N00460:59
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.
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,
1. Sleep is a binding up of the senses, and thereby it takes off the apprehension of pain and trouble. A man that is asleep doth not feel his sorrow. If it be Bodily pain, or if it be any grief oppressing the spirit, by falling asleep he loseth the present sense of it: as long as it keeps him waiting he is molested with it, but now it is to him as if it were not; and Death puts a real end to all the molestations and sorrows of the people of God. In this life they are full of them, and they accompany them to their dissolution but at the Grave they leave them, and they know them no more: All their Tears are now wiped away, sighing and sorrow now cease for ever.