A27017:776
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 2 › Section 3
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. III.1
- 1§. 3.
3. And as the damned will have clearer and deeper apprehensions of the Happiness which they have lost, so will they have a truer and closer application of this Doctrine to themselves, which will exceedingly tend to increase their torment. It will then be no hard matter to them, to say, This is my loss, and this is my everlasting remediless misery. The want of this, is the main cause, why they are now so little troubled at their condition. They are hardly brought to believe, that there is such a state of misery; but more hardly to believe that it is like to be their own. This makes so many Sermons to them to be lost, and all threatenings and warnings to prove in vain. Let a Minister of Christ show ⟨p. 280⟩them their misery never so plainly and faithfully, and they will not be persuaded that they are so miserable: Let him tell them of the Glory they must lose, and the sufferings they must feel, and they think it is not They whom he means; such a Drunkard, or such a notorious sinner they think may possibly come to such a doleful end, but they little think that they are so near it themselves. We find in all our Preaching by sad experience, that it is one of the hardest things in the world to bring a wicked man to know that he is wicked; and a man who is posting in the way to Hell, to know that he is in that way indeed, or to make a man see himself in a state of wrath and condemnation: Yea, though the Preacher do mark him out by such undoubted signs which he cannot deny, yet will he not apply them, nor be brought to say, It is my case; Though we show them the Chapter and the Verse where it is written,1 that without Regeneration and Holiness, none shall see God; and though they know no such work that was ever wrought upon themselves; nay, though they might easily find by their strangeness to the new Birth, and by their very enmity to Holiness, that they were never partakers of them, yet do they as verily expect to see God and to be saved, as if they were the most sanctified persons in the world: It is a most difficult work to make a proud person know that he is proud, or a covetous man to know that he is covetous or an ignorant, or erroneous heretical man to know himself to be such a one indeed; But to make any of these to confess the sin, and to apply the threatening, and to believe themselves the children of wrath, this is to Humane strength an impossibility.