Categoria: John Smith (1618-1652)

At the season of the New Birth, says Sterry, ” God discovers Himself in the soul as a glorious ground, out of which thy life and thy Jesus spring up together by degrees, like twin-lilies— roses from the same stalk or root, which is Christ.” When the set time is come, nothing can withstand that…

To assist our conversion, we do well to consider these four questions : (1) What are we? By descending into our own being, and entering into ” the secretest retirement” of our own spirit, we shall discover that we are not our own original, but that there is ” some eternal thing ” above our…

The mystic or evangelical life is, according to Sterry’s teaching, a life in which man ministers unto God, offering up himself unto God “as a perpetual sacrifice in a flame of love,” and receiving from Him divine manifestations and communications according to the divine good pleasure, ” and all this with an open contemplation of…

In addition to various sermons, Sterry’s published works consist of The Spirit Convincing of Sin, London, 1645 ; Discourse of the Freedom of the Will, London, 1675—the preface to which, one writer has said ” will bear a comparison with Cudworth’s famous sermon on the same subject”; The Rise, Race and Royalty of the Kingdom…

Such as men themselves are, such will God Himself seem to be. It is the maxim of most wicked men, that the Deity is some way or other like themselves; their souls do more than whisper it, though their lips speak it not; and though their tongues be silent, yet their lives cry it upon…

To seek our divinity merely in books and writings, is to seek the living among the dead: we do but in vain seek God many times in these, where His truth too often is not so much enshrined as entombed: — no; intra te quaere Deum, seek for God within thine own soul; He is…

It hath been long since well observed, that every art and science hath some certain principles upon which the whole frame and body of it must depend; and he that will fully acquaint himself with the mysteries thereof, must come furnished with some Praecognita, or prolepsis that I may speak in the language of the…

In the discourse here printed John Smith gives in a few broad strokes the general method of this group; the paper was designed by him as “a necessary introduction” to his other discourses, his friend John Worthington says. As this looks at religion from the point of view of how man is to know God,…

One of the marked features of present Christian thinking is the refreshing and new expression which it is finding in the revival of the Greek theology over against the Latin: and of this movement John Smith was a notable forerunner. Theology has descended through the Latin branch of the church and in some directions had…