A general epistle to Friends, and professors of the truth.

A general epistle to Friends, and professors of the truth.

Table of contents

A General EPISTLE to Friends, and Professors of the Truth.

[Page]

A General EPISTLE to Friends, and Professors of the Truth.

DEAR FRIENDS,

WHo with the morning light of the eternal day have been visited, and by the Heavenly Voice of Christ Jesus called out of the world: I am to say unto You in my Fathers Councel, see that all your minds be gather'd down unto the feeling of, and cleaving unto the Immortal, Incorruptible Seed which bruiseth the Serpents head; of which Seed all must be born, or they cannot see the Kingdom of God, which is excellent in Celestial brightness and sweetness, full of Glory, Immortality, Peace, Joy and eternal life.

Oh Friends, every where in the Bowels of Christ Jesus, even in the earning of the Fathers love: I beseech you read and feel in the deep what you do know of this Blessed Work in which the happiness of the Immortal Soul comes; For there may be a coming out of Aegypt, and to the Law which was added because of Trans gression until the seed should come, yea, to the Prophets, who saw, and Prophecy'd of his coming, in which states there may be openings, and heavenly tasts, &c.

But the earnest welfare of the Soul is inwardly to experience through the working of the Divine hand of Him who is the good Husband-man, a cutting off from the wild Olive, and planting into the Vine of life, translating out of the nature and Kingdom of darkness, into the divine nature and kingdom: All that come here are born of the quickning spirit of the second man ADAM, the Lord from Heaven; here's the state which truly avails, even a new creature which in Christ Jesus hath right to enjoy the favour and presence of God the Father for ever, and for evermore.

Now Friends, all Professions of Religion under Heaven, under what name or denomination soever, without this work in some measure experienced, will do the Souls of man-kind no good.

Wherefore, all Friends, and Professors of Truth every where in the fear, dread and awe of the most high God, lie low before him, that so where this inexpressible precious work is not experienc'd, there might be a true waiting, and travailing in Spirit, in which a living cry and supplication will arise to the living God to accomplish it. And now unto all such that feel true longings, living breathings, and ardent desires in their Souls this blessed work to know; I say unto You in the name and power of the Lord in earning bowels of love, bow down in true tenderness of heart, and sincerity of Spirit to this seed of the Kingdom; if but little in appearance, even as a grain of Mustard-seed, be in love with it, and love its inward discoveries of the seed of the Serpent, its workings, and bringings forth; suffer with it, sorrow and mourn with it, give up not only to its discoveries, but also to it Judgement, that both the nature and works of the seed of the serpent may be destroy'd, and the heart sanctified, for the Soul can never come into oneness with the seed Immortal (nor be born of it) in which all the Promises are Yea, and Amen; but through the wasting, working under, and dectroying of the nature and work of the seed of the serpent which have been as a separating or partition-wall between the Soul and Christ Jesus; So, through becoming passive, and subject to the power of the working of this Immortal seed in the least and lowest appearance, it will bring evere one that is acquainted therewith, very low and tender in Spirit, possessing the heart and soul with the fear, dread and awe of the most high, and truly careful, and inwardly diligent to attend its tender secret motions, and sweet powerful workings in the Soul. Now tender People that come here, diligently and constantly cleave with your souls unto it, and you shall see and feel (as your Faith stands in it,) the working of it as leaven to leaven you into the divine nature; So be not weary of bearing the Cross, or continuing here in the deep expression of spirit, but persevere daily in the love of this immortal seed; so then coming to be born again, and brought forth by the power of its workings in the Soul, ye shall be tenderly nursed by the sincere milk of the word, which lives and abides for ever, of which you were begotten, and so grow up thereby to the day of Espousals in the Marriage-chamber of divine love and life, where the Soul is safe in the enjoyment of the unutterable Joy of the Lord God, and the lamb for ever.

God Almighty arise in in his great Power and bright Glory every where for the bringing forth the Birth of the morning of his sweet day, and laying waste every false Birth, and the works of it, to the magnifying and renowning his Blessed Name for ever, which is the breathing and travail of Your Tribulated Brother,

CH. MARSHALL.

POSTSCRIPT.

