A39690:190
A token for mourners, or, The advice of Christ to a distressed mother bewailing…
A token for mourners, or, The advice of Christ to a distressed mother bewailing the death of her dear and only son wherein the boundaries of sorrow are duly fixed, excesses restrained, the common pleas answered, and divers rules for the support of Gods afflicted ones prescribed / by J.F.
London: printed for Robert Boulter, 1674
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 therefore be quieted in it, this must needs be as it is.
4. Consid. Hath God smitten your darling, and taken away the delight of your eyes with his stroke? Bear this stroke with patience and quiet submission; for how know you but your trouble might have been greater from the life, than it is now from the death of your children?
Sad experience made a holy man once to say, Its better weep for ten dead children, than for one living child: a living child may prove a continual dropping, yea, a continual dying to the parents heart. What a sad word was that of David to Abishai, 2 Sam. 16. 11. Behold, saith he, my Son which came out of my bowels seeketh my life. I remember Seneca in his consolatory Epistle to his friend Marullus, brings in his friend thus aggravating the death of his child:
O saith Marullus, Had my child lived with me, to how great modesty, gravity, and prudence, 1might my discipline have formed and moulded him? But, saith Seneca, (which is more to be feared) he might have been as others mostly are; for look (saith he) what children come even out of the worthiest families; such who exercise both their own and others lusts; in all whose life there is not a day without the mark of some notorious wickedness upon it.