A27017:1597
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
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.
1SECT. XIX.
- 1§. 19.
10. Consider, thou hast had a competency of the comforts of life, and not of naked time alone. God might have made thy life a misery; till thou hadst been as weary of possessing it, as thou art now afraid of loosing it. If he had denied thee the benefits and ends of living, thy life would have been but a slender comfort. They in Hell have life as well as we, and longer far then they desire: God might have suffered thee to have consumed thy days in ignorance, or to have spent thy life to the last hour, before he brought thee home to himself, and given thee the saving Knowledge of Christ; and then thy life had been short, though thy time long. But he hath opened thine eyes in the morning of thy days, ⟨p. 591⟩and acquainted thee betimes with the trade of thy life. I know the best are but negligent loiterers, and spend not their time according to its worth; but yet he that hath an hundred years time, and looseth it all, lives not so long as he that hath but twenty, and bestows it well. Its too soon to go to Hell at an hundred years old, and not too soon to go to Heaven at twenty. The means are to be valued in reference to their end: That's the best means, which speediliest and surest obtaineth the end. He that hath enjoyed most of the ends of life, hath had the best life, and not he that hath lived longest. You that are acquainted with the life of Grace▪ what if you live but twenty or thirty years? would you change it for a thousand years of wickedness? God might have let you have lived like the ungodly world, and then you would have had cause to be afraid of dying. We have lived in a place and time of light; in Europe, not in Asia, Africa or America; in England, not in Spain or Italy; in the Age when Knowledge doth most abound, and not in our forefathers days of darkness; we have lived among Bibles, Sermons, Books, and Christians. As one Ace of fruitful soil, is better then many of barren Commons; as the possession of a Kingdom for one year, is better then a lease of a Cottage for twenty; so twenty or thirty years living in such a place, or age, as we, is better then Methuselahs age, in the case of most of the world besides. And shall we not then be contented with our proportion? If we who are Ministers of the Gospel, have seen abundant fruit of our labours; if God hath blessed our labours in seven years more then some others in twenty or thirty;