Three treatises of the vanity of the creature. The sinfulness of sin. The life…Three treatises of the vanity of the creature. The sinfulnesse of sinne. The life…

Is not the poor soul in my bosom an immortal soul? Must it not have a being, as long as there is a God who is able to support it? And will not my bags and titles, my pleasures and preferments, ⟨p. 456⟩my learning and natural endowments, every thing save my sins and mine adversaries, and mine own Conscience forsake me, when I once enter into that immortality? When a man I say shall begin to summon his heart unto such sad accounts as these, how will his face gather blackness, and his knees tremble, and his heart be even damped and blasted with amazement in the middest of all the vanities and lies of this present world? What a fearful thing is it for an eternal soul to have nothing between it, and eternal misery to rest upon, but that which will moulder away and crumble into dust under it, and so leave it alone to sink into bottomless calamity? O Beloved, when men shall have passed many millions of years in another world, which no millions of years can shorten or diminish, what accession of comfort can then come to those glorious joys which we shall be filled with in Heaven, or what diminution or mitigation of that unsupportable anguish which without ease or end must be suffered in Hell, by the remembrance of those few hours of transitory contentments, which we have here, not without the mixture of much sorrow and allay enjoyed? What smack or relish think you hath Dives now left him of all his delicacies, or Esau of his pottage? What pleasure hath the rich fool of his full Barnes, or the young man of his great possessions? What delight hath Jezebel in her paint, or Ahab in the Vineyard purchased with the innocent blood of Him that owned it? How much policy hath Ahithophel, or how much pomp hath Herod, or how much rhetoric hath Tertullus left to escape or to bribe the torments, which out of Christ they must for ever suffer? O how infinitely doth it concern the Soul of every man to find this Life of Christ to rest upon, which will never forsake him till it bring him to that day of Redemption, wherein he shall be filled with blessedness infinitely proportionable to the most vast ⟨p. 457⟩and unlimited capacities of the Creature.

Is not the poore soule in my bosome an immortall soule? Must it not have a being, as long as there is a God who is able to support it? And will not my bagges and titles, my pleasures and preferments, ⟨p. 456⟩