A saint or a brute the certain necessity and excellency of holiness, &c. ...…

Oh miserable wretch! If thou hadst chosen God instead of thy sin, and the everlasting Kingdom instead of this world, thou wouldst not have been thus cast off in thy extremity: God would have stuck better to thee: Heaven would have proved a more durable Inheritance: For it is a Kingdom that cannot be moved, Heb. 12. 28. The day is near when thy despairing soul must take up this lamentation, [My dearest friends are now forsaking me, I must part with all that I laboured for, and delighted in. I have drunk up all my part of pleasure, and there is no more left. My merry company, and honours, and recreations are past and gone; I shall eat, and drink, and sport no more: but God would not have used me thus, if I had set my heart upon him and his Kingdom. Oh that I had chosen him, and made him my portion, and spent these thoughts, and cares, and labours, for the obtaining of his love, and promised Glory, which I spent for the pleasing and providing for my flesh. Then I should have had a happiness that death could not deprive ⟨p. 68⟩me of, and a Crown that fadeth not away. Neither life nor death, nor any creature could have separated me from his love. I need not then have gone out of the world as a prisoner out of the Gaol, to the ••rr and to the place of execution. My departing soul should not then need to have been afraid of falling into the hands of an unreconciled God, and so into the hands of the Devils as his executioners, nor of passing out of the flesh to hell.

Oh poor sinners, for how short a pleasure do you sell your hopes of everlasting Blessedness, and run your selves into endless pains! O what comparison is there between the time of your pleasure, and the everlastingness of your Punishment! How short a while is the cup at your mouths? or the drink in your bellies? or the harlot in your embracements? or the wealth of the world in your Possession? And how long a time must you pay for this in hell? How quickly are your merry hours past! but your torments will never be past. When your corpses are laid in the grave, men can say, [Now he hath done his satisfying the flesh and following the world] but never man can truly say, [Now he hath done suffering for it.] Your life of sin is passing as a dream, and your honours as a shadow, and all your business as a talc that is told: but the life of Glory which you rejected for this, would have endured for evermore. Suppose as many thousand years as there are sands on the Sea, or piles of grass on the whole earth, or hairs on the heads of all men in the world, yet when these many are past, the Joy of Saints and the Torments of the wicked are as far from an end as ever they were: The eternal God doth give them a duration, and make them eternal.