A77608:233
Heaven on Earth
Heaven on earth or a serious discourse touching a well-grounded assurance of mens everlasting happiness and blessedness. Discovering the nature of assurance, the possibility of attaining it, the causes, springs, and degrees of it, with the resolution of several weighty questions. By Thomas Brooks, preacher of the Gospel at Margarets Fishstreet-Hill.Heaven on earth or a serious discourse touching a wel-grounded assurance of mens everlasting happiness and blessedness. Discovering the nature of assurance, the possibility of attaining it, the causes, springs, and degrees of it, with the resolution of several weighty questions. By Thomas Brooks, preacher of the Gospel at Margarets Fishstreet-Hill.
London: printed by R.I. for John Hancock, 1654
Title page typeset from the transcription.
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.
The sixth Impediment to Assurance,1 is, doubting souls, making their Sense, Reason, and Feeling, the judges of their Spiritual Conditions: Now so long as they take this course, they will never reach to Assurance; Reasons arm is too short to reach this Jewel Assurance: This Pearl of price, is put into ⟨p. 190⟩no hand, but that hand of Faith that reaches from Earth to Heaven. What tongue can express, or heart conceive, the fears, the doubts, the clouds, the darkness, the perplexities, that will arise from the souls reasoning thus. I find not that the countenance2 of God is towards me as before, therefore, surely my condition is bad; I feel not those warmings, those quicknings, those cheerings, those meltings as before; I am not sensible of those secret stirrings, and actings of the Spirit, and Grace in my soul as before; I do not hear such good news from Heaven as before, therefore certainly God is not my God; I am not beloved, I am not in the state of Grace, I have but deceived my self and others; and therefore the issue will be, that I shall die in my sins, &c. To make Sense, and Feeling, the Judges of our Spiritual Conditions, what is it but to make our selves happy and miserable, righteous and unrighteous, saved and damned in one day, I, in one hour, when Sense and Reason sit as Judges upon the Bench? Hath God made Sense and Feeling the Judges of your Conditions? ⟨p. 191⟩No. Why then will you? Is your Reason Scripture, is your Sense Scripture, is your Feeling Scripture? No. Why then will you make them Judges of your Spiritual Estate? Is not the Word the Judge, by which all men and their actions shall be judged at last? The word that I have spoken 3(says Christ) shall judge you in the last day. To the Law, and to the Testimony,4 if they speak not according to this Word, it is because there is no light, or no morning in them. Why then, O doubting souls, will you make your Sense and Feeling the Judge, not only of your conditions, but of the truth it self? What is this, but to dethrone God, and to make a god of your Sense and Feeling? What is this, but to limit and bind up the Holy One of Israel? What is this, but to toss the soul to and fro, and to expose it to a labyrinth of fears, and scruples? What is this, but to cast a reproach upon Christ, to gratify Satan, and to keep your selves upon the rack?