N00460:157
The mourners cordial against excessive sorrow discovering what grounds of hope Gods people have…
The mourners cordial against excessive sorrow discovering what grounds of hope Gods people have concerning their dead friends / by Samuel Willard, teacher of a church in Boston. ; [Five lines from II Corinthians]
Boston: printed by Benjamin Harris, 1691
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.
3. Nor can the piety of the parents merit the application of saving grace to the Children. God is not obliged or brought in debt unto us, by any thing of ours. We ourselves when we have done all we can, and served God with the greatest integrity, are still saved by grace, Eph. 2.8. And so must our Children too: God hath the liberty to do with his own what he will, we cannot be before hand with him. They greatly err, who think that infants are saved by the Faith of their Parents, as the Condition of their salvation; much less can it be the procuring cause of it: The qualification to which Salvation is ascertained, or the condition required in the new covenant in order to Salvation must be found. Habitually at least, in every one that partakes in the good of it; The Just shall live by his Faith; and as a godly Parent can neither Propagate it by Generation, nor produce it by all his most careful endeavours, so neither can he make God a Debtor of it to his Children by any thing that he can do, for when he hath done all he is ⟨p. 79⟩an unprofitable Servant, hath done but his duty, Luk. 17.10.
3. Nor can the piety of the parents merit the application of saving grace to the Children. God is not obliged or brought in debt unto us, by any thing of ours. We ourselves when we have done all we can, and served God with the greatest integrity, are still saved by grace, Eph. 2.8. And so must our Children too: God hath the liberty to do with his own what he will, we cannot be before hand with him. They greatly err, who think that infants are saved by the Faith of their Parents, as the Condition of their salvation; much less can it be the procuring cause of it: The qualification to which Salvation is ascerteined, or the condition required in the new covenant in order to Salvation must be found. Habitually at least, in every one that partakes in the good of it; The Just shall live by his Faith; and as a godly Parent can neither Propagate it by Generation, nor produce it by all his most careful endeavours, so neither can he make God a Debtor of it to his Children by any thing that he can do, for when he hath done all he is ⟨p. 79⟩