N00460:222
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.
Sermon › Proposition 6 › Application 3: USE III.Sermon › Proposition 6 › Application 3: VSE III.
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.
To move us hereto, consider,
1. You cannot well live without it in this world of change; and it will be very uncomfortable Travelling through this Wilderness without such a cordial to refresh your tired Spirits; for you must expect to meet with such occasions of sorrow as well as other men. Gods people are not to promise themselves a discharge from this War any more than other men: if they should be so foolish as to feed themselves up with an expectation of it, their experience would in a little time confute these expectations. ⟨p. 126⟩Good men lose their Friends as well as bad; we see that wise men die, as well as the foolish and brutish, Psal. 49.11. and the more of these comforts that you do enjoy in this life, the more such bereavements you must expect to undergo: every one of them is mortal, and exposed to the common casualties by which God is wont to take men out of the world: and so much room as they have now gotten in your affections, so much sorrow you will be liable unto when they shall be taken away. Death hath as many ways to seize them as it hath for others; and though godly men have more reason to hope for the sparing of the lives of theirs in a time of great Mortality by the judgments of God upon a sinning people, than the wicked and ungodly have; yet it must be acknowledged that in these things God doth his pleasure, That his Judgments are unsearchable, and his ways past our finding out.
1. You cannot well live without it in this world of change; and it will be very uncomfortable Travelling through this Wilderness without such a cordial to refresh your tired Spirits; for you must expect to meet with such occasions of sorrow as well as other men. Gods people are not to promise themselves a discharge from this War any more than other men: if they should be so foolish as to feed themselves up with an expectation of it, their experience would in a little time confute these expectat•ons.