N00460:73
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.
Sorrow for the Death of Pious relations, ⟨p. 33⟩is, so far from being a sin, that the Omission of it would be so. Our Apostle doth not here tell them, that he would not have them to sorrow at all: but he only regulates this Mourning; we have therefore in the Scripture the examples of the most eminent and holy men recorded for this without any the least reflection made upon them for it; yea Jesus Christ himself wept at the grave of Lazarus: we shall farthermore find, that it is one Judgement, which God hath in his word threatened to befall some, that they shall die unlamented. We may take this brief account of the ground or reason of this conclusion.
Sorrow for the Death of Pious relations, ⟨p. 33⟩is, so far from being a sin, that the Omission of it would be so. Our Apostle doth not here tell them, that he would not have them to sorrow at all: but he only regulates this Mourning; we have therefore in the Scripture the examples of the most eminent and holy men recorded for this without any the least reflection made upon them for it; yea Jesus Christ himself wept at the grave of Lazarus: we shall farthermore find, that it is one Judgement, which God hath in his word threatned to befal some, that they shall die unlamented. We may take this brief account of the ground or reason of this conclusion.
1. Sorrow or Mourning is nothing else but the ••ting of the Affection of Grief. To grieve, to sorrow, and to mourn do all intimate one and the same thing. Grief is the inward principle, and sorrow is the expression or exertion of this principle, by the influence of it upon the spirits, oppressing and dejecting of them, and mourning outwardly, which discovers it by sighing, & weeping, & bitter complaints, that persons make, or whatsoever other outward symbols of it men are wont to signalize it by, as by solitariness, & walking softly, putting on Sack Cloth, lying in the Dust, which kinds of practices we find recorded in Scripture.