A39695:552
The touchstone of sincerity, or, The signs of grace and symptoms of hypocrisy opened…The touchstone of sincerity, or, The signs of grace and symptomes of hypocrisie opened…
The touchstone of sincerity, or, The signs of grace and symptoms of hypocrisy opened in a practical treatise upon Revelations III 17, 18 being the second part of the Saint indeed / by John Flavell ...The touchstone of sincerity, or, The signs of grace and symptomes of hypocrisie opened in a practical treatise upon Revelations III 17, 18 being the second part of the Saint indeed / by John Flavell ...
London: printed for Tho. Parkhurst, 1698
Title page typeset from the transcription.
THE Touchstone of Sincerity: OR, THE SIGNS Of GRACE, AND Symptoms o… › Chapter 11 › Section 1
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 'tis a great deal of honour put upon a ⟨p. 168⟩poor worm, when God will every moment try him and visit him: it argues the great esteem the Goldsmith hath of his gold, when he will sit by the Furnace himself, and order the fire with his own hand: when he pries so often, and so curiously into the fining pot, to see that none of his precious metal upon which he sets his heart be lost.
Think it not then a debasing to you to be so often exposed to trials: if God did not value you highly, he would not try you so frequently: what would become of you▪ if your condition here should be more settled and quiet than now it is? I believe you find dross enough in your hearts after all the fires into which God hath cast you: surely there is filth enough in the best of Gods people to take all this: it may be a great deal more trouble than they have yet met with▪ we fancy it a brave life to live at ease, and if we meet with long respites and intervals of trial than usual, we are apt to say, we shall never be moved, as David did, Psal. 30. 6. or we shall dye in our nest as it is, Job 29. 18. our hard and difficult days are over, but woe to us if God should give us the desire of our hearts in this: see what the temper of those mens spirits is, that meet with no changes, Psal. 55. 19. Because they have no changes, therefore they have not God: O it's better to be preserved sweet in brine, than to […] in honey.
Think it not then a debasing to you to be so often exposed to tryals: if God did not value you highly, he would not try you so frequently: what would become of you▪ if your condition here should be more settled and quiet than now it is? I believe you find dross enough in your hearts after all the fires into which God hath cast you: surely there is filth enough in the best of Gods people to take all this: it may be a great deal more trouble than they have yet met with we fancy it a brave life to live at ease, and if we meet with long respites and intervals of tryal than usual, we are apt to say, we shall never be moved, as David did,