A77608:243
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 tenth and last Impediment that1 keeps Christians from Assurance, is, The secret cherishing, and running out of their hearts, to some bosom darling ⟨p. 205⟩sin: It is dark night with the soul, when the soul will cast a propitious eye upon this, or that bosom sin, and secretly say, Is it not a little one, and my soul shall live, though God and Conscience hath formerly checked and whipped the soul for so doing. Ah how many be there, that dally & play with sin, even after they have put up many prayers and complaints against sin, and after they have lamented, and bitterly mourned over their sins: Many there be that complain of their deadness, barrenness, frowardness, conceitedness, censoriousness, and other baseness; and yet are ready at every turn to gratify, if not to justify those very sins that they complain against: No wonder that such want Assurance. After the Israelites had eat Manna in the Wilderness, and drunk water out of the Rock, after God had been to them a cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night, after he had led them by the arms, and kept them as the apple of his eye, after he had made them spectators of his wonders, they hankered after the flesh-pots of Egypt; so when, after God hath given a man a new name, and a ⟨p. 206⟩white stone, after he hath made a report of his love to the soul, after he hath taken a man up into paradise, after he hath set a man upon his knee, and carried him in his bosom, after he hath spoke peace & pardon to the soul,2 for the soul to return to folly, O this cannot but prove a woeful hinderance to Assurance, this will provoke God to change his countenance, and to carry it not as a Friend, but as an enemy: When Love is abused, Justice takes up the Iron Rod, God will strike hard and home, when men kick against the Bowels of Mercy. God hath made an Everlasting separation betwixt Sin and Peace, betwixt Sin and Joy, and betwixt Sin and Assurance. God will be out with that man, that is in with his sin; if sin and the soul be one, God and the soul must needs be two: He that is resolved to dally with any sin, he must resolve to live in many fears. Never forget this; he that favoureth any one sin, though he forgoeth many, doth but as Benadab, recover of one disease, and die of another; yea, he takes pains to plunge himself nto two hells, a hell here, and a hell