N00583:22
Reformation the great duty of an afflicted people. Setting forth the sin and danger…
Reformation the great duty of an afflicted people. Setting forth the sin and danger there is in neglecting of it, under the continued and repeated judgments of God. : Being the substance of what was preached on a solemn day of humiliation kept by the Third Gathered Church in Boston, on August. 23d. 1694. / By Samuel Willard, teacher of the said church. ; [Four lines from Zechariah]
printed by Bartholomew Green, 1694
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.
1. That Public Calamities may be the Lot of a Professing People to meet withal. This needs no proof, in being so manifestly exemplified in the Providence of God, in all the Ages of the Church, that we may as well question the Suns shining at noon day in a clear sky. The true Emblem of the Militant Church is a Bush on fire: such a People are Obnoxious to God, to Devils, and to wicked men, and there ⟨p. 12⟩are Occasions for their expecting to meet with trouble from them all.
1. That Publick Calamities may be the Lot of a Professing People to meet withal. This needs no proof, in being so manifestly exemplified in the Providence of God, in all the Ages of the Church, that we may as well question the Suns shining at noon day in a clear sky. The true Emblem of the Militant Church is a Bush on fire: such a People are Obnoxious to God, to Devils, and to wicked men, and there ⟨p. 12⟩are Occasions for their expecting to meet with trouble from them all.
2. That usually they procure these Afflictions to themselves by some Apostasy. God may indeed exercise them for the trial of their Obedience, and sincerity in it: Afflictions merely probationary are not only suffered Personally, but may be Publicly too; did not God do thus by the Kingdom of Judah under Hezekiah, in the time of a most zealous and through Reformation? and there is an Astonism put upon it, 2 Chron. 32. begin. After these things, and the establishment thereof, &c. But, though God some times, for holy ends, thus useth his Sovereignty; for the most part there hath some great Provocation or other gone before, which procured these troubles for them; and this is very agreeable to the tenor of the Covenant, in which God hath engaged to bestow his favours on a People, that walk before him in the Truth, and therefore the Apostle hath such a challenge,