A26919:759
The divine life in three treatises
The divine life in three treatises ... by Richard Baxter.
London: printed for Francis Tyton, 1664
Title page typeset from the transcription.
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.
What comfort can you think such friends if they had survived, would have found on earth? Unless it were a comfort to hear the complaints of the afflicted, to see and hear such odious sins as sometimes vexed righteous Lot to see and hear; or to hear of the scandals of one friend, and the apostasy of another, and the sinful compliances and declinings of a third; and to be under temptations, reproaches and afflictions themselves? Is it a matter to be so much lamented that God hath prevented their greater miseries and woe?
What comfort can you think such friends if they had survived, would have found on earth? Unless it were a comfort to hear the complaints of the afflicted, to see and hear such odious sins as sometimes vexed righteous Lot to see and hear; or to hear of the scandals of one friend, and the apostasie of another, and the sinful compliances and declinings of a third; and to be under temptations, reproaches and afflictions themselves? Is it a matter to be so much lamented that God hath prevented their greater miseries and wo?
5. What was the world to your friends while they did enjoy it? Or what is it now, or like to be hereafter to your selves? was it so good and kind to them, as that you should lament ⟨p. 328⟩their separation from it? was it not to them a place of toil and trouble, of envy and vexation, of enmity and poison? of successive cares and fears and griefs? and worst of all, a place of sin? Did they groan under the burden of a sinful nature, a distempered, tempted, troubled heart of languishings and weakness of every grace; of the rebukes of God, the wounds of conscience, and the malice of a wicked world? And would you have them under these again? Or is their deliverance become your grief? Did you not often join in prayer with them, for deliverance from malice, calamities, troubles, imperfections, temptations and sin? and now those prayers are answered in their deliverance: and do you now grieve at that which then you prayed for!
5. What was the world to your friends while they did enjoy it? Or what is it now, or like to be hereafter to your selves? was it so good and kind to them, as that you should lament