Henry Scougal's classic little book The Life of God in the Soul of Man has had a massive impact on many, including George Whitefield who said he "never knew what true religion was" until he read it. Fred Sanders includes it as one of his ten favourite theology books. You can read the book online for free, but I'd also recommend JI Packer's introduction to the CFP edition, which is also online. He sings its praises but he also offers a helpful corrective:
One could wish, however, that his exposition had been more explicitly and emphatically Christ-centred. Like so many seventeenth-century writers, he lets himself assume that his readers know all about Jesus and need only to be told about real religion, the life of faith and faith-full turning Godward as opposed to the orthodoxism, formalism, emotionalism and legalism that masquerade as Christianity while being in truth a denial of it. Had Scougal elaborated on the Christian’s union with Christ, which the New Testament sees as regeneration by the Holy Spirit; had he explained incorporation into the Saviour’s risen life, whereby Jesus’s motivating passion to know and love and serve and please and honour and glorify the Father is implanted in sinners so that it is henceforth their own deepest desire too; had he thus shown, in black and white, that imitating Jesus’s aims and attitudes in serving God and mankind is for the born-again the most natural, indeed the only natural, way of living, while for the unregenerate it is hard to the point of impossible; his little treatise would have been immeasurably stronger. As it is, Scougal’s profile of divine life in human souls is much more complete than his answer to the question, how do I get into it? – or, how does it get into me? This is a limitation.
