N00527:49
Warnings from the dead. Or Solemn admonitions unto all people
Warnings from the dead. Or Solemn admonitions unto all people; but especially unto young persons to beware of such evils as would bring them to the dead. / By Cotton Mather. ; In two discourses, occasioned by a sentence of death, executed on some unhappy malefactors. ; Together with the last confession, made by a young woman, who dyed on June 8. 1693. One of these malefactors.
printed by Bartholomew Green for Samuel Phillips, 1693
A Blessed Medicine for Sinful Madness. › Direction 3: Direction. 3.
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.
Direction. 3.
Remember and Consider much, That you are Going to the Dead. The Thoughts of Death have a marvellous Efficacy to Compose and Settle the Madness of our Hearts. If you find your selves Mad upon any thing, the way to allay that Madness will be, by thinking, I am to Die Shortly! Let the First Death be often in your Thoughts; and often say with your selves like Job, in […] I know that God will bring […] Death. […] Are you Mad upon any ⟨p. 28⟩Pleasures? Then think, 'Tis but a M• meant that I can Enjoy them. Are you Mad upon any Profits? Then think, I must be gone from them all, within a […] while. A Clod of that Earth; which must Ere long be laid upon us, we should find a wonderful Cooler of all that Madness which we are carried away withal. A Mad Sinner will […] of a thing that he never thought of, […] thought no more of it than of my Dying day. Forlorn Soul, I believe thee. Didst thou think of thy Dying day, we should see more Sobriety in thy whole Behaviour. Let the Second Death also have a room in your Thoughts. It is a smart passage in Eccl. 11.9. Rejoice, O young man, in thy Youth; yea, that I will, says he; he thinks the Wise man in Earnest, and mad mirth is an […] with him. But stay there […] Hear what a Reprimand follows hereupon, But know thou, that for all these Things, God will bring thee into Judgment. Even so, Let the Mad Sinner Know, that God will call him to a Reckoning for all his Mad Frolics here; Know thou, that there is an Eternity of Destruction and Confusion for them that now ⟨p. 29⟩live without the Fear of God; Know thou, that the Contemners of the Lord Jesus, and of His Word, and of His House, will be Broken sore in the Place of Dragons World without End. This Knowledge actually and frequently revived in us, would strangely remove that Madness which is in many of our Souls.