N00583:76
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.
4. But if the more easy Corrections will not do, he then goes on to smite them harder. If his hand may be stayed from this, well; but if it be not, he is not wont to tarry always where he was, and do no more, but he will, in due season, go a step further, and make them to undergo greater and more grievous Calamities, he doubles his strokes, and pulls up the floodgates higher, and makes the gap in the hedge wider, so that their Plagues become great and wonderful: and this is observable in a treble respect; he doth it, partly by greatening the same strokes, and so adding to the degrees of it, partly by bringing in of greater and more terrible Judgments, such as are more frightful to men, and which carry in them more of his indignation, and in their own nature are dreadful: if scarcity and sickness will not do, if Famines, ⟨p. 56⟩and Pestilences prevail not, he calls for a wasting Sword upon his land, and gives it a Commission to devour, and make it self drunk with the blood of the slain. Partly also by heaping up of manifold Calamities at once upon them, involving of them in all sorts of difficulties, as, Ezek. 14. 21. How much more when I send my four sore Judgments upon Jerusalem, the Sword, and the Famine, and the noisome Beasts▪ and the Pestilence: and these lay all wast before them, and they that escape the one▪ are devoured of the other, and now they are terribly distressed. Hence, how are all terrible miseries heaped together in the last step of the progress in our Context? Verse 29. &c. And so it is expressed in Deut. 28. 61. Also every sickness, & every plague▪ &c. them will the Lord bring upon thee, until thou be destroyed.
4. But if the more easy Corrections will not do, he then goes on to smite them harder. If his hand may be stayed from this, well; but if it be not, he is not wont to tarry always where he was, and do no more, but he will, in due season, go a step further, and make them to undergoe greater and more grievous Calamities, he doubles his stroaks, and pulls up the floodgates higher, and makes the gap in the hedge wider, so that their Plagues become great and wonderfull: and this is observable in a treble respect; he doth it, partly by greatning the same stroaks, and so adding to the degrees of it, partly by bringing in of greater and more terrible Judgments, such as are more frightfull to men, and which carry in them more of his indignation, and in their own nature are dreadfull: if scarcity and sickness will not do, if Famines,