A26701:405
The way to true happiness in a serious treatise /
The way to true happiness in a serious treatise / by Joseph Alleine.
London : Printed and are to be sold by Nevil Simmons, 1678
Title page typeset from the transcription.
Introduction › Chapter 7: Containing the Motives to Conversion.
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
Oh Rock! Oh Adamant! What not moved yet! not yet resolved to turn forthwith and to close with mercy! I will try thee yet once again: If one were sent to thee from the dead, wouldst thou be persuaded? Why hear the voice from the dead, from the damned, crying to thee that thou shouldst repent. I pray thee that thou wouldst send him to my fathers house: for I have five brethren, that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment. If one went unto them from the dead, they will repent, Luke 16. 27, 28. &c. Hear O man, thy Predecessors in impenitence Preach to thee from the infernal gibbets, from the flames, from the rack, that thou shouldst repent. O look down into the bottomless pit. Seest thou how the smoke of their torment ascendeth for ever and ever, Rev. 14. 11. How black are the fiends? How furious are their torments? 'Tis their only music to hear how their miserable patients roar, to hear their bones crack. 'Tis their meat and drink, to see how their flesh frieth ⟨p. 189⟩and their fat droppeth, to drench them with burning metal, and to rip open their bodies, and to pour in the fierce burning brass into their bowels, and the recesses and ventricles of their hearts. What thinkest thou of those chains of darkness, of those instruments of cruelty? Canst thou be content to burn? Seest thou how the worm gnaweth, how the oven gloweth? how the fire rageth? what sayest thou to that river of brimstone, that dark and horrible vault, that gulf of perdition? wilt thou take up thine habitation here? O lay thine •ar to the door of Hell. Hearest thou the curses and the blasphemies, the weepings and the wailings, how they lament their folly, and curse their day? Mat. 22. 13. Rev. 16. 9. How do they roar and yell, and gnash their teeth? how deep are their groans? how feeling are their moans? how unconceivable their miseries? If the shrieks of Corah, Dathan and Abiram, were so terrible (when the earth clave asunder, and opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and all that appertained to them,) that all Israel •led at the cry of them,