N00731:38
The folly of sinning, opened & applied, in two sermons, occasioned by the condemnation…The folly of sinning, opened & applyed, in two sermons, occasioned by the condemnation…
The folly of sinning, opened & applied, in two sermons, occasioned by the condemnation of one that was executed at Boston in New-England, on November 17th. 1698. / By Increase Mather, president of Harvard College, in Cambridge, and preacher of the Gospel at Boston in N.E. ; [Two lines from Romans]The folly of sinning, opened & applyed, in two sermons, occasioned by the condemnation of one that was executed at Boston in New-England, on November 17th. 1698. / By Increase Mather, praesident of Harvard Colledge, in Cambridge, and preacher of the Gospel at Boston in N.E. ; [Two lines from Romans]
Boston: printed by B Green for Michael Perry over against the Town House, 1699
THE FOLLY OF Sinning. › Sermon 1 › Proposition 1: PROPOSITION I.
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.
Consider. 1. You have been a great Sinner: And in very Truth a great Fool. Although you are little & young in years, you are great in Wickedness. It is seldom seen that one so young as you are, ha's been guilty of such Prodigious wickedness. You are (as I understand) hardly Nineteen years old, and yet ripe for a Lamentable Destruction as to your Body, if not as to your Soul. You are known to be guilty of Fornication and that more than once, and with more persons than one, as young as you are: Oh horrid Shame! But besides that, you have been guilty of Murder: Yea, and of unnatural Murder too. Can a woman forget her Sucking Child that she should not have Compassion on the Son of her Womb? She may, but then she must be unnatural. And so monstrously unnatural have you been, as not to have Compassion on the Son of your Womb: but to be guilty of Murdering it, whose blood Cries for Vengeance against you, from the ground where you exposed it to death. You have defiled the Land wherein you live. It should be an humbling Consideration to you, that all this Provinc•• […] ⟨p. 39⟩New-England must fare the worse, and be exposed to the wrath of Heaven if you should be suffered to live any longer in it: for so does the Scripture speak. Numb. 35.31, 33. You shall take no satisfaction for the Life of a Murderer which is guilty of blood. You shall not pollute the Land wherein you are, for blood it defileth the Land, and the Land can not be cleansed of the blood which is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it. Methinks you should sometimes hear the blood of your woeful Infant, Crying, Vengeance! Vengeance! Lord, upon my unnatural Mother, who murdered me as soon as I came into the World. And what if you murdered its Soul as well as Body? What then do you think will come on you? Nevertheless as vile a Sinner as you have been.
Consider. 1. You have been a great Sinner: And in very Truth a great Fool. Although you are little & young in years, you are great in Wickedness. It is seldom seen that one so young as you are, ha's been guilty of such Prodigious wickedness. You are (as I understand) hardly Nineteen years old, and yet ripe for a Lamentable Destruction as to your Body, if not as to your Soul. You are known to be guilty of Fornication and that more than once, and with more persons than one, as young as you are: Oh horrid Shame! But besides that, you have been guilty of Murder: Yea, and of unnatural Murder too. Can a woman forget her Sucking Child that she should not have Compassion on the Son of her Womb? She may, but then she must be unnatural. And so monstrously unnatural have you been, as not to have Compassion on the Son of your Womb: but to be guilty of Murdering it, whose blood Cryes for Vengeance against you, from the ground where you exposed it to death. You have defiled the Land wherein you live. It should be an humbling Considration to you, that all this Provinc