N00460:176
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.
5. Yet there are the fruits of this change which are brought forth by such as live after their Conversion. They can bring forth nothing before, for where there is no grace, there can be no exercise of it; and if they die immediately upon it, as it may be presumed that some do, they are deprived of the opportunity to discover it in an holy life, and God will accept of the will, and not deny his own Grace which he hath created in them by his Almighty power; but if they are spared, and have a season allowed to them, they will more or less discover some encouraging symptoms of a work of God wrought in their hearts, by a life and conversation ordered according to the will of God, therein showing forth the virtues of him that hath called them. They are regenerated to this end; and the Spirit of God will aid them in it; and so far as we discover any of these things, our hope will receive ⟨p. 94⟩a lift from thence, to conclude that they have received the Grace of God, and that therefore the well ordered and Everlasting Covenant is made with them; and the inferences which we shall draw from thence must needs be comfortable.
5. Yet there are the fruits of this change which are brought forth by such as live after their Conversion. They can bring forth nothing before, for where there is no grace, there can be no exercise of it; and if they dy immediately upon it, as it may be presumed that some do, they are deprived of the opportunity to discover it in an holy life, and God will accept of the will, and not deny his own Grace which he hath created in them by his Almighty power; but if they are spared, and have a season allowed to them, they will more or less discover some encouraging symptoms of a work of God wrought in their hearts, by a life and conversation ordered according to the will of God, therein shewing forth the vertues of him that hath called them. They are regenerated to this end; and the Spirit of God will aid them in it; and so far as we discover any of these things, our hope will receive ⟨p. 94⟩a lift from thence, to conclude that they have received the Grace of God, and that therefore the well ordered and Everlasting Covenant is made with them; and the inferences which we shall draw from thence must needs be comfortable.