A27017:1670
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.
SECT. VIII.1
- 1§. 8.
6. Consider, The frequent believing views of Glory, are the most precious cordial in all Afflictions. First, To sustain our spirits, and make our sufferings far more easy. Secondly, To stay us from repining, and make us bear with patience and joy: And thirdly, to strengthen our resolutions, that we forsake not Christ for fear of trouble. Our very Beast will carry us more cheerfully in travel, when he is coming homeward, where he expecteth Rest. A man will more quietly endure the lancing of his sores, the cutting out the Stone, when he thinks on the ease that will afterwards follow. What then will not a believer endure, when he thinks of the Rest, to which it tendeth? What if the way be never so rough? can it be tedious, if it lead to Heaven? O sweet sickness! 1Sweet Reproaches! Imprisonments! or Death! Which is accompanied with these tastes of our future Rest! This doth keep the suffering from the soul, so that it can work upon no more but our fleshly outside; even as Alexipharmical Medicines preserve the heart, that the contagion reach not the vital spirits. Surely, our sufferings trouble not the mind, according to the degrees of bodily pain; but as the soul is more or less fortified with this preserving Antidote. Believe it, Reader, thou wilt have a doleful sickness, thou wilt suffer heavily, thou wilt die most sadly, if thou have not at hand the foretasts of Rest. For my own part (if thou regard the experience of one that hath often tried) had it not been ⟨p. 624⟩for that little (alas too little) taste which I had of Rest, my sufferings would have been grievous, and death more terrible. I may say as David, Psal. 27.13. I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the Land of the living. And as the same David,