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By Justin Taylor

The short classic The Life of God in the Soul of Man originated as a private letter of spiritual counsel to a friend, but Scougal allowed it to be published in 1677, a year before his death. Sixty-eight years later, in the spring of 1735, Charles Wesley (1707-1788), whose mother Susanna had commended it to her sons, gave a copy of this little book to his friend George Whitefield (1714-1770). Upon reading it, Whitefield was convinced: “I must be born again, or be damned.” Whitefield testified that he “never knew what true religion was” until he read this book.

Who Was Henry Scougal?

Henry Scougal (1650-1678) was a Scottish minister, theologian, and author. Upon his graduation in 1665 from King’s College, University of Aberdeen, the 19-year-old was appointed professor of philosophy at the school. In 1673, after a one-year pastoral stint, he became professor of divinity at King’s, where he served until he died of tuberculosis five years later, just shy of his 28th birthday.

What Scougal Means by “True Religion”

By “true religion” Scougal means something like authentic spirituality or genuine Christianity. He is at pains to defend the term from common misconceptions among Christians. “I cannot speak of religion,” he writes, “but I must lament that, among so many pretenders to it, so few understand what it means.”

3 Places Where Religion Does Not Reside

Scougal identifies three places where religion is incorrectly located.

(1) Theological correctness. Some place religion “in the understanding, in orthodox notions and opinions; and all the account they can give of their religion is, that they are of this or the other persuasion, and have joined themselves to one of those many sects whereinto Christendom is most unhappily divided.”

by John Newton

“I know that the Lord is great — that our Lord is greater than all gods. The Lord does whatever pleases Him — in the heavens and on the earth, in the seas and all their depths!” Psalm 135:5-6

God rules all! And though He is concealed by a veil of second causes from common eyes, so that they can perceive only the means, instruments, and contingencies by which He works, and therefore think He does nothing; yet, in reality, He does all according to His own counsel and pleasure, in the armies of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth.

Who can enumerate all the beings and events which are… incessantly before His eye, adjusted by His wisdom, dependent on His will, and regulated by His power!

If we consider the heavens, the work of His fingers, the moon and the stars which He has ordained; if we call in the assistance of astronomers to help us in forming a conception of the number, distances, magnitudes, and motions of the heavenly bodies — the more we search, the more we shall be confirmed that these are but a small portion of His ways! Without His continual energy upholding them — they would rush into confusion, or sink into nothing! They are all dependent upon His power, and obedient to His command.

BY THOMAS WATSON

IN EPUB, .MOBI & .PDF FORMATS

Many modern Christians view the Christian life as one of ease and worldly blessings. Building on Jesus's words that "the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force" (Matt. 11:12),  the Puritans saw it, rather, as warfare, as wrestling, as "holy violence" against one's own self, against Satan, the world, and even heaven. We are called to take up the full armor of God in our daily battles. 

As Watson puts it, "Our life is military. Christ is our Captain, the gospel is the banner, the graces are our spiritual artillery, and heaven is only taken in a forcible way." In his typically heart-searching style, replete with practical illustrations and gripping remarks, Watson describes how the Christian is to take the kingdom of heaven by holy violence through the reading and exposition of Scripture, prayer, meditation, self-examination, conversation, and the sanctification of the Lord's Day. Soldiers of Christ will find this a practical handbook on Christian living.

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Table of Contents 

Introduction: Taking Heaven by Violence

Offering Violence to Ourselves

The Christian Must offer Violence to Satan

The Christian Must Offer Violence to Heaven

Arrows of Reproof and Apostasy

by W. G. T. Shedd

"God's works of providence are his most holy, wise, and powerful, preserving and governing all his creatures and all their actions" (Westminster Larger Catechism 18). Preservation and government are the two functions in the eternal providence of God. They presuppose creation. Preservation is described in Heb. 1:3 as an "upholding." The Son of God "upholds all things by the word of his power." Nothing that is created ex nihilo is self-sustaining. Consequently, it must be sustained in being. It would not require a positive act of omnipotence, antithetic to that exerted in creation from nothing, in order to annihilate created existences. Simple cessation to uphold would result in annihilation. For to suppose that matter, for example, could persist in being after the withdrawal of God's preserving power, with such an intensity as to necessitate a direct act of omnipotence to annihilate it, would imply that matter has self-existence and self-continuance. But this is an attribute that is incommunicable to the creature. This is true of finite mind, as well as of matter. Created spiritual substance is not immortal because it has self-subsistence imparted to it by the Creator, but because he intends to uphold and sustain it in being forever:

When we speak of the soul as created naturally immortal, we mean that it is by divine pleasure created such a substance as not having in itself any composition or other particles of corruption will naturally or of itself continue forever, that is, will not by any natural decay or by any power of nature be dissolved or destroyed; but yet nevertheless depends continually upon God, who has power to destroy or annihilate it if he should think fit (Clarke, Letter to Dodwell).