A27017:1849
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.
why every one of these gripes that I feel are but the cutting of the stitches for the ripping off mine old attire, that God may clothe me with the glory of his Saints; Had I rather live in these rotten rags, then be at the trouble and pains to shift me? Should the Infant desire to stay in the womb, because of the straitness and pains of the passage? or because he knows not the world that he is to come into? nor is acquainted with the fashions or inhabitants thereof? Am I not nearer to my desired rest, then ever I was? If the remembrance of these griefs will increase my joy, when I shall look back upon them from above; why then should not the remembrance of that joy abate my griefs, when I look upwards▪ to it from below? And why should the present feeling of these dolours so much diminish the foretasts of Glory, when the remembrance of them will then increase it? All these ⟨p. 710⟩gripes and woes that I feel, are but the farewell of sin and sorrows: As Nature useth to struggle hard a little before death, and as the devil cast the man to the ground and tore him, when he was going out of him, Mark 9.26. so this tearing and troubling which I now feel, is but at the departure of sin and misery; for as the effects of Grace are sweetest at last, so the effects of sin are bitterest at the last, and this is the last that ever I shall taste of it: when once this whirlwind and earthquake is past, the still voice will next succeed; and God only will be in the voice, though sin also was in the earthquake and whirlwind.
why every one of these gripes that I feel are but the cutting of the stitches for the ripping off mine old attire, that God may cloathe me with the glory of his Saints; Had I rather live in these rotten raggs, then be at the trouble and pains to shift me? Should the Infant desire to stay in the womb, because of the straitness and pains of the passage? or because he knows not the world that he is to come into? nor is acquainted with the fashions or inhabitants thereof? Am I not neerer to my desired rest, then ever I was? If the remembrance of these griefs will increase my joy, when I shall look back upon them from above; why then should not the remembrance of that joy abate my griefs, when I look upwards▪ to it from below? And why should the present feeling of these dolors so much diminish the foretasts of Glory, when the remembrance of them will then increase it? All these