N00460:23
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.
PROPOSITION I. That Gods People have consolations which others are strangers unto.
God hath provided those comforts for his Children, which he hath not made common to the World: they have their Joys which a stranger may not meddle with without presumption, because he hath nothing to do with them. The Apostle, applying of himself to his Thessalonians, makes a plain difference between them, and others who did not believe: he leaves wicked men to sorrow without hope if they will, yea and he reckons that they have reason enough so to do; but he wholly disallows it in the Children of God, as a thing that is altogether unreasonable, and that must be because they have something peculiar to support their spirits withal, or else what should make the difference? The world indeed make high pretences to their comforts, but they are of another stamp and character than those that belong to the people of God, and no way comparable with them: and we may observe these four differences between them.
1. Those are but seeming comforts, whereas ⟨p. 7⟩these are real. They are but the shadow▪ these are the substance of Consolation. Of the worlds comforts, we have the Wis•mans observation upon them,