A77608:340
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 eighth Means to gain a well-grounded1 Assurance of your everlasting happiness and blessedness, is, to take your hearts when they are in the best and most spiritual frame and temper God-wards, Heaven-wards, and Holiness-wards: Times of temptation, and desertion, &c. are praying times, hearing times, mourning times; and believing times; but they are not trying times, they are not seasonable times for doubting souls to set themselves about so great and so solemn a work as that is, of searching and examining how things stand, and are like to stand between God and them for ever:
The eighth Means to gaine a welgrounded1 Assurance of your everlasting happinesse and blessednesse, is, to take your hearts when they are in the best and most spiritual frame and temper God-wards, Heaven-wards, and Holinesse-wards: Times of temptation, and desertion, &c. are praying times, hearing times, mourning times; and beleeving times; but they are not trying times, they are not seasonable times for doubting soules to set themselves about so great and so solemn a worke as that is, of searching and examining how things stand, and are like to stand between God and them for ever:
- 1Means 8.
Be diligent, and constant, be studious1 and conscientious in observing ⟨p. 318⟩the frame and temper of your own2 hearts, and when you find them most plain, most melting, most yielding, most tender, most humble, most sweetly raised, and most divinely composed, then, O then is the time to single out the most convenient place where thou mayst with greatest freedom open thy bosom to God, and plead with him, as for thy life, that he would show thee how things stand between him and thee, and how it must fare with thy soul for ever. And when thou hast thus set thy self before God and opened thy bosom to God, then wisely observe what report God, and thy own renewed conscience do make concerning thy eternal condition. I will hear what God the Lord will speak (saith