A77608:570
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.
Fifthly, A well-grounded Assurance of a mans own eternal Happiness and Blessedness, will make him very studious ⟨p. 554⟩and laborious to make others happy. Psal. 66. 16. Come and hear all ye that fear God, and I will tell you what he hath done for my soul. I will acquaint you with the soul-blessings, with the soul-favours, that God hath crowned me with. I was darkness, but he hath1 made me light; I was unrighteousness, but he hath made me righteous; I was2 deformed, but he hath made me complete; I was full of sores, and spots, and blemishes, but he hath washed me, and made me all fair without spot or wrinkle. I have found the want of Assurance, I now see the worth of Assurance; I have long sought Assurance, and now I find the sweetness of Assurance: Ah it is such a Pearl of price, it is such a Beam of God, it is such a spark of glory, that makes my Soul a rich amends for all its waiting, weeping, and wrestling. So when it pleased3 God to call Paul by his grace, and to reveal Christ in him, and to him, Ah how doth he labour, as for life, to bring others to an acquaintance with Christ, and to an acceptance of Christ, and to an Assurance of Everlasting Happiness, and Blessedness by Christ! After Paul ⟨p. 555⟩had been in Paradise, he makes it his4 all to bring others to Paradise. So the Spouse in the Canticles having assurance5 of her interest in Christ, how doth she labour by all holy and heavenly Rhetoric and Logic, by all the strains of love and sweetness, to draw the daughters of Jerusalem to a sight of Christ, and to an assurance of the love of Christ! When a Beam of Divine light and love had shined upon Andrew, 6