The blessedness of the righteous discoursed from Psal. 17, 15 /The blessednesse of the righteous discoursed from Psal. 17, 15 /

Much less, can we think it worthy of God to perpetuate such a state of things as this; and continue a succession of such persons and actions, as we now behold in the world, through eternal generations; only to perpetuate to himself the same pleasure, in the exercise of his immense ⟨image 10⟩power, upon created natures; over which he hath so infinite advantage.

Much less, can we think it worthy of God to perpetuate such a state of things as this; and continue a succession of such persons and actions, as we now behold in the world, through eternal generations; onely to perpetuate to himself the same pleasure, in the exercise of his immense ⟨image 10⟩power, upon created natures; over which he hath so infinite advantage.

And indeed nothing can be more unconceivable, then that the great Creator and Author of all things, should frame a Creature of so vast comprehension, as the Spirit of man, put into it a capacity of knowing, and conversing with himself; give it some prospect of his own glory and blessedness, raise thereby in many, boundless unsatisfied desires after him, and an unexpressible pleasure in the preconceived hope of being received into the communion of that glory and blessedness; and yet defeat and blast so great an expectation by the unsuspected reducement of the very subject of it again to nothing. Yea, and that he should deal herein (as in that case he must) the most hardly with the best; And that such souls, whose mere love and devotedness to him, had made them abandon the pleasures of this life, and run thorough whatsoever difficulties for his sake, should fare worse then the very worst, were,¹ beyond all the rest, most utterly unimaginable; and a thought which Pagan-reason hath not known how to digest or entertain. If (saith one, and he speaks the sense of many another, as well as his own) with the dissolution of our bodies, the essence of the Souls, whatsoever that be, should be dissolved too, and for ever cease to be any thing; I know not how I can account them blessed, that never having enjoyed any good, as the reward of their virtue, have even perished for virtue its self.