The divine life in three treatises

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 ⟨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 joyn 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!

Doth the world use your selves so well and kindly, as that you should be sorry that your friends partake not of the feast? Are you not groaning from day to day your selves? and are you grieved that your friends are taken from your griefs? you are not well pleased with your own condition: when you look into your hearts you are displeased and complain: when you look into your lives, you are displeased and complain: when you look into your families, into your neighbourhoods, unto your friends, unto the Church, unto the Kingdom, unto the world, you are displeased and complain: And are you also displeased that your friends are not under the same displeasedness and complaints as you? Is the world a place of Rest or trouble to you? And would you have your friends to be as far from Rest as you?