N00460:56
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 3: PROPOSITION III. The Death of the Godly is but a sort of sleep.
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 III. The Death of the Godly is but a sort of sleep.
The Spirit of God takes delight in expressing it by this Metaphor in Scripture; hence also their grave is resembled unto a Bed, and their abiding in it unto Rest, Isa. ⟨p. 25⟩57.2. and there are many respects in which the resemblance suitably expresseth the thing; only we must here cautiously observe, that it refers only to the bodies of the Saints; for their Souls sleep not, but do immediately pass over to actual perfect blessedness in the Kingdom of Glory. It is the body properly that dies, it is that therefore which sleeps. The Heathen Poets were wont to call sleep the Image of Death, and the Brother of death, because of the similitude between them, but more especially doth the resemblance hold in the Death of Godly ones. For,
The Spirit of God takes delight in expressing it by this Metaphor in Scripture; hence also their grave is resembled unto a Bed, and their abiding in it unto Rest, Isa. ⟨p. 25⟩57.2. and there are many respects in which the resemblance s•tably expresseth the thing; only we must here cautiously observe, that it refers only to the bodies of the Saints; for their Souls sleep not, but do immediately pass over to actual perfect blessedness in the Kingdom of Glory. It is the body properly that dies, it is that therefore which sleeps. The Heathen Poets were wont to call sleep the Image of Death, and the Brother of death, because of the similitude between them, but more especially doth the resemblance hold in the Death of Godly ones. For,