The divine life in three treatises

Answ. Is this your case? I pray you answer these few Questions, and suffer the truth to have its proper work upon your mind.

Quest. 1. Who was it that deprived you of your friend? was it not God? Did not he that gave him you take him from you? Was it not his Lord and owner that called him home? And can God do any thing injuriously or amiss? will you not give him leave to do as he list with his own? Dare you think that there was wanting either wisdom or goodness, justice or mercy in Gods disposal of your friend? Or will you ever have Rest, if you cannot have Rest in the will of God?

Quest. 1. Who was it that deprived you of your friend? was it not God? Did not he that gave him you take him from you? Was it not his Lord and owner that call'd him home? And can God do any thing injuriously or amiss? will you not give him leave to do as he list with his own? Dare you think that there was wanting either wisdom or goodness, justice or mercy in Gods disposal of your friend? Or will you ever have Rest, if you cannot have Rest in the will of God?

2. How know you what sin your friend might have fallen into, if he had lived as long as you would have him? You'll say, that God could have preserved him from sin: It's true: but God preserveth sapientially, by means, as well as omnipotentially: And sometime he seeth that the temptations to that person are like to be so strong, and his corruption like to get such advantage, and that no means is so fit as Death it self, for his preservation. And if God had permitted your friend by temptation to have fallen into some scandalous sin, or course of evil, or into errors or false ways, would it not have been much worse then death to him and you? God might have suffered your friend that was so faithful, to have been sifted and shaken as Peter was, and to have denied his Lord; and to have seemed in your own eyes, as odious as he before seemed amiable.