A27017:834
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 3 › 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.
O the direful gripes and pangs of horror that seize upon the soul of the sinner at Death and Judgment, when he is parting with all his former hopes! Secondly, The soul departeth from the body suddenly, in a moment, which hath there delightfully continued so ⟨p. 305⟩many years; Just so doth the hope of the wicked depart. Thirdly, The soul which then departeth, will never return to live with the body in this world any more; and the hope of the wicked when it departeth, taketh an everlasting Farewell of his soul. A miracle of Resurrection shall again conjoin the soul and body, but there shall be no such miraculous Resurrection of the damned's hope. Me thinks it is the most doleful Spectacle that this world affords, to see such an ungodly person dying, and to think of his soul, and his hopes departing together! and with what a sad change he presently appears in another world? Then if a man could but speak with that hopeless soul, and ask it; what, are you now as confident of salvation as you were wont to be? Do you now hope to be saved as soon as the most godly? O what a sad answer would he return▪ They are just like Corah Dathan, and their Companions; while they are confident in their Rebellion against the Lord▪ and cry out, Are not all the people holy? They are suddenly swallowed up, and their hopes with them: Or like Ahab, who hating and imprisoning the Prophet for foretelling his danger, while he is in confident hopes to return in peace, is suddenly smitten with that mortal Arrow, which let out those hopes, together with his soul: Or like a Thief upon the Gallows, who hath a strong conceit that he shall receive a Pardon, and so hopes, and hopes, till the Ladder is turned: Or like the unbelieving sinners of the world before the Flood, who would not believe the threatenings of Noah, but perhaps deride him for preparing his Ark so many years together, when no danger appeared, till suddenly the Flood came and swept them all away. If a man, had asked these men when they were climbing up into the tops of Trees and Mountains, Where is now your hope of escaping? Or your merry deriding at the painful preventing preparations of godly Noah? Or your contemptuous unbelief of the warnings of God? What do you think these men would then say? when the waters still pursued them from place to place, till it devoured their hopes and them together?