N00129:448
Useful instructions for a professing people in times of great security and degeneracy
Useful instructions for a professing people in times of great security and degeneracy: delivered in several sermons on solemn occasions: / by Mr. Samuel Willard Pastor of the Church of Christ at Groton. ; [Eight lines of Scripture texts]
printed by Samuel Green, 1673
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.
2. Look into Families, and see what disorders there are, Children rising up against Parents, and carrying themselves disobediently, which hath a dreadful Curse denounced against it: Parents neglecting the due care of their Children, to nurture and bring them up in the admonition of the Lord, cockering, and making them their equals, not keeping their due distances; and too many families without the Worship of God in them, being more like Pagan, then Christian houses.
3. Look into Towns, and there you shall see disorders, young men despising the aged, and carrying themselves contemptuously towards them; vanity and profaneness abounding; a selfish spirit growing upon the most, together with a neglect of one another's good, that love which is due one to another wholly in many neglected; Town Societies rent in pieces with disorderly Contention.
3. Look into Towns, and there you shall see disorders, young men despising the aged, and carrying themselves contemptuously towards them; vanity and profaneness abounding; a selfish spirit growing upon the most, together with a neglect of one anothers good, that love which is due one to another wholly in many neglected; Town Societies rent in pieces with disorderly Contention.
4. Look into Congregations, and there you shall see confusions; some contending with their Ministers, and others biting and catching atone another; some not agreeing about the setting up of the Ordinances of God among them, and others not contented when they have them, but pulling them down again with […] and main; great emulations, jealousies false surmises &c. Ministers despised, their Office questioned, their Authority cast off, and trampled upon, their persons undervalued and vilified, their comfortable Supply and Maintenance neglected, Ordinances not frequented with care and constancy, &c.