Selected quad for the lemma: spirit_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
spirit_n	baptize_v	ghost_n	holy_a	6,694	5	6.0083	4	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A43071	A sermon preached at St. Olave Southwark, September the 8th, 1700 occasioned by the recantation of Dr. Joh. Spire, lately a Quaker : which said recantation is added at the end / by John Haslewood ...	Haslewood, John, b. 1647.; Spire, John. Oration at the parish-church of St. Olave-Southwark.	1700 (1700)	Wing H1132; ESTC R14553	11,771	28

that will not part with his Iniquity and his Ruin is to lay to his charge an unjust Sentence and as a necessary consequent thereto an undue Execution of it Let us not therefore please our selves with the vain delusions of being God's special Favourites when our hearts are not right towards him for doubtless only those that live to him here shall live with him hereafter Give me leave to make some Application of what hath been delivered to the present occasion and I shall conclude I do not pretend to have given you here a Catalogue of all the false Doctrines of Quakers which are as much too numerous to be recited as they are too foul to be owned What I have concerned my self with have been only such as have come in my way and could not fairly be avoided And those I look upon as sufficient to vindicate their prudence and honesty who have forsaken them and their Errors and have come out from among them that they might not be partakers of their Sins And I hope that those who have thus deliberately chosen to walk together with us in the House of God as Friends will never bring any scandal upon our Profession whilst they own it nor upon themselves by forsaking it will never hearken to any Sophistry that either the Tempter himself or any of his Agents shall make use of for the seducing them back again to those Principles and Practises which they have so wisely and so solemnly renounced For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness then after they have known it to turn from the holy Commandment dilivered unto them For a relapse as it is more dangerous so when it may be prevented it is more culpable too then the first beginning of a disease But I am perswaded better things of them that hear me now and things that accompany Salvation though I thus speak And to the end that you and they may be rooted and grounded in the true faith of our Church I shall briefly shew you her temper i. e. draw some of the great lines by which she may be known for I have neither time nor ability to represent her at large and give you a full view of all her excellencies In the first place then She Accounts no Doctrine necessary to Salvation but what is either expresly founded upon or by direct consequence deduced from Scripture which is the Pillar and ground of Truth to which with all the Saints that are and have been upon earth and such as excell in Virtue she pays a most profound Veneration and takes it as David did for a Lanthern to her feet and a light unto her Path. So very different is her treatment of it from that of Quakers who vilify it as a thing of nought and therefore in a style as peculiar to them as their behaviour dishonour it with the contemptuous Names of Dust Death and Serpents Meat (C) G. Fox's News out of the North Pa. 14. And it is plain they are not conversant in it For then would they cease to talk and act so foolishly and so wickedly as they do It being one of the great excellencies of sacred Writ to give wisdom und understanding unto the simple She doth indeed insist upon the two Sacraments of Baptisme and the Lords Supper And very good reason she hath for so doing because they are of Divine Institution The former was established by our Saviour when he gave his Disciples a Commission to go and baptize all Nations in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost And when he hath enacted it as a law That all his followers shall be received into his Church by that laver of Regeneration can any one forbid them Water that they should not be baptized And as for that other Sacrament of the Lords Supper certainly it must be a strange Spirit of opposition that possesseth them who gainsay it for can there be any thing more endearing than our Lords appointing that perpetual feast except it be the love that made him do so Is his precious Blood-shedding become so vile in our Eyes that we cannot bear the remembrance of it And yet neither the benefit nor the sacredness of the Institution could restrain a Blasphemous Quaker from this unsufferably vile Reflection upon it Their Communion Bread and Wine is the Table of Devils and Cup of Devils (D) G. Foxe's News out of the North Pa. 14. And yet some of the inferiours of this wicked Crew have payed Divine Honours to this vile Wretch and W. Pen hath since vindicated them (D) W Pen. Judas and the Jews Pa. 44. Surely St. Paul took it for granted that his Corinthians neither would nor should abstain from it when he only directed them how to prepare themselves for it Let a man examine himself and so let him eat of that bread and drink of that Cup 1. Cor. 11.28 And if this be not a standing Duty never to be let fall certainly the Apostle would not have recommended it to us by such an engaging account as he hath given us at V. 26. of the fore-mentioned Chapter as often as ye eat this Bread and drink this Cup ye do shew or shew ye the Lords Death till he come till the end of all things when the whole World shall be dissolved and this beautiful Frame of the Universe be first reduced to Ashes and then to nothing Nor is She more intent upon purity of Doctrine than that of Life and therefore requires Holiness in all her Professors so that if any of them are wicked Livers they are not so by her Indulgence but their own depraved inclinations Their ungodliness therefore can be no just imputation to her the strictness of whose rules is a sufficient proof of her love of Virtue and hatred of Vice I own indeed that she requireth a conformity to a few innocent Ceremonies not that she looketh upon them as absolutely necessary but only as fit to be observed for the sake of good Order Decency and Edification which is the sole cause of her injoyning them And to lay them aside would be of more mischievous consequence than some of their oppugners apprehend or perhaps would consent to if they did for they seem to me to have the same kind of usefulness that leaves have which if they be not too numerous are both an Ornament to the Tree and a Fence to the Fruit. And now that I may not be suspected to have any By-end in what I have delivered as if I had not spoken the very Thoughts of my Heart I do with all imaginable Sincerity make this Wish may my Portion in the next World be with those that are true Members of the Church of England who walk worthy of that their Profession may I have the Reward which God in his Mercy for his dear Son's Sake shall bestow upon them whose Faith and Practise are agreeable to her Doctrines and