Dear Friends;

Every where, feel that Divine Hand, and Mighty Arm and your Subjection thereunto, that gathers out of the rollings and tossings of the Nations and People into the goodly Tents of Jacob, and sweet safe Habitation of Israel, where you may dwell alone out of the Defilements of the Nations, wbere the hidingplace will be known, until the word of the Lord be fulfilled, and his Indignation pass over to accomplish his own determination in the Earth, which he will hasten for his Elects sake, and for the Honour of his Great and Mighty Name, who is over all Heaven and Earth, God Almighty, Blessed for ever. Amen.

Tetherton in the County of Wilts, the 9th. of the 6th. Month, 1680.

Let this be carefully Read in the Meetings and Families of the Lords People in the Feeling Sense of Gods Presence and Tendering Powers.

Information about this book

Title statement

A general epistle to Friends, and professors of the truth.

Marshall, Charles, 1637-1698.

Edition statement

1680

Publication

Publisher

Text Creation Partnership,

Place of publication

Ann Arbor, MI ; Oxford (UK) :

Date

2008-09 (EEBO-TCP Phase 1).

ID [DLPS]

A89559

ID [STC]

Wing M740A

ID [STC]

ESTC R180381

ID [EEBO-CITATION]

45789358

ID [OCLC]

ocm 45789358

ID [VID]

172669

Availability

This keyboarded and encoded edition of the work described above is co-owned by the institutions providing financial support to the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership. This Phase I text is available for reuse, according to the terms of Creative Commons 0 1.0 Universal. The text can be copied, modified, distributed and performed, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Series

Early English books online.

Notes

(EEBO-TCP ; phase 1, no. A89559)

Transcribed from: (Early English Books Online ; image set 172669)

Images scanned from microfilm: (Early English Books, 1641-1700 ; 2645:1)

Source

— A general epistle to Friends, and professors of the truth., Marshall, Charles, 1637-1698..

Extent

1 sheet ([1] p.)

s.n.,. [London :: 1680]. (Signed: Ch. Marshall. ... the 9th. of the 6th month, 1680.) (Place of publication suggested by Wing.) (Reproduction of original in: Friends' Library (London, England).)

Creation

Created by converting TCP files to TEI P5 using tcp2tei.xsl, TEI @ Oxford.

Editorial practices

EEBO-TCP is a partnership between the Universities of Michigan and Oxford and the publisher ProQuest to create accurately transcribed and encoded texts based on the image sets published by ProQuest via their Early English Books Online (EEBO) database (http://eebo.chadwyck.com). The general aim of EEBO-TCP is to encode one copy (usually the first edition) of every monographic English-language title published between 1473 and 1700 available in EEBO.

EEBO-TCP aimed to produce large quantities of textual data within the usual project restraints of time and funding, and therefore chose to create diplomatic transcriptions (as opposed to critical editions) with light-touch, mainly structural encoding based on the Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org).

The EEBO-TCP project was divided into two phases. The 25,363 texts created during Phase 1 of the project have been released into the public domain as of 1 January 2015. Anyone can now take and use these texts for their own purposes, but we respectfully request that due credit and attribution is given to their original source.

Users should be aware of the process of creating the TCP texts, and therefore of any assumptions that can be made about the data.

Text selection was based on the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL). If an author (or for an anonymous work, the title) appears in NCBEL, then their works are eligible for inclusion. Selection was intended to range over a wide variety of subject areas, to reflect the true nature of the print record of the period. In general, first editions of a works in English were prioritized, although there are a number of works in other languages, notably Latin and Welsh, included and sometimes a second or later edition of a work was chosen if there was a compelling reason to do so.

Image sets were sent to external keying companies for transcription and basic encoding. Quality assurance was then carried out by editorial teams in Oxford and Michigan. 5% (or 5 pages, whichever is the greater) of each text was proofread for accuracy and those which did not meet QA standards were returned to the keyers to be redone. After proofreading, the encoding was enhanced and/or corrected and characters marked as illegible were corrected where possible up to a limit of 100 instances per text. Any remaining illegibles were encoded as <gap>s. Understanding these processes should make clear that, while the overall quality of TCP data is very good, some errors will remain and some readable characters will be marked as illegible. Users should bear in mind that in all likelihood such instances will never have been looked at by a TCP editor.

The texts were encoded and linked to page images in accordance with level 4 of the TEI in Libraries guidelines.

Copies of the texts have been issued variously as SGML (TCP schema; ASCII text with mnemonic sdata character entities); displayable XML (TCP schema; characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or text strings within braces); or lossless XML (TEI P5, characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or TEI g elements).

Keying and markup guidelines are available at the Text Creation Partnership web site.