1. These very distempers of body and mind serve to embitter the comforts and pleasures of this world to you, and make life it self less desirable to you than it is to others, they much wean your hearts from, and make life more burdensome to you than it is to others who enjoy more of the pleasure and sweetness of it than you can do. I have often thought this to be one design and end of Providence in permitting such distempers to seize so many gracious persons as labour under it, and providence knows how to make use of this effect to singular purpose and advantage to you,1 when ⟨p. 124⟩a call to suffering shall come; this may have its place and use under higher and more spiritual considerations to facilitate death, and make your separation from this world the more easy to you; for though it be a more noble and raised act of faith and self denial to offer up to God our lives, when they are made most pleasant and desirable to us upon natural accounts, yet it is not so easy to part with them as it is when God hath first embittered them to us. Your lives are of little value to you now, because of this burdensome clog you must draw after you, but if you should increase your burden by so horrid an addition of guilt, as the denying of Christ, or his known truths would do, you would not know what to do with such a life; it would certainly lie upon your hands as a burden. God knows how to use these things in the way of his providence to your great advantage.
1. These very distempers of body and mind serve to imbitter the comforts and pleasures of this world to you, and make life it self less desirable to you than it is to others, they much wean your hearts from, and make life more burdensome to you than it is to others who enjoy more of the pleasure and sweetness of it than you can do. I have often thought this to be one design and end of Providence in permitting such distempers to seize so many gracious persons as labour under it, and providence knows how to make use of this effect to singular purpose and advantage to you,1 when ⟨p. 124⟩a call to suffering shall come; this may have its place and use under higher and more spiritual considerations to facilitate death, and make your separation from this world the more easie to you; for though it be a more noble and raised act of faith and self denial to offer up to God our lives, when they are made most pleasant and desirable to us upon natural accounts, yet it is not so easie to part with them as it is when God hath first imbittered them to us. Your lives are of little value to you now, because of this burdensome clog you must draw after you, but if you should increase your burden by so horrid an addition of guilt, as the denying of Christ, or his known truths would do, you would not know what to do with such a life; it would certainly lie upon your hands as a burthen. God knows how to use these things in the way of his providence to your great advantage.
- 1It was common with the Martyrs to sweeten death to themselves by reckoning what infirmities it would cure them of, one of his blindness, another of his lameness, &c.
