The true Christians love of the unseen Christ, or, A discourse chiefly tending to…

And what need have you to remember whence you are to fallen, to ransack your hearts to find out your sins, to humble your selves deeply, to repent and grieve and mourn, to turn your laughter into weeping, and your joy into heaviness, and to return unto the Lord speedily and do your first works▪ ⟨p. 201⟩otherwise some fearful judgements are like to befall you, and the Lord may be even forced to awaken you with a vengeance, and make you a terror unto your selves and unto all about you: Don't provoke the Lord, by your thus running away from him, to follow you with a storm as he did Jonah, and to devour you in the floods and waves of dreadful afflictions, that hereby he may reduce and restore you, and keep you from being drowned in utter perdition and eternal destruction. It may be the Lord hath scourged some of you for your faults with the rods of some crosses and disappointments, some outward losses and troubles; it may be he hath put bitterness upon those breasts which you have been sucking, and mingling gall in the cup of your pleasures which you have been drinking; and you have begun to think of your evil ways, and seen what an evil thing and bitter it is to backslide from the Lord; and you have thought it was best with you when you were nearest unto Christ. It may be God hath dealt with you as he telleth his backsliding people he would do with them, Hos. 2. 6, 7. Behold I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and make a wall that she shall not find her paths: And she shall follow ⟨p. 202⟩after her Lovers, but she shall not overtake them, and she shall seek them, but she shall not find them; Then shall she say, I will go and return to my first husband, for then it was better with me than now. And now you are seeking after your Beloved, but he hath withdrawn himself from you, and seems to take no notice of you; you call and cry, and sigh, and weep, and lament, and complain, and seek, and wait, and yet he withholds from you all special discoveries of his Love: Possibly doubts may hence arise, and fears grow upon your spirits, and you are ready to sink, and sometimes are almost overwhelmed with inward trouble. Let this Doctrine be an encouragement to you still to seek diligently and wait patiently, for the Lord will manifest himself again unto you in his own time, which is the best time: