The Saints' Everlasting Rest

I will therefore here prove these three things in order thus. First, That there is such a state for man hereafter. Secondly, That it is necessary that he know it, and the way to be so happy. Thirdly, That Nature and Creatures do not sufficiently reveal it.

For the first, I take it for granted, that there is a God, because Nature teacheth that, and I shall pass over those Arguments drawn from his righteousness and just dispensations, to prove the variety of mens future conditions, because they are commonly known; and I shall now argue from sense it self, because that works best with sensual men: and that thus. If the devil be very diligent to deceive men of that Happiness, and bring them to that misery, then sure there is such a Happiness and Misery; but the former is true, Ergo the later. They that doubt of the Major Proposition do most of them doubt whether there be any devil, as well as whether he seek our eternal undoing. I prove both together. First, By his Temptations: Secondly, Apparitions. Thirdly, Possessions and dispossessions. Fourthly, His Contracts with Witches. I hope these are palpable Discoveries.

1. The temptations of Satan are sometime so unnatural, so ⟨p. 237⟩violent, and so importunate, that the tempted person even feels something besides himself, persuading and urging him: He cannot go about his calling, he cannot be alone, but he feels somewhat following him, with persuasions to sin, yea, to sins that he never found his nature much inclined to, and such as bring him no advantage in the world, and such as are quite against the temperature of his body. Doth it not plainly tell us that there is a Devil, labouring to deprive man of his Happiness, when men are drawn to commit such monstrous sins? Such cruelty as the Romans used to the Jews at the taking of Jerusalem: So many thousand Christians so barbarously murdered; such bloody actions as those of Nero, Caligula, Sulla, Messala, Caracalla, the Roman Gladiators the French Massacre, the Gunpowder Plot, the Spanish Inquisition, and their murdering fifty millions of Indians in forty two years, according to the Testimony of Acosta their Jesuit. Men invading their own neighbours and brethren, with an unquenchable thirst after their blood, and merely because of their strictness in the common professed Religion, as the late cruel wars in England have declared: I say, how could these come to pass, but by the instigation of the Devil? When we see men making a jst of such sins as these, making them their pleasure, impudently, and implacably against Knowledge and Conscience proceeding in them, hating those ways that they know to be better, and all those persons that would help to save them: yea, choosing sin, though they believe it will damn them, despairing, and yet sinning still; Doth not this tell men plainly that there is a Devil, their enemy? When men will commit the sin which they abhor in others, which Reason is against, when men of the best natures, as Vespasian, Julian, &c. shall be so bloody murderers, when men will not be stirred from sin by any entreaty, though their dearest friends should beg with tears upon their knees; though Preachers convince them, and beseech them in the name of the Lord, though wife and children, body and soul be undone by it: Nay, when men will be the same under the greatest judgments, and under the most wonderful convincing Providences, as appears in England, yea, under Miracles themselves.