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Discourses Upon the Existence and Attributes of God (1840)
Discourses Upon the Existence and Attributes of God - 1840 Author:Stephen Charnock Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: pride; using the creatures contrary to the end God hath appointed. This is to dishonour God; and it is diabolical. Man would make himself the end of God. In lovi... more »ng God because of some self-pleasing benefits distributed by him; in abstinence from some sins, because they are against the interest of some other beloved corruption; in performing duties merely for a selfish interest, which is evident in unwieldiness in religious duties where self is not concerned; in calling upon God only in a time of neccessity; in begging his assistance to our own projects, after we have by our own craft laid the plot; in impatience upon a refusal of our desires; in selfish aims we have in our duties. This is a vilifying God, a dethroning him. In unworthy imaginations of God, universal in man by nature. Hence springs idolatry, superstition, presumption, the common diseases of the world. This is a vilifying God; worse than idolatry, worse than absolute atheism. Natural desires to bo distant from him. No desires for the remembrance of him. No desires of converse with him. No desires of a thorough return to him. No desire of any close imitation of him. DISCOURSE III. BEING A SPIRIT. Joiik iv. 24.—God ia a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. The words are part of the dialogue between our Saviour and the Samaritan woman. Christ intending to return from Judea to Galilee, passed through the country of Samaria, a place inhabited not by Jews, but a mixed company of several nations, and some remainders of the posterity of Israel, who escaped the captivity, and were returned from Assyria;1 and being weary with his journey, arrived about the sixth hour, or noon, (according to the Jews' reckoning the time of the day.) at the well that Jacob had digged, which w...« less