N00460:43
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.
2. Death is sometimes a fatherly correction which God inflicts upon his Children. There must be acknowledged a vast difference between a curse and a chastisement: the matter of the one and the other may be the same, but the design which denominates them, is vastly divers. A curse is ever the fruit of hatred, but a correction hath always love in the bottom of it: there is indeed anger in it; and it consists well enough with the love of God, for him to be angry with his children, and when he is so, he can lay hard blows upon them, and love them still, because they are for their good and not hurt; yea, because he loves them he chastens them, Heb. 12:6. And sometimes he strikes so hard that he kills them. God is angry with Moses for his ⟨p. 17⟩unadvised carriage at Meribah, and he must die for it: David provokes him in the matter of Uriah, and he must lose his Child on the account: and though such a stroke hath a great deal of smart in it, yet there is no harm comes of it.
2. Death is sometimes a fatherly correction which God inflicts upon his Children. There must be acknowledged a vast difference between a curse and a chastisement: the matter of the one and the other may be the same, but the design which denominates them, is vastly divers. A curse is ever the fruit of hatred, but a correction hath always love in the bottom of it: there is indeed anger in it; and it consists well enough with the love of God, for him to be angry with his children, and when he is so, he can lay hard blows upon them, and love them still, because they are for their good and not hurt; yea, because he loves them he chastens them, Heb. 12:6. And sometimes he strikes so hard that he kills them. God is angry with Moses for his ⟨p. 17⟩unadvised carriage at Meribah, and he must die for it: David provokes him in the matter of Vriah, and he must lose his Child on the account: and though such a stroak hath a great deal of smart in it, yet there is no harm comes of it.