Preface to the Reader
-- BOOK IV: Though faith be a difficult work above our power, yet God commands us to use our utmost endeavours to believe
---- CHAPTER I: Though faith be a difficult work above all our abilities, yet God commands us to use our utmost endeavours to believe, and it is our duty so to do.
---- CHAPTER II: Discouragements against using our endeavours to believe, which arise from the thoughts of the difficulty of faith, as being above our own, power, considered and answered.
---- CHAPTER III: That the sense of heinous sins is another great hindrance of faith, which disheartens men from endeavouring to believe.
---- CHAPTER IV: That men should not be discouraged from believing by the doctrine of election.
---- CHAPTER V: Some general considerations premised to open a way for the following directions to guide us in our endeavours to believe.
---- CHAPTER VI: Directions given to guide us in our endeavouring to believe.
----
A PREFACE TO THE READER
As in this fourth volume of the author's works, which by the generous encouragement of some few worthy gentlemen, who in a noble zeal
to promote the doctrines of the gospel, engaged to take off the whole impression, there are great and important truths discoursed with the same life and spirit which shined in the former, so I doubt not but it will find the same grateful acceptance. After the discourse of the person and mediation of our blessed Lord Jesus, which you had in the third volume, it naturally follows in order to have the knowledge of the genuine nature of that faith which looks to the Mediator, and comes to him from an interest in his person, sacrifice, blood, and righteousness. You have first the infinite mercies of God's nature displayed as far as man's thoughts and words can reach them, proposed as the great object which a believer regards, as the spring of all those acts of grace exerted in saving a sinner, and in which he trusts and hopes. You have then the promises, which are nothing but the mercies of the divine nature, and his gracious purposes proclaimed to, us, and so are absolute as they themselves are, proposed as another object which the soul considers in believing.
You have then Jesus Christ set forth as the great object of faith in his person God-man; and it is indeed a sufficient argument to prove his divinity, that we are commanded to believe on him; nor could we have a certain and undoubted faith in him if he were not God: for what assured confidence and hope could we have in a creature, whose goodness, wisdom, and power, in the highest excellence of them, are imperfect and defective? The author therefore insists on it, that the true believer who heartily comes to Christ for life and salvation, regards him as the Son of God, and looks to and considers the spiritual excellencies of his person. He is the object of faith, too, in respect of what he hath done and suffered for our salvation, and of what he at present doth. He is the object of faith proposed to us in his death, resurrection, and intercession: and therefore I once had thoughts to have drawn into this discourse of the object and acts of faith, as into their proper place, those treatises of the triumph of faith in Christ's death, resurrection, and intercession, which were many years ago printed in quarto by my dear father himself. But when I considered that that excellent book is in so many hands, and perhaps the most of them who will have this volume have that already, I apprehended it would look like a wrong, and an imposing
upon them, to reprint it again, to make them pay for what they had already. Therefore the reader is to take notice, that the latter end of the title of the second book in this first part of the object of faith, directs him to those discourses of the triumph of faith which are in the quarto volume.
The second part of this treatise is concerning the acts of faith, in which that chapter about joy in the Holy Ghost was his Concio ad
Clerum, which the author made when he commenced Bachelor of Divinity in Cambridge, but finding in his papers that he designed it to be a part of this discourse, and not finding that he had done it into English himself, I translated it, that it might be suitable to the other parts, though my English doth not reach the eloquence of his Latin.
The third part treats of the properties of faith, and in it you have discouragements removed, and the Arminian objections answered.
They reproach us, that by depriving men unregenerate of power to believe, and by ascribing the work of faith entirely to grace, we make men's endeavours to believe impossible, and all their attempts of this nature frivolous and vain. The author, with great strength of thought and clearness of expression, baffles these unreasonable cavils, and shews how the prevailing and always victorious grace of God and our endeavours may very well be consistent together.
In the discourse of the order and government of the churches of Christ,* though the author hath drawn down those forms which have been erected by men, and fashioned to suit with the political regiment of kingdoms, and hath in the room of it asserted that order which is of Christ's own institution, which, though it doth not dazzle and take men's vain minds with any appearance of greatness and state, yet sufficiently recommends itself by its own plain native beauty. Though it is not pompous, yet it is handsome; though it is not framed according to the admired rules of human policy, yet it is orderly, and so perfectly suited by the wisdom of the Great King of saints to the cases, circumstances, and necessities of them his subjects in all ages, so fitted to prevent corruption both of doctrine