A27017:1457
The Saints' Everlasting Rest
The saints everlasting rest, or, A treatise of the blessed state of the saints in their enjoyment of God in glory wherein is showed its excellency and certainty, the misery of those that lose it, the way to attain it, and assurance of it, and how to live in the continual delightful forecasts of it and now published by Richard Baxter ...The saints everlasting rest, or, A treatise of the blessed state of the saints in their enjoyment of God in glory wherein is shewed its excellency and certainty, the misery of those that lose it, the way to attain it, and assurance of it, and how to live in the continual delightful forecasts of it and now published by Richard Baxter ...
London: printed by Rob. White for Thomas Underhil and Francis Tyton, 1650
THE SAINTS Everlasting REST. PART. III. › Chapter 12 › Section 11
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.
II. I entreat you that are parents also to consider, what excellent advantages you have above all others for the saving of your children.
II. I intreat you that are parents also to consider, what excellent advantages you have above all others for the saving of your children.
1. They are under your hands while they are young and tender and flexible; But they come to Ministers when they are grown elder, and stiffer, and settled in their ways, and think themselves too good to be catechised, and too old to be taught. You have a twig to bend, and we an oak. You have the young plants of sin to pluck up, and we the deep rooted vices. The consciences of children are not so seared with a custom of sinning and long resisting grace, as others. You have the soft and tender earth to plough in, and we have the hard and stony ways, that have been ⟨p. 535⟩trodden on by many years practice of evil. When they are young' their understandings are like a sheet of white paper, that hath nothing written on; and so you have opportunity to write what you will. But when they are grown up in sin, they are like the same paper written over with falsehoods; which must all be blotted out again, and truth written in the place: and how hard is that? We have a double task, first to unteach them, and then to teach them better; but you have but one. We must unteach them all that the world, and flesh, and wicked company, and the devil have been diligently teaching them in many years time. We have hardened hearts to beat on, like a Smiths Anvil, that will not feel us: We may tell them of death and Judgment, heaven and hell, and they hear us as if they were asleep or dead; you have the soft clay to mould, and we the hardened burned bricks. You have them before they are possessed with prejudice, and false conceits against the truth: but we have them to teach, when they have many years lived among those that have scorned at godliness, and taught them to think Gods ways to be foolish preciseness. Custom hath not ensnared and engaged your little ones to contrary ways: But of old sinners, the Lord himself hath said, that if the Ethiopian can change his skin, and the Leopard his spots; then may those that are accustomed to do evil, learn to do well,