearted holiness that now they hate and yet without which as it will clearly appear when matters are brought before that high and everlasting Judge non shall ever see the Lord or dwell in the joyes of eternity Nay I verily think there are no desperate despisers of godliness or formal opposites to grace which do now hold Holiness to be Hypocrisie Sanctification singularity practice of sincerity too much preciseness but when the pit of d●struction hath once shut her mouth upon them and they are sunk irrecoverably into that dungeon of fire would be content with all their hearts to live a million of years as precisely as ever Saint did upon earth to redeem but one moment of that torment so p. 159. The common conceit of these men is that civil honest men are in the state of grace and that formal professors are very forward and without exception but true Christians indeed are Puritans Irregularists exorbitants transcendents to that ordinary pitch of formal piety which in their carnal comprehensions they hold high enough for heaven They either conceit them to be Hypocrites and so the only objects for the exercise of their Ministerial severity and the terrours of God or else though the Lord may at last pardon perhaps their singularities and excesses of zeal yet in the mean time they dissweeten and vex the comforts and glory of this life with much unnecessary strictness and abridgement Now of all others such Prophets as these are the only men with the Formal Hypocrite exactly fitted and suitable to his humour for however they may sometime declaim boysterously N. B. against gross and visible abominations and that is well yet they are no searchers into nor censurers of the state of Formality and therefore do rather secretly and silently encourage him to sit faster upon that sandy foundation then help to draw him forward to more forwardness c. See also his description of a Puritan p. 132. So in his Direct for walking with God p. 172. Good-fellow meetings and Ale-house revellings are the drunkards delight but all the while he sits at it he is perhaps in a bodily fear of the Puritan Constable Many such Passages tell you how the word Puritan was commonly interpreted in Oxford Northamptonshire and whereever Learned and Holy Mr. Bolton was acquainted And having mentioned his testimony of the use of that word I shall add somewhat of his discovery of this spirit of malignity and detraction that worketh in the Antipuritans In his Disc of Hap. p. 190 191. he saith The reverence and respectful carriage to godly Ministers which may sometimes be found in the Formal Hypocrite doth grow towards distast and disaffection when they press them by the powerful sense and piercing application of some quickning Scriptures to a fervency in spirit purity of heart preciseness in their walking supernatural singularity above ordinary and moral perfections excellency of zeal and a sacred violence in pursuit of the Crown of life to an holy strictness extraordinary striving to enter in at the strait gate and transcendent eminency over the formal righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees to a nearer familiarity with God by prayer daily examination of conscience private humiliations meditation upon the endless duration in a second life to a narrow watch over the stirrings and imaginations of the heart and expression of holiness in all the passages of both their callings c. Points and ponderations of which nature are ordinarily to him so many secret seeds of indignation and many times breed in his formal heart and cold affection exasperation and estrangement if not meditations of persecution and revenge Sanctification preciseness purity holiness zeal strictness power of godliness spiritual men holy brethren Saints in Christ Communion of Christians godly conferences conceived prayers sanctifying the Sabbath family exercises exercise of fasting and mortifying humiliations and such like are commonly to men of thus temporising temper and lukewarm constitution terms of secret terrour and open taunting And sometimes they villanously sport themselves with them and make them the matter of their hateful and accursed jeasts that so they may keep under as much as they can in disestimation and contempt the faithful Professors and Practisers thereof whom naturally they heartily hate and also seem thereby to bear out the heartless stourishes of their own formality with greater bravery Hereupon it is that if they take a child of God but tripping in the least infirmity against which too perhaps he strives and prayes with many tears c. slipping only in some unadvised precipitant passage of his negotiations c. they take on unmeasurably then they cry out These are your men of the spirit these are the holy brethren these are your precise fellows these are they which make such shew of Purity and forwardness you see now what they are