A26879:917
The catechizing of families a teacher of householders how to teach their householdsThe catechizing of families a teacher of housholders how to teach their housholds
The catechizing of families a teacher of householders how to teach their households : useful also to school-masters and tutors of youth : for those that are past the common small catechisms [sic], and would grow to a more rooted faith, and to the fuller understanding of all that is commonly needful to a safe, holy comfortable and profitable life / written by Richard Baxter ...The catechizing of families a teacher of housholders how to teach their housholds : useful also to school-masters and tutors of youth : for those that are past the common small chatechisms [sic], and would grow to a more rooted faith, and to the fuller understanding of all that is commonly needful to a safe, holy comfortable and profitable life / written by Richard Baxter ...
London: printed for T. Parkhurst, 1683
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.
A. Reason and Scripture confute this Dream. The Soul is Essential Life, naturally inclined to Action, Intellection and Love or Volition, and it will be in the midst of Objects enow on which to operate: And is it not absurd to think that God will continue so noble a Nature in a state of idleness, and continue all its essential Faculties in vain, and never to be exercised? As if he would continue the Sun without Light, Heat, or Motion. What then is it a Sun for? And why is it not annihilated? The Soul cannot lose its Faculties of Vitality, Intellection and Volition, without losing its Essence, and being turned into some other ⟨p. 168⟩thing. And why it cannot act out of a Body, what Reason can be given? If it could not, yet that it taketh not hence with it a Body of those corporeal Spirits which it acted in, or that it cannot as well have a Body of Light for its own Action, as it can take a Body (as Moses on the Mount) to appear to Man, is that which we have no reason to suspect.
2. But Scripture puts all out of doubt, by telling us, that To die is gain, and that it's better to be with Christ, and that Lazarus was comforted in Abraham's Bosom, and the converted Thief was with Christ in Paradise, and that the Souls under the Altar and in Heaven pray and praise God, and that the Spirits of the Just are there made perfect: And this is not a state of sleep. It is a World of Life, and Light, and Love, that we are going to, more active than this Earthy, heavy World, than Fire is more active than a Clod. And shall we suspect any sleepy unactivity there? This is the dead and sleepy World: And Heaven is the place of Life it self.
2. But Scripture puts all out of doubt, by telling us, that To die is gain, and that it's better to be with Christ, and that Lazarus was comforted in Abraham's Bosom, and the converted Thief was with Christ in Paradise, and that the Souls under the Altar and in Heaven pray and praise God, and that the Spirits of the Iust are there made perfect: And this is not a state of sleep. It is a World of Life, and Light, and Love, that we are going to, more active than this Earthy, heavy World, than Fire is more active than a Clod. And shall we suspect any sleepy unactivity there? This is the dead and sleepy World: And Heaven is the place of Life it self.