false Witnesses it will be as impossible to support the veracity and credit of the other Writers of the New Testament as it is to keep up a Superstructure after the Foundation is taken away And the Scripture not only bears Testimony to the Article it self but to all them that acknowledge it For every Spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the Flesh is of God saith St. John and whosoever confesseth that Jesus Christ is the Son of God God dwelleth in him and he in God 1 John 4.2 15. And then as for them who set their faces against him who is declared to be the power and wisdom of God and tell us only of a Christ within we may very well allow them to have the Spirit but it is only that of lying But I would demand of these Men whether or no the Christ within was crucified dead and buried at Jerusalem and rose again the third day Whether he was afterwards seen by hundreds of People and did eat with the Apostles and convinced them that what they saw was a real Body by shewing them his Hands and Feet All which are expresly affirmed of our Saviour and therefore nothing but an infinite clemency could make him still endure such contradiction of Sinners against himself And yet it is the most common practise imaginable of Quakers to contemn and revile all those who speak to them of the coming of that just one of whom the Jews were the betrayers and the murderers Acts 7.52 Nay some of them have been so prodigiously audacious as to bespatter him with such foul and contemptuous expressions as I am afraid to utter and cannot think of without extreme horrour and amazement * What I here allude to may be seen in the Snake in the Grass Vol. 1. Pag. 78. The Author of which Book 1 know to be a Person of too great sincerity to affirm any thing positively which he is not sure of But if he hath accused them wrongfully it is somewhat strange that they should not call him to account for it I suppose their fondness of him is no inducement to conceal such a failing And then wherewithal shall they be cleansed who thus despise that Blood which alone can purify them from their Sins What Laver will be sufficient to wash away this deep stain of Infidelity But Lord Though they thus blaspheme the Name of thy Dear Son grant that we may earnestly beg and effectually obtain the Benefits of his Passion and turn that Curse of the Jews upon themselves into a Blessing upon us and let his Blood be upon us and our Children for our good But can Faith alone save us Will it be enough to fix our eye upon God No my Text requireth us to Incline our ear to him to fulfil his holy Will and Commandments or with a truly humble and contrite Heart to implore his Mercy for our manifold Sins and Trangsressions We must therefore in the next place come to him by Repentance 2. And this I suppose all but Quakers will grant to be necessary to Salvation that every one must either lead a good life or repent of a bad one But with them indeed it is a toyl as insignificant as tedious there being no need of their contrition who cannot offend for why should they afflict their Souls who are arrived to a sinless Perfection Which is an happiness that these mortified and humble Creatures lay claim to And therefore a great Preacher among them represents a Quaker as meeker than Moses stronger than Samson wiser than Solomon and more patient than Job Nay farther harmless and innocent as Christ himself (a) W. Shewen's Treatise concerning Thoughts and Imaginations P. 25. Whatever instances there may be of humane infirmities it is beneath a Quaker to increase the number for he boasts of as great a security from Sin as the Psalmist promised himself from bodily evilds Tho' a thousand should fall beside him and ten thousand at his right hand yet should not wickedness come nigh him for amidst all the Spoils of Sin and Corruption he is resolved to remain untouched and in this sense to be free among the dead I grant indeed that Scripture seems to favour this Principle and to allow of a state of unsinning Obedience when it affirms some to be so innocent as to need no Repentance but I conceive the meaning of that place to be no more than this that though they are within the state of Grace and so need not Repentance as it is a conversion of the whole yet they do need contrition for their single acts of Sin for how else could the Holy Spirit say That in many things we offend all And why did our Saviour in that absolute form of Prayer which he hath appointed bid us pray to Our Father which is in Heaven to forgive us our trespasses And let any one but consult the frailty of his own Nature and he will find the Diseases of his Soul to be at the least as numerous as those of his Body that betwixt his strayings and backslidings the burden of his Sins must needs be intolerable And then what way is there for him to obtain any ease but by casting that weight of his Sins from him By sweeping and garnishing his Soul not that those evil Spirits which had been ejected might return again or that other more unclean ones might be admitted in their stead but that the Holy Dove which loves not dark Houses might make his abode with him when he was become a Child of Light And to this consideration of our own weakness add we that other no less weighty one of the subtlety and watchfulness of our Enemy who hath been long practised in the arts of treachery and insinuation and knows too well when and how to seize upon our affections with the least difficulty and greatest success Now if we live thus in perpetual dangers both within and without how is it possible for us to be sure that we shall always escape them that we shall neither willfully betray our selves nor fall into our Enemy's hand unawares That we shall neither run nor be lead into captivity He therefore that thinks himself above Repentance needs it most of all and that very Pride of heart calls for plenty of Tears and Ashes for the deepest sighing and the humblest prostration I conclude then that since in God's sight no Man living can be justified the most righteous Person must necessarily stand in need of Pardon and the way for him to obtain it is to plead guilty that so he may avert that Wrath which he had deserved and regain that Mercy which he had forfeited And this brings me to my next Head viz. The encouragement that God hath given to all People to incline their ear and come unto him that he will give them the sure Mercies of David make them partakers of a joyful Resurrection 2. But if this be the certain reward of true Faith and Repentance